🤔 Low-priced indie B2C businesses that work?
About 6 month ago, I wrote a post about how I managed to find my first users.
I build the MVP of worksheet.digital in December 2020. After that I didn't really work on the project except from my singular marketing effort in October 2021 and some occasional updates.
About 9 weeks ago, I decided to give the project more love and focus most of my working time (4 days a week) to improve and market the tool. I decided to split my time into [coding and marketing weeks].(https://codingweekmarketingweek.com/). Doing that really helped me to make progress and actually market the project. Something I always neglected. That gave me a lot of drive during the first 8 weeks. I was improving the product a lot and managed to increase traffic. Some people started mentioning and recommending the project, back-link to it from their homepages, and even create blog posts and YouTube videos about it (by people I didn't know and didn't incentivize to do so). I added the possibility to signup (before it worked without registration) and between 20-50 new users signed up every week (and still are). But…
… during the 9th week, I had a massive motivational low. The growth in usage I was hoping for didn't kick in, even though the summer holidays were over in two German states. Additionally, I realized that the market I am in is probably very difficult. I started working on adding a paid pro-plan (which I should have added when I built the MVP two year ago) and realized that my (German) competitors were charging extremely low prices (between €2.49 and €4.99 monthly, but only annual payment). If I charge the same amount, I am going to need at least 1,500 paying customers to have a decent income. It feels like a very hard path to choose, and I'm still very unsure if I want that.
However, there are some tools in that space, that manage to sustain and grow a business. And they only target the German market. Hence, I decided to try the following:
- Add a pro plan
- Stop building features
- Better understand what my users want to achieve
- Only build stuff that helps marketing (publicly sharing worksheets etc.)
- Translate the app to English
I set a deadline till the 15th October, I want to have 20 paying customers and see some growth and potential. Otherwise, I'm going to pivot or stop working on the project.
What do you think about markets with such low prices for indie hackers?
Do you have any examples of successful bootstrapped businesses in low price B2C markets?
