My side project earned 385$ & 25 customers in the last four months

Hey Guys,
I launched a side project - https://gum.co/aZmeh in the lockdown as I had some free time (Coz my agency business took a hit) & wanted to use my time wisely. Though the project didn’t earn me much but gave sufficient confidence to work on a future full-fledged project again. I thought of sharing my journey of what worked & what didn’t.

Choosing the project: As my agency business was down, I thought this would be the right time to try something new hence I zeroed down on creating an info product like an ebook. Out of all the skills & experience, I have the most experience on delivering value on Facebook Ads & hence the topic I zeroed down was on Facebook Ads Targeting. I wanted the topic to be niche & done well rather than a general broad topic which doesn’t go in-depth. Also, one more reason to choose a niche topic was publishing faster or else I lose motivation to complete it. I tried writing in but couldn’t so I left that idea & worked on creating webinar video from a PPT. Created a pre-order page so that I work towards a timeline of creating the content & recording a webinar.

Resources: Google Slides for content creation & Zoom for recording. That's it.

Launch: I launched it on the evening of 20th May & put up a tweet. Also, posted on Indie Hackers & slept. The best part was that I got the first purchase overnight from indie hacker & later in the afternoon again got a purchase from Indie hacker.

Channels I tried & worked

• Indie Hacker - Initial some purchases came from here
• Reddit: Got some purchases from commenting on Facebook audience related Reddit posts
• Personal Connections: Reached out personally through WhatsApp. Highest purchases from here till now.
• Twitter: Got good referrals, connections & customers from here
• Linkedin: Linkedin gets me a purchase every time I post about the course :D

Channels which didn’t work

• Hacker News: Just Got one purchase even after my friend posting it & me posting it as well
• Reddit Ads: Quite expensive, may have got one purchase but overall couldn’t track. I just spend around 25$ so can't rule it out completely
• Facebook Groups: Most of the groups didn’t allow to post & others it just didn’t work there
• Pinterest Guest Post: I worked with a guy on Fiverr who did a posting on his account with massive followers. Didn’t get any traffic though
• Others: Posted on some other websites like Sideprojectors, Instagram, Cold emailers, careermove, etc

All in all, good experience & a lot of takeaways. The most important takeaway I got from this experiment was that you need to BUILD AUDIENCE first & you can sell anything. I didn’t have much audience across channels & the sales could be better if I would have built some audience first.

I would love to take questions (If any). Also, pretty active on twitter, you can follow me here for further discussions - https://twitter.com/SaajJain

Cheers!