I sold an idea for $600
Submetrics, a modern metrics dashboard sold a few days ago for $600
The sale included
- Domain
- Landing page
- Early access list of 80 emails
- Figma mock-up
🧵 what I learned selling an idea
I was very shocked to find that someone wanted to buy an idea. Actually over 8 individuals had reached out to acquire this asset.
It goes to show that an idea itself isn’t worth anything. If you can prove that an idea is validated and have some infrastructure to capture that interest, that is worth at least something.
I believe I may have sold the most minimum product one can actually sell.
The only thing that I can think of that’s even more minimal is simply a domain name and an idea. The biggest difference is I’ve added the layer of validation.
Overall I believe someone could make a solid living off thinking of and validating ideas.
I spent 10 hours from start to sale of Submetrics and profited $400. $40/hour isn’t bad. Do this twice per week and you got yourself a monomial viable salary.
New marketplace idea:
TinyAcquire
Sell an idea + landing page + waitlist
Who's building it? ☺️
There's already something similar called Tiny Acquisitions.
Tiny Acquisitions looks looks nice ! Thanks for sharing 😉
This would be a great marketplace idea. Although with micro acquire being out there, I would try to come up with a different name other than tiny acquire.
Honestly this is a pretty awesome idea and clearly there is a market for it!
A meta way to check if it really is a good idea or not will be if someone (and I am not saying that someone is not me) builds a landing page, gets some people on waitlist and sells it for ~$1000 😱
I feel most indie hackers should be doing this actually, first validate the product then build. The niche comes into to those who don’t necessarily want to spend the time thinking of ideas and validating them. You could go months without starting on any product.
We are working on plygrnd.xyz, instant landing page + waitlist creator.
having a marketplace of selling landing pages with email signups is something in our roadmap :)
Check out microns.io
Slightly unrelated question: How did you drive traffic to the landing page to build the waitlist? I'm trying to do the same right now in order to validate my idea (Masterplan.so) but I found it difficult to get enough eyes on the page. Any advice?
Traffic most came from ProductHunt Ship, Reddit, IndieHackers, and Twitter. In no particular order
Thanks, I haven’t heard if product hunt ship. I’ll check it out 👌🏻
Hey @fl2100 really nice looking UI! Did you use a front-end library to do the studio/workflow editor? Looks great!
Thanks so much! The pictures on the website are actually just mockups that I designed in Figma. We're trying to figure out if there is enough interest in the idea for us to make it a reality. To create the real thing, we would use either Vue or React in combination with a html canvas library like paper.js or maybe cytoscape.js.
This is also a great resource for building applications like this:
https://whimsical.com/blog/how-we-built-whimsical
Could you share the website?
Submetrics.co
The link isn't working anymore?
@Ooshimus here is the archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20220123221440/http://submetrics.co/ :)
DNS settings probably got changed and site isn’t up due to transfer. Give it a few days
What you created is an easy task?
Yes correct but the validation through early access users is the hard part
Congrats on sale. Good try and validation.
Ask 100 people and 3-5% is good success rate.
Myself being a domain investor I wouldn't have sold just the domain for $600. It's a mid-high 4 figure domain
Oh really?! I have a time of domain names like nocodebootstrap, nocodecollege, memberkit, and a lot more haha. You think I could get 4 figures for these domains?
There are some factors for valuing domain. So it depends. DM here or on Twitter if you are letting any domain expire
Did it look as it does now when you sold it as an idea? Design is really crisp and professional, wouldn't be surprised that people found it so easy to seem like a viable idea with the current setup.
Thanks! And yes it did. design is super. I love it.
Great concept - selling an idea with a bit of framework around it (domain, mockups, email list, etc)! Maybe I missed it, but how did you find a customer? Did you post here on IH?
I have a list of half dozen ideas that I am hoping to explore this year. I'm wondering if this is a good route if I start to realize that I don't have the time - or market pull. Thanks!
Yes I was building in public for the duration of this project. You can find the threads on my profile. I think it’s worth a shot. Build out all of your ideas. See which one sticks the most. Build that and sell the rest (assuming there is some pull)
Yes! I remember seeing your post now. Thank you for sharing!
Super interesting, and congrats! So what's your next 10 hr/$600 project? Have you brainstormed a list?
