The Heidorn Report

On January 17th I received an email from Gumroad, informing me that I was 1 out of 179 creators to gross more than $100,000 in 2020. I was blown away. I didn't realise it was such a small group of people.

Doing the math, I came to realise that this meant I was among the Top 1% for that year. Yikes!

Not sure if Gumroad realises it, but they made my day. It was one of the proudest moments of my life :)

In December I finally hit the $10k mark for the German report and almost $11k for both versions combined. The English report still only had about 30 subscribers, but hey, that was coming from 0 only 7 months prior.

2020 had been a really good year for me on Gumroad. However, I wasn't aware of HOW good it was.

Yay! Idea validated – sort of. Now had a paying subscriber and enough of a good reason to continue releasing new editions in English as well. The good thing was that I already had all the content. I just needed to translated and re-package it.

My English subscribers would slowly increase over the next couple of months.

Inspired by the success of the subscription, I realised that I have a fairly successful English blog in the same niche. I wasn't really using it much and figured it might be a good idea to direct traffic from there to an English version of the report.

So I translated the very first report and made it available for free as well. I also translated the 2nd edition, just in case someone signed up. That way I'd be able to give them more content right away.

I had ZERO English subscribers at the time.

Unlike the German report, this one was structured as a sequence. So everyone who subscribed would start with the 1st edition and work their way up. This also gave me some time to get organized.

One day I coincidentally bumped into one of my readers who referred to the report as "The Heidorn Report", named after my last name. In Germany it's not uncommon to refer to people you know simply by their last name.

I figured, if that's what people are calling it, what better way to give it a brand name that also strengthens my personal brand!

In line with what I had said at launch, I increased the monthly price to 15€ two weeks later. Just in time for the release of the 3rd edition of the Report.

By the end of the month I had reached 387 subscribers in total, grossing roughly $5,000 per month.

A month later I launched the subscription for the new report and gave preferential pricing at 10€/month to all founding subscribers.

It was a huge success and initially named "Merch Research & Strategy Guide".

I ended the month with 273 subscribers!

After spending 2 weeks working really hard on a prototype and testing out different types of content, I released this new baby to the world and it was received with open arms.

People love it. They had been longing for this type of content and especially for something in their native language.

I was talking to my business partner when he suggested that I think about creating a research and strategy report for our joint audience in the German speaking print-on-demand scene.

I figure, why not, especially since it combined 2 things that I really good at: Research and Design. I have a knack for visualizing information.

So I asked my audience whether they'd like me to create a report. And they said "Hell yes!.