How I made $1500 spending 1 hour each talking to 15 Shopify App Developers.

​I have been a silent Indie Hacker building and scaling micro-saas apps on Shopify. So far my apps are used by 15k merchants and generate me a revenue of ~$22k, details of which make​​ up for a separate post.

​​​But recently I thought of going big and working on bigger projects and raising funding for it. A part of this required me to build my personal brand and get out in front of an audience. I tried getting active on twitter through #buildinpublic, but I am not that great with content and made little progress. The one thing I got really good at in the last few years was Shopify AppStore Marketing and I thought that's what I'll use to grow my personal brand.​​

I made a tweet about sharing my knowledge about Shopify AppStore Marketing through 1-on-1 sessions to anyone who comments on the tweet.

The tweet did pretty well, interestingly out of the many comments only few actually took time out to get on call with me.

I prepared a presentation, shared interesting tips around Shopify AppStore Marketing on the call which everyone loved. I asked them to drop in a tweet for recommendation on twitter which helped me improve my reach and I was able to crawl from 200 odd followers to about 500+ followers.

After about 10 odd calls I thought I'd rather put it up as a paid session. I liked doing it as it helped me build connections and a build credibility in the Shopify App Developers community but it didn't monetarily justify the time spent. So I put up the 1-on-1 session as a paid session for $100 on Gumroad (https://vishshet.gumroad.com/l/ykcTQD).

I wasn't really expecting to make any sales, but after posting the Gumroad link on a Facebook Group and Twitter I actually started getting sales. One of the major reasons was probably the real testimonials tweets that I had from Free calls.

Over last couple of months I had about 15 sales and made $1500 through these 1-on-1 calls.

​Last week I had a call with Björn Forsberg, who is kind of a legend in the Shopify​​ App Developers community, being in this space since I guess almost a decade, and he too had some nice things to say :)

Takeaway

​Though this is not my primary revenue source and something that I might not continue long, it felt good to be able to make money through something other than programming. I think a lot​​ of people can follow this as a playbook which worked for me.

1. Find something that you are good at that you can teach others.
2. Offer to give it away for free in return for Social Engagement.
3. Take a few free sessions and blow their minds off with your awesomeness.
4. Ask for Social Reviews and grow your personal brand.
5. Use these reviews to sell your Info products.

My audience size is very limited, there are probably no more than 6000 active developers with apps on Shopify AppStore. But still I have been able to make 15 sales so far. If you are in a bigger market like Dropshipping, email marketing etc, then almost anyone could be your customer.

👉 This is my first post on IndieHackers, hope I am doing it right!