One small change that took us from $200 to $1,200/mo 🤩

Hey guys,

I'm Karthik, co-founder of LaunchPedia.

When we started LaunchPedia back in January,

Our plan was to build a content-rich website about Product Hunt launches and monetize it through sponsorships.

And the plan looked great on paper, but in reality, it was the biggest mistake we made 🤦‍♂️

Why?

Scaling a startup through sponsorships turns out to be super tough, especially when you quit your 9-5 and your savings are on line.

Because, to increase the number of sponsors or sponsorships, you need to keep getting more and more traffic to your site.

And getting traffic to your site is not a short-term task.

It can take months to get a significant increase in website traffic.

And we realized this only late 🫠

During our best month,
We were making just about $200/mo and we tried to increase them, with no luck.

With such unsustainable revenue and no more options left, we thought of just shelving LaunchPedia and building other ideas.

But before shelving it, we thought of building and selling digital products from LaunchPedia as one last try.

This is because,

We have already experience in building digital products and monetizing them.

So, in the next week, we wanted to test it and prepare a 1 month plan.

This was our plan

1. Bundle all our content into digital products
2. Build a funnel with free products
3. Do giveaways and build an audience
4. Launch a paid product and a productized service as an upsell

We did this for a month and

We made $1,200 from sales, clients, and donations from all our products and services. It worked. 🥳

So, what are we doing now?

After seeing the results we've got from this pivot, we’re repositioning LaunchPedia totally into a digital product store for founder/indie hackers that helps them launch their products.

Changes coming up this month

1. Build more funnels with free products
2. Build one paid product/service for each funnel
3. Turn the website into a digital product store.

Hoping the good run continues 🤞

So, if you're struggling to make money for a long time, it's better to try different monetization models before giving up.