Spending $200 to earn $9

2 weeks ago, my wife (@danicapierce) and I launched our Instagram marketing tool, Hashtag Slayer on Beta List.

We paid $200 to skip the potential 2 month wait for a feature. If anyone else here is considering paying for a feature, I'm sharing our results here in hopes that it's helpful.

So, we paid 200 bucks...and what did we get for it?

Overall, BetaList has referred 222 unique visitors to our landing page.
The product stayed at the top of the page for a couple of days as a "trending startup".

Here's the website traffic referred by BetaList.com, day by day:

Dec 3 (launch day): 89 visitors
Dec 4: 42 visitors
Dec 5: 30
Dec 6: 13
Dec 7: 7
Dec 8: 10
Dec 9: 13
Dec 10: 4
Dec 11: 8
Dec 12: 5
Dec 13: 6
Dec 14: 7
Dec 15: 3
Dec 16: 5

This traffic resulted in 51 free trial sign-ups over the last two weeks:

Dec 3: 10
Dec 4: 7
Dec 5: 9
Dec 6: 2
Dec 7: 4
Dec 8: 3
Dec 9: 2
Dec 10: 4
Dec 11: 1
Dec 12: 1
Dec 13: 1
Dec 14: 2
Dec 15: 2
Dec 16:  3

But did anyone actually become a customer?

Yes!... two people.

Customer #1
Someone in our target demographic: an independent coach who brings in much of her work through Instagram. Great! Except, this coach knows my wife professionally, so I'll only half-count this one as validation.

Customer #2
This person isn't in our target demographic at all, and they're not someone we know either. Customer #2 runs an online marketplace in India. Not the kind of business I had in mind when building Hashtag Slayer, but I see this as a plus: someone who's never heard of us, and isn't in our target still saw enough value in the product to purchase. This shows me that there may be a wider audience than initially aimed towards, and if we can get the product in front of enough people, we should be able to at least make some passive income to supplement my freelancing.

Both customers used a coupon that gave them 50% off their first 2 months.

So - was it $200 well spent? I think so.

If both customers stick with us for a year, the revenue will be $198. Almost break even. Here's hoping.

Lessons learned from the experience

• Hashtag Slayer can be marketed to more than our target audience.

• You can never really test your product until you get it into the hands of real potential customers. Two things came up since this launch:
  - someone let me know that Hashtag Slayer didn't work with hashtags written in Cyrillic (it does now!)
  - and I also found that some people created such large collections of hashtags that they broke my app! It was a fun practice to improve my efficiency in database calls.

• This launch may just have been bad timing... for the past month, viewing recent posts from hashtags has been disabled on Instagram throughout the USA. So, while Americans signed up for Hashtag Slayer, none of them bought. It may have just been difficult for us to show value given the circumstances. I understand recent posts are beginning to be enabled again now.

What's next?

Next week, we'll be launching Hashtag Slayer on Product Hunt.

As we're preparing our marketing materials for the PH launch, I've got a question for you.

Which of these tag lines would you be more likely to click?

1. The struggle-free Instagram hashtag tool
2. Optimized Instagram hashtags to reach more clients with every post.

THE END

Thanks for reading! Do you think I'm right not to call this a failure, or am I completely crazy?

Either way, I hope this is helpful to anyone else here considering a similar feature.