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Launched 2 months ago, now at $1700 Revenue.

In case if you missed it, here is the story. 2 months ago, we launched a website that we did in less than a week. ~2 months fast forward, I think we are happy that it is launched in less than a week.

I am a full-stack developer and designer with a keen eye for perfection, and for almost five years, I believed a product with great UI, UX, and the leading technologies used should bring tons of customers. I know it's a rookie mistake. In the past, I launched many websites based on my assumptions that they would succeed. Honestly, looking at my Git account today, I have 139 repositories. I am sure at least 25% of them are useless apps that I created which once I thought would be helpful for the people, and the rest of the repos were made for clients who paid well enough to run my consulting business. I have an app (Larapos) that we worked on for ~3 years as a side project, and I don't have a client yet. I am going to start marketing it someday soon, though.

After that, I moved to the USA and got a full-time job, "stopped" side hustling for three years, and it still bothered me a lot that I miss my startup life. So started following indie hacker podcasts, which helped me understand my mistakes and read few books that are an eye-opener for me. So with a mission to launch quickly, I started on a thought to solve the simple problem of giving gifts without asking for an address that I experienced at my office. So we launched Surprise Gift after working on it for a whole week, well technically, we both had full-time jobs, so we worked on it only the evenings of weekdays and entirely on the weekend.

The first platform we chose was Product Hunt. It's our first launch on PH, and we got three upvotes for it: Me, my wife, and the hunter (my manager at work). Yeah, it's a big fail on PH, but we didn't feel bad, you know why? We spent only a week on it, and we were busy finishing it in time rather than pushing our hopes high. So, I started applying some of the tricks I learned by listening to podcasts and audiobooks to find the right channel. I posted on Reddit, got a good amount of traffic (~200) for two days in total and not even a single order. It made sense because I posted inside projects thread, but my customer is a professional employee that wants to gift to their colleague. So I searched google and found a question on the Amazon developer forum, asking how they can send a gift without an address on Amazon. So, I quickly answered the question. The traffic from 0 visitors per day went to ~ three consistent visitors every day from the amazon forum. It felt nice; we were on a trip to CA the next week of the launch.

I was sitting in a park; I got an email saying someone ordered on Surprise gift(I set up an email notification if the order is received). I couldn't believe it. I quickly logged in to the stripe dashboard on my phone and saw that a customer was created, and yes, we got our first order!! He ordered a $250 worth mic to his online friend; at that time, we were charging only $3 per order, and with stripe charging us 2.7% + 0.30, we were processing this order at a loss, but hey, we were trying to validate the idea. We were so happy that he trusted us with $250 bucks.

After we are back from the vacation, we decided to bring more traffic to the website, so I searched google again on how to send a gift without an address and found a bunch of Quora questions. I answered all of them (~8). Now the traffic increased, and we are at ~27 average visitors per day. We also posted in Reddit threads, created posts on Blind. We got 75 orders after that (mainly from Quora). Sorry, I think this post is coming long. I am happy to create different posts on a depth process that I think might be useful for anyone out there. I am sure this isn't wholly validated, but we know many things we can do to increase our traffic as we now know the ideal customer. We are holding on scaling this as we have some setbacks that I can share in the different posts once we overcome that (Disclaimer: Needed LLC or Incorporation in the USA). The customers who placed the orders or received the gift have given great feedback, and many of them are excited about the idea and thanked for creating such a thing that solved their problem.

Our next steps here are to overcome some of the setbacks that we had, automate most of the stuff we are doing like emails on follow-ups for address or reviews, and decrease our time now. Honestly, we are putting in ~30 minutes a day now, which is less, but we can still automate it and spend at least an hour scaling this product. Remember? We both have full-time jobs, have a toddler that needs our full attention, and have some of the side-projects I am still working on.

I still can't believe how powerful it is for us to push the product to the public as soon as possible and participate in the feedback loop. Let me know if you have any questions. Also, please let me if you want me to post more stuff on what I am doing with Surprise Gift or any other stuff I am working on. This is really new to me, and I wonder if anyone would be interested in these types of posts. Thanks for taking the time to read through this post.

  1. 2

    Really liked the idea of use quora! Without spending a cent on advertising, really good job!
    What book do you recommend/read that opens ur eyes?

    1. 1

      Thanks :) yeah, haven't jumped into paid advertisement although once we are able to scale we have plans to see the Linkedin marketing, it's a huge market for us in that community.
      And about the book, I am going to copy-paste another comment I posted below :)

      I checked my audiobooks library and wow there are 14 books I bought and completed 6 all the way through. The ones that stand out are

      7 Day Startup by Dan Norris (he gives what's important and not important when building a startup quickly)
      The Lean Startup (learned not to assume stuff and validate as quickly as possible.)
      Traction - how any startup can achieve explosive customer growth (there are some books on traction but specifically traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares helped me learn there are almost 22 channels that you can explore. This is a must book for people experimenting channels)
      FYI: I buy only audiobooks because it's really easy for me to listen than read. I listen to them in the shower, in the car, exercise, and go on the bike. I wasn't able to complete 1 book in a whole year but with audiobooks, I was able to finish 6 books and 8 more books close to the average of 40%

  2. 2

    Thanks for sharing all of this! Really motivated me. I have one question: you said you posted on Reddit, Quora and Blind. What is this last one? Never heard of it.

    Also, you used your personal account for all of this posts?

    Congrats!

