I follow a formula to build micro sass product, and finally made money on first day of pre-launch

Hi fellow builders,

After failing on too many ideas. I decided to shift my coding/building hat with this business mindset formula.

And I take it strictly :

1. At least 50 interests before actually building - If not start new one
2. At least 50 paid users within 2 months launch - If not start new one
3. Go for producthunt proper launch only after 50 paid users
4. Ads and any non-organic spending after 100 paid users.

Easier said than done.

Pre-MVP

Couple months ago, I made a kind of concept demo with landing page on a tool that help user instantly scrape data from any website with just prompt, like any other AI prompt. There is no need for css selector, coding, proxies and all, everything is handled behind the scenes.

From a single reddit post, 100+ people signed up for waiting list ( get passed the formula). That ’s when I started to work on the project with my brother, to build the MVP.

Things were much harder than we thought. We failed to build a stable project, keep running into problems with passing proxies, captcha, then with the LLM models not returning the right data. You name it, it was some difficult challenges.

… but we (me and my fellow indiehacker @lufutu) didn’t give up, we continued to push, trying to find solutions. And finally, it is working with around 90% success rate.

However, the building part is not as hard as the marketing part. So we thought about teasing a pre-launch with a demo on reddit first.

MVP & Growth

Thanks for reddit, our post couple day ago got 199 upvotes, with 50k views on the first day, and to our surprise we got a 49.99 USD customer be the end of the day. Another 200 signed up.

Hurray, the money is no where near but the feeling is just great.

Here is the demo of how my app work :
Demo Video

The link to the project is at :

Scraper.is

What's Next?

1. Growth On X: I will keep building more use case demo, from our existing customers to build more reach on X. My profile is at https://x.com/tuantruong (let's connect)

2. SEO Focus: The product got some initial organic, so I'm planning to focus on SEO and content to get more eyes in the long run. Especially in term of training and guidelines

3. Newsletter: I was shared that some newsletter sponsorship with affiliate is working well, so gonna try that too. Will keep you guys posted.

4. Reddit: This is tricky, as you will get banned, removed many times due to the rules in different reddit. But once you get the hang of it, it is wonderful. Will keep finding a way to make it more interesting, putting in the effort to bring values to each subreddit that I am in. I also found out that you can't keep posting the same video/ content again and again, you got to renew it every time. So it take quite a bit of works.

5. Influencer Marketing: This is a bit skeptical , and I want to avoid burning money at all costs, so will try to find one that can offer affiliate

6. Other Growth Plan : I am looking into posting directories and maybe try AppSumo, as I heard quite number of good things on it.  Paid Ads: will have to wait when I pass the above number, Press Release is also something interesting to look into

7. A new user everyday: this is something new that I learnt today from this subreddit. But I will up my game a bit, if there is not enough of at least 3 new users / a day, I need to do more work.

8. Building better product: Last but not least, to keep users engaged and bring values is always the most important thing. There are so many things that we need to work on , in order to provide best functions for our users. However, this will be prioritized upon customers preference for sure.

Here is how our tool looks like :

Thanks for reading til here, if you wanted to use our product for your project, feel free to reach me on DM, and I will sure give you a juicy discount code for fellow builders.

Hope to inspire fellow builders here !