How We Made $13,500 in 24 hours with a 3 Weeks Old MVP

Quick context

On December 26th, we bought a domain.

2 weeks later, we had a MVP with +250 registered beta users.

A week later, we got +2 MRR paying customers.

To foster growth and feedback collection, we needed more users, faster.

1°) Understanding the early adopter audience

These days, people expect a lot from young products.

Without VC funding, it's hard to close the gap fast.

However, we knew that some SaaS early adopters were in FB groups and loved LTDs (aka lifetime deals).

(me understanding the FB groups)

2°) The choice of a short LTD

LTDs are bad according to many people.

I believe the bad reputation comes from the platforms where you usually distribute your deal and the massive cut they take.

However, if you don't need to rely on the money made from the LTD, it's actually a powerful way to get early users if you're a bootstrapped startup.

This is why we decided to make it 7 days.

The goal wasn't to do big numbers but rather get a pool of early adopters that were willing to commit and give feedback.

These people are also extremely used to new SaaS products and can spot UI/UX, bugs and errors really fast.

There are not your average customer, they might not be your ICP on all aspects - but they are key to avoid building mistakes early on.

The objective shouldn't be to build in a cave for 3 months and deliver something that people don't want. The objective should be to fail as fast as possible to adjust quickly and deliver an awesome product.

Why not going with AppSumo?

Long story short, you need to:

• either let your deal run for 120 days

• have to accept a 70/30 cut for AppSumo Select

Also you cannot do AppSumo Select as a baby MVP.

We could have achieved like +$250,000 but big numbers were not the objective here.

What we wanted was to go fast to keep momentum and continue our MRR growth.

We also kept 100%, seems like a fair cut to me.

Doing LTDs de-focus you and you don't want to avoid MRR growth for months.

Think about your costs

If you do a LTD, calculate your costs wisely.

Goal is to be here for the long term, not to get debts after a few months in.

You can assume that 30% of people buying the deal won't use it.

Mainly for speculative purposes.

How to price

We decided to be creative here.

Again, the goal was not to do big numbers so we played with the typical rules a bit.

We did a price that was increasing every 2 days.

The objective was to create urgency for the first days.

Do a specific landing page

We've built a custom landing page for early adopters.

It was greatly appreciated by the community.

We shared our story, the numbers we've made in 3 weeks as a baby MVP.

We underlined our objectives and how we wanted to be here for the long term.

All of this was to reassure buyers that we were a serious deal.

I would say that was the most important thing we did to make this event successful.

Do a video

I've done a video specifically for this launch.

I went through the software but went way beyond that.

I expressed our long-term vision and our objectives for the year.

3°) Reach out to distributors

Reach out to FB admins

Few days before launching, reach out to FB admins.

It's highly important as you're not backed by big platforms.

Some of them will say no because they're exclusive to AppSumo.

Reach out to affiliates

Affiliates probably brought us more than +30% of the revenues.

Some people who bought the deal even brought themselves 10 people.

Never underestimate this channel.

We used GetRewardful for that.

4°) Invest in customer support

We had hundreds of conversations and tickets.

Be prepared.

Thanks to our own tool, we reduced the amount of tickets.

We also did a Q&A on the landing page, it helped so much.

(us on customer support for 24 hours)

5°) Try to generate reviews

By being nice, we generated a few reviews.

People where cheering for us in many FB groups.

That was just awesome.

Here is an extract of my favorite review:

I'm active on Twitter @ArnaudBelingaCX