Road to $1000 in 2 weeks - Launch and Conclusion

Howdy folks this is the final conclusion of my journey of validating, building and marketing a browser extension within 2 weeks.

Previous posts here:

• Day 1 - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/shash7s-road-to-1000-in-2-weeks-c642a2f991
• Day 2 - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/road-to-1000-in-2-weeks-day-2-2381dd37d9
• Day 3 - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/road-to-1000-in-2-weeks-day-3-a67f06e159
• Day 4 - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/road-to-1000-in-2-weeks-day-4-e3965285f0

Important stuff first - I earned $159 from 18 sales Proof

So obviously, I lost.

But wait, there's more. Around the day 3 mark I knew the absurdness of this challenge and made this comment in my notes.

So while I didn't reach my personal record of 20 sales, I got very close to it. Closing this down would be a shame.

What went right

• Charging for the product from day 1. Instead of making it free and turning it around in a few months time, by charging right off the gate I got a good idea of whether people would pay for it or not. Things get serious when money is involved.
• Marketing from the start. Before starting work on the project I built a landing page explaining what the product would do(hypothetically). This gave people a good idea of what to expect. As a bonus, I also set up a subscribe list and got 2 pre-orders in the process.
• Doing this all in 2 weeks time. As harsh as the deadline was, I'm glad I didn't waste more time working off random tangents. A 2 week deadline gave me a lazer like focus on working on the most important things.
• Not pushing enough features. As much as I would like to have added more features, I kept asking for more feedback from beta testers on what would they like to see before adding that feature in. The last thing I wanted was to build a fancy feature nobody would use.

What went wrong

• The project was way too technical. And I badly underestimated how much time it would take to build something like this. For those not in the known, I was juggling 4 different repos. The actual highlighter part was a webcomponent and it introduced some major friction in the process, not to mention the highligher part being quite complex itself. For a time constrained challenge like this, keep it simple.
• The launch was messed up in the first couple of hours because of PH. Here' the story - when I made the listing, the link was active. And since it was early morning in AU, I went to bed. After waking up, I got messages from my friend that they couldn't upvote. Turns out the listing got scheduled for next day. Which was fucking ridiculous. I contacted them via Intercom and they gave the lamest reply ever. Suffice to say, I will never use PH for initial product launches.
• On that note, big shoutout to all the peeps from IH, Twitter, Reddit and everyone else who supported the launch. By the end of next day, UnderlineMe was ranking at 7th place.
• I should've done more research on day one. While my research wasn't bad, I should've done a deep dive on how this tool helps my (hypothetical)audience do xyz better than my competitors. Or pick a different niche, preferable one where people are used to pay for something.
• The dynamics of it all. All my competitor products, no matter how bad their UI was or how clunky they are, were free products. In some ways, pushing for a paid product in a market of free ones was a ballsy move.

What next

• Since I got so few sales I'm re-evaluating my next steps.
• Over the next few days I'll be trying to get as much open ended feedback about my customers as possible.
• If I feel like I can't help them do xyz in the near future using this tool then I'll proceed with option 1.
• If I get a sense of direction where this project can go and there's a market for it, I'll go with option 2.

Option 1

• I refund all my customers, turn this into a free product and keep it on CWS, thus joining all other 'dead' highligher tools. Which would be ironic.

Option 2

• If I get some solid customer feedback, I can add more features and focus on a particular target market. I can give myself about a month to turn this into an actual $1000.

Option 2 has been selected. I got heaps of feedback from users, plus some of them are already using this for mission critical stuff.

Right now I'm gathering feedback and adding features based on the feedback. I'm gonna keep iterating in quick 4 day bursts.

In the end, making an app and selling it is the easy part. Building a business on top of it is the hard part.

And that's something I want to find out in the next few months.

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Thus concludes this 2 weeks long project.

Bonus section. During the build, I needed these things to simplify my processes. Sounds like a good challenge for any up-coming indiehacker.

• A better way to manage browser downloads. I use downloads-router but would be good if it came with a page showing the downloads in a single place and aggregrating them via data, content type, etc. I would pay 5-10 bucks for this
• A server side analytics solution. I'm using nucleus but its not really meant for server side. All those new privacy-friendly analytics don't support server side events. I would pay a 3-5 bucks a month for this.

Lastly, if you found this case study interesting and are on the fence about entrepreneurship, I highly recommend setting a tight deadline for yourself and building something of your own.