My SaaS was featured in a prominent newsletter and I had my best day of sales by a mile
About two months ago, I launched Modern Serial, a tool for reading classic books as Substack-style email newsletters.
The initial reception was warm and I sold a handful of books. I chalked this up as a success! I did this project to learn Python, read more myself, and get experience building an entire SaaS product end-to-end, so the fact that anyone wanted to pay me for it at all was exciting!
Besides posting on Twitter a couple of times, the only "marketing" I did was a single post on Hacker News, which made it to the second page of HN and drove a good number of people to the site.
Since the HN post, there's been a steady trickle of sales—between 0 and 5 per day. Encouraging, but nothing to write home about.
Fast forward to yesterday. I wake up, check my phone, and see that I've sold 73 books since falling asleep. Overnight, my lifetime sales have tripled.
That's when I learn I've been featured in the Morning Brew, a daily newsletter with over 4 million subscribers.
This was a wild black swan event, so I figured I'd give y'all a look behind the scenes, sharing a few of my numbers and lessons learned.
Stats from the day
Altogether, being featured in the Morning Brew led to 125 sales, for a total of $994.52 in revenue.
I got 50k total pageviews from 21k unique visitors. About 2/3 of those visitors looked at the landing page and then immediately left the site.
I received 25 support emails, mostly folks asking for help with their passwords, requesting features, or providing feedback about the site.
Of the 206 people who clicked "Sign up" and made it to my checkout screen, only 125 completed their purchase. I'm very curious why 40% of people are abandoning their carts, and hope I can find ways to improve this stat in particular.
Lessons learned
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There's value in launching a project, even if you're lazy about marketing. Because once you've released your project, there's always the possibility that someone will discover it, share it with millions of people, and then drive a bunch of traffic to your site out of nowhere.
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People actually want to buy this thing I made. Maybe foolish, but I thought this project was so esoteric that it could never make much money. However, about 0.5% of the people who visited my site ended up buying a book. If I can improve that conversion rate and drive more people to the site...maybe this could be an actual business?
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There are some consistent pain points that I need to iron out. I got so many emails asking, "How do I sign up?" because people didn't realize that you create an account by purchasing a book. Several people also told me they were frozen with decision fatigue when trying to pick what book to buy. Takeaway: I need to improve my sign-up flow and make a better UI for book discovery.
I have no idea how the folks at Morning Brew discovered my site, but I'm happy they did, and I'm determined to make the best out of this random stroke of luck.
Oh and by the way, if Modern Serial sounds like something you'd like, I encourage you to take a look. And if you have any feedback, feel free to leave it in the comments!
Congrats, and really cool idea! Regarding the signup flow and “analysis paralysis”, I wonder if an Audible-style flow would work well - people sign-up and pay in one step, and then they receive a credit which they can exchange for a book. Then they can take all the time they would like to make their choice, and they’ve also already committed and paid. Anyway, nice work!
I've been mulling over your idea for a few days. I think this is a great idea. If people want to sign up, I could just take their card immediately and give them a credit to use in exchange for a book.
I need to work out the details but I think you're onto something.
Do you think you'll use this as a proof point that you should advertise in more newsletters?
Congrats on being featured in Morning Brew! Definitely an accomplishment.
I saw them incubate in 2017 at the University of Michigan and have read them nearly every day since.
Your tool is super cool and I bet English departments at universities would love it
Similar thing happened for us. Seems like buying newsletter ad placements could be a great course of action!
You're totally right! Newsletter readers are exactly my target market, so that definitely seems like it could be fruitful.
Now I just have to figure out how to buy newsletter ad placements!
Congrats Andrew!
Congrats, and really cool idea! Regarding the signup flow and “analysis paralysis”, I wonder if an Audible-style flow would work well - people sign-up and pay in one step, and then they receive a credit which they can exchange for a book. Then they can take all the time they would like to make their choice, and they’ve also already committed and paid. Anyway, nice work!
Very encouraging Andrew!! I love how well you've shared your experience. Best of luck with Modern Serial!!
Getting featured is amazing. I read this article about getting feature in news article maybe it will be helpful for you guys : Tips and Trick to get feature in news articles
You read article from your website?
Thanks for sharing, Andrew, and congrats!
It’s a great example that shows that building a valuable product can bring attention of prominent media and lead to sales even if you’re not a sales or marketing expert.
Would be interesting to understand how Morning Brew discovered you. Have you tried to reach out to their team? Since they already featured your product, there is likelihood that they’ll reply back.
Your product is quite interesting! Even after reading the first paragraph of this post I went to the website to check it out.
Yeah I should reach out to them, you're right.
Glad you like the idea!
Congratulations, that's amazing!
Congrats. I love the Idea man and you executed like a perfect pie!
Hey andrew. thanks for sharing this. I feel you and in fact I am kind of in the position that you were in right now where I have not yet had the feeling/validation of people 'actually' using the product that I am trying to build. THis is super cool!
Thank you for sharing, and glad my story resonated.
Keep going. I promise it's going to feel amazing as soon as you have that first user!
I was one of the randos who saw this on Morning Brew went through the flow of clicking Find a Book > {book} > Sign Up and then abandoned the site after seeing it redirected to a Stripe page.
The reason I left is because I was just clicking through out of curiosity rather than intending to buy. I hadn't seen an offering like this, so I wanted to see how you'd sell it. Naming the last button 'Sign Up' made me think that I'd just create an account and get on your email list. If the wording suggested purchasing intent (eg, 'Buy Your First Month'), I probably wouldn't have clicked it.
That said, I also like the concept and organically shared it with a friend the same day I found it on MB. I'm a little skeptical about how high churn is, but if you could keep getting traffic and expanding your offering then it might be NBD.
Congrats!
🔮💹✌️☀️
Thanks! What inspired you to create this project initially, and did you anticipate any of the reactions or results you've observed post-launch?
As a cart abandoner myself 2 reasons spring to mind. One is swapping devices to the one that has credit card details saved. The other is sometimes using the cart is the only way to tell what the price of something will be.
Thanks for sharing this insight. I hadn't thought of either of these, and I bet that does account for some of the cart abandons.
I do list the price on the book page, right above the button that takes people to their carts. However, if there's one thing I know about websites, it's that your users never read the text you think they're going to read. Maybe I should experiment with making the price even more prominent on the page before.
very inspiring!! Best of luck
nice to see a founder building his coding skills by building a SaaS product. Really inspiring. You said that you only uploaded tweets occasionally and a HackerNews post, how were you able to get a sale just from those uploads? Did you do anything else to directly influence sales? Seems that they just happened serendipitously
Glad you enjoyed the story!
Before this feature, I didn't do anything to get people's eyes on my site other than Tweet, share it on a few Slack groups that I'm part of, and post on Hacker News once. From there it has all just been word of mouth.
I have about 640 followers on Twitter FWIW. So not crazy reach there but usually I'll get at least some engagement on my posts.
Very inspiring. I asked because I'm on a similar trajectory. I've been working on two projects and if it weren't for being motivated to build something useful, I wouldn't have gotten far in my abilities. Now I'm at a point of trying to get signups to my landing page that's why I was curious. Still, it's wonderful to see you're getting traction. How long have you been getting customers for?