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I've made $24.2K MXN ($1.3K USD) since Dec 26th 2020. AMA

At the end of last year I started working on Legendsverse.com an app for Toys collectors that help them track their Marvel Legends collection. I work on it for a few hours a day and my expenses to date have been ~$200 USD.

My stack is:

  • digital ocean cheapest VM ($5 USD/monthly)
  • Namecheap private email ($10 USD/year)
  • com domain ($11 USD/year)
  • Laravel forge for deployment ($19 USD/month, shared with 2 other projects)
  • Laravel for backend
  • tailwindUI for styling
  • vue for frontend
  • scrapping bee of Ebay scrapping ($29 USD/monthly)

When I shipped Legendsverse I set up a demo account that would let users take a look at the insides of the app. I'm pretty sure that helped me get my first costumers. I removed that feature a few weeks back because I opened a lot of the features to the general public (list of figures, figures prices, etc).

Legendsverse started as a monthly subscription, but recently I moved it to a one time payment subscription. I'm currently considering moving it back again to monthly subscription.

I currently have around 80 paid customers. No free trials, no free accounts. Most of my customers pay via Stripe, and about 4-5 have paid with PayPal.

Scrapping Bee service is by far the most expensive service I pay but it's also the most important, a lot of my customers are looking to keep track of their current collection value. It's not my favorite feature, and it's the most expensive.

I market Legendsverse on Reddit, not as much as I should, but most of my customers come from there, and I manage to get a link to my site in a Marvel Legends sub links. I've tried marketing it on Facebook but it's really hard to have my postings approved by mods. I'm trying to have SEO traffic and legendsverse is the fifth result for "Marvel Legends Checklist" search.

So, if there's anything you'd like to know, or anything that I can help you with, let me know and I'll do my best to shed some light

  1. 3

    Love your business !

    What kind of sharing do you do on Reddit?

    1. 1

      Hey thanks a lot!

      I started teasing the app and then I shared new features. At the beginning I wasn't sharing as much because I thought that I could get banned or something but that wasn't the case. So I started posting more about it. I also post new figures that are being released and announcements. In Twitter I follow the Marvel Legends responsible and have notifications whenever he posts something, so often I'm one of the first people to post news stuff.

  2. 2

    I would suggest you creating an email list with a bi-weekly newsletter to your followers.

    I reckon many collectors would be thrilled to receive an email on the latest collections added onto your site and also to keep them informed about your product.

    As time goes by, you can start to convert these readers into customers with funnels, discount codes and many more.

    1. 1

      Yeah, I already have a Newsletter with about 275 people subscribed. I used to share new features that, and actually the first customers came from them I guess. I started the newsletter about two months before launching. I haven't shared a lot there recently. But yeah, I want to make it more of a content newsletter as you said (news, reviews, etc), instead of just new features.

      I guess I'll have to get back to it.

      1. 1

        I reckon you can increase your subscribers by a way lot more since your Reddit posts are quite popular.

        Include a CTA at the end of your post every time, saying something along the line of "if you would like stay up to date with the latest collections, I share a bi-weekly newsletter on the latest features..." to get them to sign up to your newsletter.

        You can definetely get more conversions from there on.

  3. 1

    This seems so cool! I like the fact that this is in such an unconventional space.

    1. 2

      Yeah, I started with this product because I collect this figures. I started collecting them last year and saw an opportunity, the hardest part has been convincing people to pay for something that is free on some other sites.

      Also I think that:

      a) I'm not a very good coder/marketer/whatever.
      b) Don't have enough experience

      to sell something for developers/creators.

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