Thanks! I have a few more ideas but I probably won’t make this into a regular thing. This part is probably one of the hardest parts of an project. It does take time, and if I find a pull from the market I’d probably just build it myself. I sold it mostly since I don’t have time
Ah, I gotcha. Well, pretty nifty that you could make $600 instead of just putting it in the pile of moldy old projects! 😂
Where did you get buyers who approached you for it?
Reddit, InideHackers, Twitter
what a smart move. btw do you design your own design system and write your own css or use something like bulma/bootstrap and get the job done?
A good friend of mine did the design and I used a NextJS template for the landing page
i see, thank you, will consider to learn nextJS too
Congrats!
I did the same thing with a project last year.
Had an idea. Created a landing page on a good domain, got ~20 waiting list signups, and then sold it for $500.
Maybe it could be done with other ideas. But I don't think it's something that can be done that predictably.
Nice! And agreed, it’s too difficult to do it consistently
Congrats.
Could you share the domain name?
very interesting.
On which channels do those 8 individuals had reached out to you?
Reddit, Twitter, and IndieHackers
Hello! I am currently building a marketplace for exactly this purpose and I wanted to ask you how did you sell the idea. I mean did you use a platform? How did you make the payment etc?
This is so amazing! stories like these give so much motivation & inspiration.
The problem is you would not being able to sell that idea without a name, domain name and list of emails validating the idea... So, no.
Great one. I'm looking forward to selling my own ideas
You'll be shocked I guess ) softwareideas.io and https://openstartup.tm/software ideas
Hey Yaro, thank you so much for sharing this.
This is really exciting and inspiring. This is an idea we were considering for plygrnd.xyz . Our product lets you instantly create a landing page for your idea and start collecting email signups. We were curious, if people would like to sell their launched landing pages with the audience.
A couple of months ago I was asking twitter about this: https://twitter.com/alperkemalkoc/status/1448577242762813440?s=20&t=gtJ8WUcLg3k5NiX1_vxM0g
If you are thinking about keep doing this, I would be happy to give you some access to plygrnd.xyz, and would deeply appreciate your feedback!
Sounds like a legit idea! How many customers do you have?
Is this the first time you do such thing?
I think the key validation here is that you have the skills set required to pull such thing, which could be far more valuable than the 600$ earned.
Side note: It could be that you’ve left big money on the table based on numerous factors unknown to us, right? Besides, it really isn’t merely an idea you have sold, you’ve put in substantial work. Btw, anyone from the early access pay paid or explicitly agreed to pay?
Nonetheless, great job. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks! Absolutely my time is worth much more especially if I had taken it further. The problem is how much would someone really pay for an opportunity?
In the end I’d probably not go about it the same way but would charge hourly or a per project biases and charge much more. I calculated I earned about $40/hr which is a lot but probably should be closer to $200/hr
It might be that the buyer was interested in the domain name... I mean why pay someone 600 bucks for an idea they can just "take" by reserving another domain: you can make any domain name up...
There was a Figma design too which looked really nice! Sure you could take that too but people would know.
Yeah they shouldn't just "take" your work/design that's not right.
Anyways good job, now for the next idea... But aim for something higher, maybe build more
Thanks! It was a one time experiment that seemed to work well
I believe that every transaction is fair and that your idea is worth 600 USD to the person buying it. What I don't understand is, where was the value of the idea?
The true value I believe was in the early access list. There were 80 people who signed up. That’s 80 interested people. The next step would be is to presell it to those 80.
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Sure technically your right but in the end there is no working product.
You sold a brand.
Yeah perhaps, I still feel it’s an idea. There really isn’t anything tangible other than emails, which validate the idea and a landing page which serves to capture interest.
Lots of people buy just that...
https://brandnic.com/
https://www.brandbucket.com/
https://brandpa.com/
https://www.brandroot.com/
I think the key here… is that you added a personal touch. You found a "brand" that people wanted. An idea is only that until someone builds it(execution).
If someone could do that once a day every weekday, they'd have a nice paycheck in their pocket like you mentioned above.
I think you did a great job! Kudos. :)
Oh interesting I’ve never seen these types of websites. Pretty cool! Yeah it would be pretty legit I agree, but it’s hard! Thank you 🙏
Idk why people are downvoting, I think what you did is pretty cool and it's actually just an idea without being executed in a product manner. Good job.
Thanks! Yeah idk either. In the end it doesn't really matter. Just keep moving forward.
email lists have value