I earned $100 from my app in 1 week after a year of failure

Hey IndieHackers, I’m proud to say after a year of trying and failing multiple projects I made $100 in one week from GrepJob - a niche job board for software engineers. Here is my story of how I picked a winning idea, got initial traction from reddit, converted to a paid product, and the lessons I had to learn to reach this milestone.

Picking a winning idea

While I was working on MassApply, a job application service for software engineers, I learned that finding relevant jobs to apply to is very painful on mainstream platforms like LinkedIn. It was so painful that I quit working on MassApply, even though I was pretty sure people would pay for it.

Around the same time, I discovered a couple niche job boards that used AI + web scraping to offer a much better experience compared to LinkedIn. These job boards were charging for access, and after some digging I realized that they are actually making a lot of money.

While the niche job boards were great to use, they did not have enough jobs that I would personally apply to as a software engineer who wants to work at an established company. So, I decided to build GrepJob to fill this gap.

I think GrepJob is a winning idea because it solves a painful problem, I experience the problem myself, and people are already paying for similar solutions.

Getting initial traction from reddit

I got my first users from posts in reddit communities where my target users hang out. For example r/leetcode and r/developersindia. Most of my posts did well and I got about 15,000 visitors to the site in 2 months. I think my posts did well because 1) at the time my product was free 2) the problem is very painful and 3) the product is relevant for those communities.

Here is an example post I made in r/leetcode which got me around 4K visitors.

I also tried launching on ProductHunt, X, and HackerNews but I did not see much success.

Paywalling the app

The first iterations of GrepJob were free and I felt conflicted about paywalling the app. As a compromise, I decided to implement the paywall, but hide it behind a feature flag so I could enable it when I felt the product was good enough.

I ended up not even using the feature flag though because a guy at my coworking space convinced me to just paywall right away. That worked out and just 2 days later I had my first paying customer, and within 1 week I had made $100!

If you’re struggling to make this decision: just paywall it already. There is not really much to lose, you either make money or learn that your product isn’t good enough to pay for. This is critical information and will save you from weeks or months of working on the wrong thing.

Lessons learned

Here were the most important lessons I learned in the last year:

1. A product must solve a problem that people will pay to solve
2. It’s easier to solve a problem you personally face (”scratch your own itch”)
3. Competition is good, it gives you higher confidence that people will pay for your solution
4. Distribution is as important as product development.

Next goal: earn $500 / month

Early data shows that my conversion rate for visitor→paid user is about 0.5% and I charge $25 for access. So working backwards from that, I just need to get 4000 monthly visitors to the site to reach my goal (4000 * 0.5% * $25 = $500).

Given that I got 15,000 visitors to the site in 2 months, this goal should be achievable. But, that was when the product was free. It is a lot harder to promote a paid product on reddit and I’ve already had posts taken down since I added the paywall.

To get around this, I will still post on reddit, but I will link to my product only in posts that genuinely contribute value to the community.

I will also expand to other socials. My target users also hang out on Linkedin, TikTok, Blind, Dev.to, etc. so I will start distributing content to those platforms too.

Conclusion

Anyways, thank you for reading! If you want to keep up to date with what I’m working on and see the results of these strategies in real time I am building in public on X: @kylem_dev

Question to IndieHackers: What do you think of my strategy to reach $500 / month? How would you grow the product if you were me?