Reached $500 in sales in 1 week with my new product! (no AI)
$500 is not A LOT but for a new project... hey! It's the Matthew Principle for us, I hope - or at least the first step.
I have to mention there's no AI in our product, so that's the 2nd anti-hype signal I'm sending you.
Context: we are an eSignature tool - think: DocuSign competitor
Background
We've built "in private" for some 8 months. While that goes against the common advice (and my natural predisposition too - my current $3.5k MRR startup was validated with some 20-30 pre-sales before we started building), it felt like a more sensible approach because:
- We're talking about eSigantures, legality, etc
- We didn't initially know what our unique angle is, but...
- The core product would've been the same regardless of our unique angle
So we went ahead. The second we decided what our unique angle would be (2 months ago), we turned lean and went about launching.
Which brings us to... today! We did soft launch recently
Pre-launching
Since...
- My brother and I (co-founders) are non-technical
- The product was being built
- We had those 8 months on our hands to... well... prepare
We've done this: we've built as much as we could for our future marketing.
P.S: We've even gotten 5 Wikipedia backlinks! Not that it would matter, but it might be a signal
Launching
We're still figuring this out. But so far we've made $500 in (disclaimer: lifetime deal) sales!
As others have pointed out in the past, selling LTDs is easier than selling subscriptions.
But I think we need that in order to accelerate the product - and then get up to speed with competitors, so we can apply our unique angle even more
I'm on Twitter here, if you want to tag long with the journey! 😸
Hey Daniel congrats on the success! I was wondering if you could expand a bit more on how you managed to get those first 500$?? Like how did you get those clients??
See other comments! Tyvm!
Lets tag broski! good luck
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Congratulation on your launch on your revenue!
That said, I believe someone on Reddit has already corrected you, you reached $500 in 8 months and 1 week, by your own admission. Let's not lie to each other, let's not engage in clickbait bullshit, let's not paint a rosy picture of how everything is good and cool, I cannot stress how I hate that.
It's been 1w since we sold anything. If we would've had smth for sale for 8 months, I wouldn't have posted this. Only turned the sales on recently
SO many questions!
But I'll start with the most obvious one:
You were building something that already existed, and you didn't have any unique angle. That's a recipe for failure, and so many startups failed because of that.
You already knew that your idea had to be validated, and yet you put 8 months into this project. What made you so sure you were going to succeed?
• Huge market. More here: https://www.highsignal.io/companies/making-200k-aged-25-startups/
• Confidence that we'll get SEO right, sooner or later. We can wait it out
• We aren't/weren't in a hurry
• We've initially had a unique angle, but realised that no matter what the angle is, the core product has to be the same. We're now starting to work on that unique angle we've initially had planned, now that the core product is close to being... at least shaped
Also worth noting: it was 8 months as well because initially we were... exploring. So I didn't have a specific launch date or anything like that. Very much countering common advice.
With the next product (CalHouse - https://www.usesignhouse.com/calendar) we're approaching it differently. Worked for 3 weeks, launching in 1-2 weeks something to test it out
Lmk what else I can answer!
How would you find users in a scalable way? I mean, having to sign documents is not something that defines people so you can't call it a "niche".
Congrats with the launch! This is a great result.
How big is your team? Just wondering how much man-huor it took to write and launch such a large amount of posts/pages/templates etc.
3 technical ppl (at one time there were only 2) building the app
While myself + my brother did all the posts/pages/etc. Man-hours... I don't know. We're the founders so... as much has we could!
Amazing @chdaniel. It's definitely a slog to get your first customers, but that's the case for pretty much all startups. Keep up the great work and I'd love to hear how you found your first customers.
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Really cool, I use Docusign (can't abandon it man, sorry. I'm not the one picking the tools to use) but I know that there are big companies like Adobe playing in this field, so mega-congrats!
You probably explain it somewhere, but why did you pick this market (and that competition)?
Hahah, no prob at all Matteo, we've got a long way to go
Yeah, I've explained in an interview why we've done that! https://www.highsignal.io/companies/making-200k-aged-25-startups/ (It's @petecodes newsletter who, funny enough, just commented below :) )
ha, thanks for the plug!
It's great to see that you've found success even without AI integration. Your approach to building the core product first and then finding the unique angle shows the importance of adaptability in the startup world.
Congrats man! Good to see this in a competitive space
Thanks a ton for the support Pete! You're the man
Hey Mathew,
Congratulation on your launch on your revenue!
That said, I believe someone on Reddit has already corrected you, you reached $500 in 8 months and 1 week, by your own admission. Let's not lie to each other, let's not engage in clickbait bullshit, let's not paint a rosy picture of how everything is good and cool, I cannot stress how I hate that.