How I made $430 in sales in 7 days with just a landing page
So for a long time I had this idea of mastermind groups for indie hackers.
I thought they would be really useful especially because bootstrapped founders don't have a strong support system to give them feedback, advice and mentorship like VC funded founders do have.
But I wasn't sure if people would be interested in a service like this or not.
I did speak to a few people about how they solved this problem and there were no concrete examples.
Of course, the Indie Hackers community plays a big role to solve this problem, but I thought there was space for a more high touch experience.
With that in mind I made a simple landing page for the service and announced it on Twitter.
It didn't get much traction on the first day, just a couple of people joined.
But as time went buy and I spoke about it more on Twitter and in my newsletter, I started getting interest from people.
Eventually over 7 days I crossed my initial target of 12 sales (3 mastermind groups).
This is enough for me to run the program for the first month and see how it goes.
My biggest lesson?
I promoted it in many places - Reddit, HN, even IH. But got sales only via 2 channels - Twitter and Email.
This tells me which are going to be my primary channels of distribution going forward.
Also, another lessons I realized is - if you have an idea playing in your head for a long time, then you should at least make a landing page for it and share it with people, see if they show interest.
This is the least you can do 😅
Cheers,
Ayush
Congrats Ayush! Love your validation first approach.
I wonder why other channels didn't work for you. Especially IH, since your mastermind group is a good match for the audience here. Any insights on this??
Yea I don't know.. success here is very random/depends on the mods. Some posts make it to the homepage and get traction, others don't.
I made a show IH post where I explained the service in detail, but that one only got 9 views..
Success on IH is very unpredictable..
Interesting, thanks for the reply :)
Good stuff. Niche communities (probably paid ones) and regular meetups biz are absolutely going to crush it in coming years I feel.
I see this as a trickle down effect from people 'at the top' who've had these communities for a while. What fortune 500 execs (chief.com/ YPO), people with multi-million exits (tiger21) etc have seen value for a long time, the masses will soon realise it's value for their own niche.
Seeing this with cohort-based course boom already, as the masses get tuned into this.
Yes, actually Chief was a big inspiration for the idea.
Also, the biggest lesson from every cohort-based course is that the real value is in the community not the content.
So I'm trying to unlock that value through this program.
If it goes well in July then I will restart again in August with more people. Let's see.
Congratulations Ayush! I really admire your approach to validate the business here. Starting small is the key. I took your post here as a reminder and motivation for me to start small and iterate fast. Thanks again!
Thanks a ton, glad the approach resonated with you.
That's incredibly informative, thank you! It's a sound business model and everyone should implement it
Thanks a lot 🙌
This is the right way to build. Great work.
Validation first.
Product second.
Validation third.
I'll do this exact thing for my next product.
Thanks a lot Dan 🙌
wow it's unbelievable
Haha.. thanks!
Wooh, thats some really great stuff, keep us posted for some more quality content, would try the same :)
Thanks a lot Ritesh
Congrats Ayush! Making at least a landing page is a great idea - better than just stopping after buying a domain for sure!
Thanks a lot Jason 🙌
From your promotion channels from where did you get the most customers?
Hey, as I said, my primary channels are Twitter and Email. Screenshot included in the post.
Thanks. It is hard to see the image on mobile:)
Aah got it 👍
Nice Ayush! Keep it up, you made some good points here, thanks for sharing.
Cheers, glad you liked it 🙌
Do you use a personal account when promoting through social networks, or do you use a dedicated business account. I have both but never know which is best to post from.
Everything is via personal account, too hard to maintain business account. And I can share multiple projects via personal account.
Thanks for sharing! I think I came to the same conclusion myself.
Cheers man 🙌
Can you confirm on what way you used email? Thanks
So most of the traffic is from my weekly personal newsletter.
And I also send email via Gumroad to my past customers, people who had bought other products from me before. I let them know that I'm launching something new that they might find useful.
My attempts to work through Twitter have never brought results, I guess I'm doing something wrong
It takes a lot of effort and time. I've been actively trying to build different products and services on Twitter for almost a year now.. Sometimes I see good results..
Thanks for sharing this Ayush! How did you find who to talk to on Twitter? And what did you say to them?
Hey so I know quite a few people on Twitter who I thought would benefit a lot from the service, so I reached out to them asked them if they would like to check it out.
And I also had a tweet where I asked people how they were getting feedback on their products, which led to interesting discussions but no concrete answers, so I knew what I was proposing would be useful.
Eventually I launched the service on Twitter and slowly started getting signups