My first $10 online!

A week ago, I launched my first info product and made my first $10 from a product online. I want to share my story so far, get some feedback and hopefully help others.

Until recently, I've always spent months and months building and polishing my products, perfecting them before sharing them with the world, only, nothing is ever perfect. The longest I spent on a product is like 5 years on and off. I did many other things during that time, but I never launched that product. If I had, who knows what could have been.

But recently I had a stroke of inspiration after taking the small bets course, and I decided to make a small bet. I've been planning to make a habit tracker for a long time, so I was looking for resources to help me develop the product, and I couldn't find any nice collections of these tools, and then I realised that I like curating and collecting, and I have a collection already. It could probably be useful for others trying to build their own products as well.

So I decided to make a small bet. I spent a little over a month curating the resources, building the landing page, refining the copy, collecting testimonials, etc. I decided to scale down my ambitions this time, hoping for just a single sale, and with a stretch goal of 10 sales. I decided, I'll build on top of small wins. I wanted to remove any barriers in my way from making these sales, so I decided to make the price something that can be a quick impulse buy, just $10.

Until now, I've always run these insane financial projections for my ideas, hoping to make 100s of thousands of dollars, and when your ambitions are that high, the effort scales accordingly, and there is more friction and uphill battle. What's good to make $100 is very different than what's good to make $100k.

I also realised, as a dev, I always get stuck in loops of trying to use cool tech, make the apps faster, improving my design, etc., and an info product provided the perfect alternative, that once ready, I couldn't avoid marketing by spending time on product even if I wanted to.

I am a perfectionist, and this has held me back. I decided to embrace imperfection. When I couldn't come up with a name, I went with the lowest effort thing possible. It's resources for makers, so maker-resources.com, with a dash! Logo and images on site were created by dall-e. I purposely left in some typos in places just to fight my perfectionism.

And you know what? Within 17 mins of launching on product hunt, I made a sale! I never made any money from the app I spent 5 years on, I never made any money on one I spent 5 months on, this was the lowest effort one so far, and I hit my initial goal so quickly! After my product went live on PH, my anxiety skyrocketed. Even after the sale, it took some time to come down. It's always difficult to put yourself out there, open yourself up to criticism, isn't it?

Now that I've done my first launch, and marketing is the only thing to do, I realise PH isn't enough, and my mind is working on ways I can get this in front of more people, thinking about, ok, I could write a blog to get some passive traffic, https://maker-resources.com/blog. So what kind of things would my potential audience be searching for? Once I set up a blog, I realised, to be listed on google, I need to do "SEO". I haven't really started on that, but I will be looking into it. I've sent some DMs to people on instagram and twitter (and I really hope I'm not being "spammy"). I've thought about running ads, and I am even fine losing money on each sale, that's the cost of learning. I'll submit my product to some relevant directories, that I am trying to find. I also want to be genuine. I will be writing more posts about my journey, and I'm happy to openly share details including numbers.

I have been wanting to become a full-time maker for many, many years now, and it feels really good to start making some progress finally.

I'll plug my product here, of course, it's https://maker-resources.com, it's a curated database of resources (more than 230 of them) I've collected over the 5+ years I've been building products. There's tools for product development, design, marketing, engineering, and everything in between. If you think this might be helpful for you, help me reach that stretch goal :).