    1. 2

      Sure, I am glad it helped! Blind is an anonymous professional network. People who work at corporate jobs will join the Blind, Your identity is completely hidden on the platform and you can post anything you want about the company you work for or seek help in your career. My initial target customer is a person who wants to gift their colleagues so I posted it over there. FYI I linked the post which got me over 600 visitors
      https://www.teamblind.com/post/I-launched-a-website-in-less-than-7-days-from-idea-to-live-c5MMO2fS

      1. 1

        That sounds really interesting! I'm checking it out right now, thanks. And good job getting leads.

        What do you plan to do in the future to get new visitors and clients?

        1. 1

          Also, let me know if you have tips on how we can attract more people that I missed for our next steps :)

        2. 1

          sure, happy to answer. I have a few more places to post about the solution like Linkedin where all my customers hang out and do a press release. Also, we will try Linkedin ads once we feel like we can handle the orders flowing in.

  3. 2

    Happy to hear that. Congratulations!! I think you should concentrate more on Blind as thats anonymous network.

    Overall, this a neatly executed. Well done!!

    1. 2

      Yep you are right, my first target customers hang in there a lot.

  4. 1

    Hey, interesting idea! My question is are you having to key in and pay for the orders manually after receiving the PayPal payments or have you managed to setup some sort api interface?

  5. 1

    Maybe, registered users can get a public page to accept gifts from fans. You can promote it to YouTube bloggers or some online celebrities who do product evaluation videos. Famous people have such needs and don't want to disclose their addresses

    1. 2

      That's exactly what we are planning to do in our next release, for now, we have few setbacks that we are working on to make sure we can scale easily. For Example, Amazon doesn't allow to order the same product more than 4 times. And, Thanks for taking the time to write about the suggestion :)

  6. 1

    That's wonderful! Any specific episodes/articles/books you'd recommend?

    1. 1

      I don't exactly remember the episodes from indie hackers but trust me most of them has great information but for books 👇

      To answer this question, I checked my audiobooks library and wow there are 14 books I bought and completed 6 all the way through. The ones that stand out are

      • 7 Day Startup by Dan Norris (he gives what's important and not important when building a startup quickly)
      • The Lean Startup (learned not to assume stuff and validate as quickly as possible.)
      • Traction - how any startup can achieve explosive customer growth (there are some books on traction but specifically traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares helped me learn there are almost 22 channels that you can explore. This is a must book for people experimenting channels)

      FYI: I buy only audiobooks because it's really easy for me to listen than read. I listen to them in the shower, in the car, exercise, and go on the bike. I wasn't able to complete 1 book in a whole year but with audiobooks, I was able to finish 6 books and 8 more books close to average of 40%

  7. 1

    Congratulations on you success. Would you mind sharing the book that you read?

    1. 1

      To answer this question, I checked my audiobooks library and wow there are 14 books I bought and completed 6 all the way through. The ones that stand out are

      • 7 Day Startup by Dan Norris (he gives what's important and not important when building a startup quickly)
      • The Lean Startup (learned not to assume stuff and validate as quickly as possible.)
      • Traction - how any startup can achieve explosive customer growth (there are some books on traction but specifically traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares helped me learn there are almost 22 channels that you can explore. This is a must book for people experimenting channels)

      FYI: I buy only audiobooks because it's really easy for me to listen than read. I listen to them in the shower, in the car, exercise, and go on the bike. I wasn't able to complete 1 book in a whole year but with audiobooks, I was able to finish 6 books and 8 more books close to the average of 40%

  8. 1

    hey, noob question.

    how did you put a link to another post in the word "story"? trying doing it, but not able to..

    1. 1

      Yeah sure, the input box allows you to put markdown content. For example, you can use this website to write your post and then paste the markdown. or like the image below
      https://ibb.co/yWWFRyP

      To make it easier, I write everything in Notion and paste it directly here.

  9. 1

    Cool post, man. 🤌

  10. 1

    Congratulations @vijaytupakula!
    Sounds like a great general framework: launch quickly, do things manually, market a bit, market more if it gets validated and only optimize and automate when you have to. Well executed by you!

  11. 1

    I like the idea, wondering how would you collect address from link ? Can you provide a screenshot of how that sharable link looks like ?

    1. 4

      Thanks! I have added 2 links. First one shows up when you placed an order with us and then the second one is when you open the unique link
      https://ibb.co/TqYXMHV
      https://ibb.co/8NNYGVj

      1. 1

        Thanks vijay for quick reply. It's all clear now.

  12. 1

    congratulations, happy to hear about your success. I should definitely focus more on answers to questions that are related to my product.

  13. 1

    Congrats on all the success - appreciate the lessons learned

  14. 1

    Congrats @vijaytupakula! And thank you for sharing the story.

    1. 1

      Thank you! I am new to sharing stories but I felt good when I did. Will post more often.

  15. 1

    Thank you for sharing, you just gave me an idea on how to target the right people for my project

    1. 1

      Honestly, I am getting started with growth hacking stuff but glad I am able to help one :) feels like the first sale to me.

  16. 1

    What if you add a feature where I can select an occasion, add interests, sex, age, etc of the receiver and then provide some gift ideas into the mix?

    1. 1

      That's a good thought and would be a great addition in the future. For now, we are solely focusing on the problem where a person wants to gift but cannot ask address for privacy reasons and we still have a lot of plans to scale this without modifying how it works now :)

  17. 1

    Congratulations, and thank you for sharing your story.

    1. 1

      Thank you! and by the way, your bio looks really interesting. I love Self-driving cars. I own Tesla for almost 2 years and it still amazes me how the self-driving exists

      1. 1

        How was your experience with Tesla's Autopilot?

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