How I made $11K in one month with Gumroad and Laravel.

Hello guys,

Let me introduce myself first, I'm Guillaume and I came from France.
I build some app since years ago and today I want to share with you my last successfull product launch.

The product

The product is called Affilisting, it is a service that allows website publishers to find the best affiliate programs across 500+ niches for a total of 10K+ programs and so save time.
It cost $99 onetime payment with lifetime access and future updates.

The idea came when I wanted to get into the affiliate business and I couldn't find any good affiliate programs.

So I identified the problem, and started looking to see if anyone had already put together lists of quality programs and all I found were scams and shitty programs.

So I started collecting hundreds of programs on an Airtable list until I had thousands and at that time, I decided to monetize this list by creating Affilisting.

As simple as that.

Why Laravel instead of a simple Airtable?

As seen above, I started collecting programs in an Airtable list, so why not just monetize this list?

For several reasons:

• First, because Affilisting is not just a list. It's an app that allows you to do several things. For example, you can add to favorites several programs so that you are alerted if their commissions change in the future. Affilisting also allows you to enter your preferences so that an algorithm can suggest the best programs and many other features. That's why I needed to develop my own application.
• Secondly, because I have been developing with Laravel for over 4 years. So it's an ecosystem I know very well. On top of that, the Laravel ecosystem is in my opinion the best to easily build an application as an Indiehacker. Especially with the Laravel Jetstream technical stack that allows you to easily set up the base of your Laravel application in one command line.
• Finally, developing your own application makes it easy to keep control over the data. It is also the best way to be able to evolve your product in the future.

Why Gumroad?

As I am alone, I needed a payment solution that is very simple to use and that makes my life easier, especially when it comes to managing taxes. My company being based in France, the management of taxes like VAT is very complicated if you sell internationally and if you are all alone to manage this part.

That's why I chose to use a reseller like Gumroad instead of Stripe. This way, I only have to issue one invoice every 7 days (the payday is every 7 days) and the management of invoices and the VAT managment is handled by Gumroad.

On top of that, Gumroad allows me to set up my own affiliate program easily and you will see later that this is a very important part for Affilisting.

My Launch Strategy

Definitely Twitter.
Affiliate marketing is a very popular topic on Twitter and there are many influential people in this niche.

So I decided to give as many free licenses as possible to these influencers and to give some to their community across of some Twitter RT Giveaway.

On top of that, I offered these influencers to join my affiliate program. This way, they get 50% of each Affilisting sale. It's a very aggressive program and it attracts a lot of people.

After that, it's a snowball effect. More and more people are joining my affiliate program, promoting my product and generating sales.

My affiliate program is so important today that it represents about 30% of my total sales and my affiliates have already generated over $4000 in sales volume.

Finally, I have also done interviews on YouTube channel, blog posts etc etc...

This last point is interesting, because it will allow me to generate sales in the long term, without doing anything.

The future of Affilisting

Today, 70% of my sales are in France. My goal is to be present in the US, UK and all English speaking countries (le monde chico).

My ambition is to be the reference in the affiliate business on the "Program Search" part.

Making big partnerships with affiliate platforms is clearly an important objective for Affilisting, for two reasons. First, to offer more programs to my users. And second, to grow Affilisting and bring credibility.

I'm also thinking about improving my deployment strategy, including paying for ads on sites that specialize in affiliate marketing.

Thank you all for reading, I will try to update the post as often as possible with new figures and I will keep you informed on how the product evolves.

Feel free to follow me on Indiehacker and on Twitter: https://twitter.com/G_Souillard & https://twitter.com/affilisting.

You can also check my product here: https://affilisting.com

If you have any feedback, I would be happy to exchange with you!