How I got my first sale for GitNotifier (it wasn't the pricing page)

Hey, I'm Francois 👋. I build GitNotifier solo, and last week I got my first real subscription! I'm still super excited about it.

The interesting part: they were under the free-tier limit. The free plan already covered their whole team. Nothing was forcing them to pull out a credit card. They did it anyway.

Every bit of validation I had before this came from small startups sitting under the free limit. Nice to hear, costs them nothing. This one cost real money, from people who had a free option sitting right there. That is a very different signal 😅

TL;DR: a customer emailed me a question, I answered fast, that turned into a bug fix, then a feature, then another feature, all over five days. Then they subscribed to the paid plan they didn't need. Support was the product.

It started as a "how do I..." email

One morning I got an email from a team testing GitNotifier. They'd noticed review bot comments from GitHub were not showing up in Slack. Final approvals came through, individual bot comments did not. Fair question they asked me: how do I turn those on?

[For the context: GitNotifier is sending you relevant GitHub notifications directly in your slack DMs. By default, bot notifications are disabled to reduce the noise. let's continue]

I replied 16 minutes later that it was intentional: GitNotifier mutes bot comments by default so you don't get pinged by Vercel, Cloudflare, Claude, Cursor and friends all day. I told them where the setting lives and pitched two ideas I had been sitting on (a per-bot allow/deny list, and org-level defaults) to see if they cared.

They cared. And then they wrote back: the toggle was off, but the comments still weren't coming through.

So it was a bug 😅

The main use-case of Gitnotifier is to reduce Bot notifs compared to the default Github notifications. So it isn't the main flow that is battle-tested and heavily tested with e2e/smoke tests.

That should have worked out of the box, free plan or not. I told them straight: this looks like a regression I introduced recently, and I never noticed because I personally mute all bot comments so I never hit the code path. I said I'd look the next day.

Next day I fixed it. They started getting the Claude bot comments in Slack.

Then they found the next thing: the bot edits its own comment, and those edits weren't being pushed. Could I track updates too?

Turns out I could (but again, I never paid attention to receive bot updates before... Well they needed it). So I shipped it. Now edits and deletions show up as a fresh Slack message.

Then it turned into a feature

Once updates worked, they asked one more thing: the comments were truncated with a "..." in Slack. Could they see the full thing?

Good idea. A few hours later I had a preview feature that renders the full comment in Slack (which is annoyingly its own markdown flavour, not GitHub's, so it needed real work). Tested it against Cursor, Vercel, Cloudflare and Bito[.]ai bots and shipped it.

Their reply: "It works perfect. Thank you!"

They next day, they subscribed. Yearly!

What I actually learned

1. Support is not a cost center when you're small. It's the product.

I answered every email in under 15 minutes, and three of those emails turned into shipped code within a day. I wasn't doing "customer success." I was building the product live, in front of the one person who cared, using their exact workflow as the spec. You cannot buy feedback that tight. As a solo founder it is genuinely the highest-leverage thing I do all day.

The bonus: their bug reports made the product better for everyone. The bot-comment fix and the full-comment preview shipped to all users, not just them.

2. Willingness-to-pay when you don't have to is the only validation that counts.

Signups feel good. "This is cool, I'd use it" feels good. Neither means anything, because neither costs the person saying it a thing. Someone paying for a plan they don't need is the first data point I've had that survives contact with a wallet.

If your users are all on the free tier and happy, you don't know if you have a business yet. You know when someone upgrades without being cornered into it.

The uncomfortable takeaway

I got the sale because I was fast and I actually fixed things. That doesn't scale, and that's fine. At one paid customer, being unreasonably responsive is the moat. The day that stops being possible is a good problem to have later.

If you liked this story and/or if you're drowning in GitHub bot noise in Slack and want the human signal back, I'd genuinely love your feedback: GitNotifier.

And if you're pre-first-sale: go answer your users' emails faster than is reasonable. Mine turned into code, and the code turned into my first paying customer.