The right approach to start earning $1000 per month?
I have been working on my side projects for over a year now. In this process I published three mobile apps on the App Store and recently have also been working on a portfolio + blog like website for myself. However I haven't had much success in any of these ventures and I seem to notice some patterns in my failures.
One of the things I've realized is that I need some small and quick wins to keep myself patient and composed in my decision-making. And I also think that instead of taking on a big project which would needs months of development and marketing to start seeing the results I should probably focus on creating a set of small products for now which can be built and released quickly to the market to start earning some revenue.
I was in fact applying this approach while working on my last micro project where I set myself a one-day deadline to get 100 users to whatever product I created. And the approach seemed to work wonderfully for me as I realized that I got more visitors from that one day of work creating and setting up a blogging platform and writing a blog article, than what I got from the lifetime of one of the apps I had built which had taken much longer to build. This approach of treating a small time box such as a day or a week as the maximum limit of all the time I had to reach a goal (may the metric be sales revenue, number of sign ups, number of visitors and so on) suites me very well. It's a bit like how I would learn so much in a subject the day before exam whereas if I were to study for the same test two weeks earlier then I'd be lost trying to find the perfect material to study, or write elaborate notes, or just lack the motivation or discipline to get any work done, while the urgency of a very short deadline leads me to get better results.
So I was thinking of continuing with this framework and give myself a week's time to earn $5 in revenue for example from a new product I was gonna create. But when I try to think in this fashion I also start being too skeptical of the time a project would take and start pushing away my ideas because they'd take too long to finish. This impatience might also be due to the fact that over the years I probably have a dozen projects which are half complete but were never released or finished, and also because I've spent a lot of time in the previous year working on my side projects but I haven't got much return from that.
So I was wondering what would be the best kinds of products I could build right now if I wanted to get some small wins in a small time frame, say a month at most. I've been thinking of creating Shopify apps, Wordpress plugins, publishing another mobile app, creating a small web app or a SaaS product. Which would be the best option for someone looking only to earn a relatively small profit in as efficient a manner as possible, and what kind of specific product might be the best option for me to build?
I'd greatly appreciate any suggestions from my fellow indie hackers!
Isn't there strong emphasis in this forum on testing your ideas before implementing them?
Why not make a simple landing page with analytics for your project to test interest?
The more I think about this: statistically it's so improbable that your projects will turn out to be profitable.
I would try to make sure there is a clear interest from users before writing single line of code.
Yeah that makes perfect sense and I've been trying to adopt as much of the "lean startup" approach as I can in my projects. Though what would you suggest is the right measurement to decide whether one should carry on with an idea or drop it? Suppose I have a landing page which clearly gives an overview of what kind of product I'm creating and also have an email subscription form. How much percent of subscription conversion should be the threshold for example? I don't want you to answer me these but I'd appreciate if you could point me out some resources on the internet where I can learn about this aspect of analytics. I'm sorry if I'm coming off as a lazy person not willing to Google things up but I'm fairly new to the analytics aspects and don't know what and where exactly to look for.
This. My gut feeling tells me this is not an absolute number, but more like a percentage based on traffic generated and sign ups.
I am struggling with this as well. Had two landingpages, one with 1000 visitors and 50 signups. Another one with 3000 visitors and 200 signups.
But both projects had zero conversion into paid customers. Even tried to grandfather the early birds into free accounts and asked for creditcards for optional upgrades and dirtcheap unlimited accounts. Zero response... ;(
So, this leaves the question intact. How many signups do you need to feel comfortable building the product?
Rather than start on another half finished project, focus your efforts on pushing the most promising existing project closer to success.
If you don't know which is closest, focus on figuring that out first, then push it at step 2.
One revenue making project is better than 10 ideas, I am fully aware from both sides of the table, been guilty of similar approach to yours in the past too!
I understand that and in fact that's what I'd been planning to do. However the most promising product that I currently has was laid out over a year and a half ago and compared to now I knew much less back then. For starters I made the mistake of picking up a niche in which I personally had no interest and now the lack of domain knowledge has become a big issue in growing that project. Also the niche itself is of a very small size and in spite of a lot of marketing effort I've been unable to take the market response to the next gear, whereas I was able to get much better responses for some other ideas I worked in the past.
All this has led me to think that I should just let this project be and start a new project. Already started working on a new project and hopefully I'm gonna stick this time around.
One solution would be to instead of trying to make money. Spend money to get users and if they like your products then your on to something. Create value first. If you want to earn $5 per week. Spend that in a channel that will allow you to get more users.
What are the best ways for it in your opinion? Using an ad network? Approaching Instagram or YouTube influencers in relevant fields? What other channels should I be looking at? I'm kind of new to marketing and have only started reading up on it leisurely in the last couple of months.
I can tell you what i plan to do when I reach that stage it may or may not work/for you. Contribute to communities (free) make sure your profile is update to date. Plug your application when you can. This is just to see how it goes. Then you used the paid mediums which i don't know much about yet.
@berk If you want to explore the possibility of re-energizing your past/ existing projects, let's have a chat on skype or Telegram. DM me if it sounds interesting.