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How I got to $3000+ Sales in 2 weeks with a $0 Marketing Budget

Hey guys,

I launched my product 2 weeks back and here are my honest learnings on what worked and didn’t work. It’s a simple product - A database of Communities for Makers and Founders to launch their product and find new users.

Since launch I’ve gotten

  • 78 Paying Users
  • $3051 in Sales 🔥

What worked?

1. Target a Niche - I narrowed down within Startup Founders => Makers and Indiehackers. What do they want? To grow their product and get sales.
Communities are a great way to do this. But finding communities is a pain. So I decided to solve that.

2. Get Pricing Right: It was extremely hard to decide on pricing and had no idea what to start of with. I started with a conservative $29 with special launch deals and now increased the price to $49. The goal is to induce a bit of FOMO in the buyer. My pricing strategy definitely helped drive sales and was inspired by this.

3. Launch everywhere that’s relevant to your product. This is the key. Launching is super important. Launch hard and regularly.

4. Break rules, don’t think too much. Just launch. Give yourself permission to screw up and experiment Treat everything as an experiment. The product, the tech stack, Copywriting. Don’t stress out too much. Building products is a series of experiments. This mindset actually helped me move and learn fast and this resulted in more sales.

5.Stay extremely lean and be scrappy - If you can use no-code/low-code go for it. I used Carrd + Airtable + Gumroad for building my product. I could’ve built a site that does filtering, grouping and sorting like Airtable. But why? Being scrappy is so much more fun.

6. Maker Compass - Only prioritize things that add value to the user: This helped me a lot in prioritizing tasks and discarding tasks.

7. Another small tip for Indiehackers is to play your Indiehacker card hard. People love underdogs :)

Where did I fail?

Spent too much time on Copywriting and Pricing Strategy :(

I spent more time on these than on the actual product. I muddled up copywriting and figured I’d wing it as I build the landing page. Biggest. Mistake. Ever.

Always make sure to write down your valueprops and copy before you actually build your landing page.

I got a lot of bad advice on pricing like “Just start of with one and don’t think too much about it”

Wrong. Use this framework.

You need to find out what your users pay for similar products. This is the key. Find similar products that have done well and then price accordingly.

What Next?

  • I haven’t posted on Facebook Communities yet.
  • I’ve been very irregular in Marketing and Promo so need to set up a nice framework that reduces friction and lets me become regular.
  • Talk to my users properly and get more feedback.

Thanks For Reading!

I’m building 1 Product/Mo and if you’re interested in following along, follow me on twitter!

  1. 2

    Very helpful, thanks

  2. 2

    Congrats! That's a great result!

    What was the most effective channel for distribution? Where did the most of sales come from?

    1. 2

      PH, reddit and slack/circle communities

  3. 2

    Truly a new way to do an MVP so quickly and scale. kudos to you. Regarding the airtable vs custom build, don't you feel the Airtbale pricing will be more than doing it custom?

    1. 1

      Thanks!

      Airtable credits and refer friend(s) :)

  4. 2

    congrats on the product success!

    how long did it take for you to build this (excluding copywriting and pricing)?

    did you have to write code for this?

    1. 2

      1-1.5 week to build
      Yes python scripts for scraping and keyword crawling

      1. 2

        thanks for answering:)

  5. 2

    Well done and thanks much for documenting what worked and what went wrong!

  6. 2

    Congrats! Awesome to see one of your products get traction like this 🎉

  7. 1

    Congrats on reaching this number @sudharshan! I actually completed listing my product ruttl on several platforms a week back otherwise this would've been very helpful for me, but anyways, keep up the hustle!

    1. 1

      Thanks man! Ruttl is awesome, I used it for my landing page

      1. 1

        Haha glad to hear that! Thanks for the feedback 😄

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