What I'm shipping: a $5 invite product, no ads, no subscription
Hey IH,
I'm bringing Lemonvite.com to Product Hunt on Monday. It's a digital invitations and RSVP product that's been live for a while. I've seen nice organic growth Thanks to some good old-fashioned SEO and what I believe is genuinely a great value proposition compared to the alternatives.
The whole thing is one flat fee: $5 per event. No ads on the invite, no marketing emails to guests, no subscription, no coins. I built it because every time I tried to send a real invite I had to choose between Evite plastering banner ads on my friend's wedding card or Paperless Post charging me $14 in "coins."
For the flat fee, users get ALL OF THE FEATURES that the competition considers "premium".
Not posting the PH link yet, just sharing the why. Back Monday with the launch.
Quick question on IH etiquette: Should I reply to this post or create a new one on Monday?
Happy to answer any questions you may have!
p.s. It would really help me if you were to RSVP to the launch event. Eating my own dog food. Haha. :)
RSVP Here: https://www.lemonvite.com/invite/-KEZMnaQ2cwQxvbR1wGzMONQiWDnZwIn
I will only send a single message to it on the event date asking people to take a few steps to help with promotion. Thank you!
The $5 isn't what stuck with me.
It's that most invitation products seem optimized around extracting more value from a single event, while you're treating the event itself as the entire transaction.
That feels like a surprisingly different bet for the category.
Yeah the feedback I got was that people liked the idea of paying one flat fee and getting everything they need. The fact that that flat fee is $5 is because it's a nice fair number.
The cost to me depends on how much AI is being used and how many guests messages are being sent to as well as updates, on average I think it's around $1.5 without UA.
I'm really hoping to grow this as organically as possible, so that I can compete the cost down. This is where the competition fails, they are competing on VC money paying for Google ads. So of course they have to monetize the hell out of everything.
The pricing is interesting, but I think the more revealing signal will be how users explain why they picked it.
Sometimes founders and customers end up telling very different stories about the same product.
That's fair and honestly, I don't know. Lemonvite is clean and simple. You go through the event creation wizard within minutes and you're done. e.g. I put in a lot of work to make it as simple as possible to add guests given that I don't have an app for native address book integration. It's just not as overwhelming and the experience is streamlined. So that might have been probably the largest contributor.
The price point is the conversion. If people feel like they got what they need quickly and the price point is fair, it seems like they convert.
So far, I'm seeing fairly decent conversion rates from users who actually show real intent.
The "honestly, I don't know" part is what I'd pay attention to.
A lot of products end up getting attributed to the wrong thing early on, especially when several changes happen at once.
Hard to untangle properly in a thread.
If you're curious, happy to send over a fuller thought — just drop your email.