$12k+ sales/$1.6k MRR 2 weeks after subs launch 🥳

2 weeks ago I pushed the button to put our Frontend Mentor PRO subscription offering live.

It was a huge moment for me, as it's taken 2 years of work to get to this point. I decided to go against the conventional (and entirely logical) IH advice of getting revenue early on. Instead, I kept up contract work on the side while I built a community around the Frontend Mentor concept. The plan was to then find out exactly what the community needed before realising a business model.

Two weeks on and the numbers are encouraging! We've hit $1.6k MRR on $12.3k of sales from 284 subscribers.

It feels great to know that I haven't been entirely crazy all this time and that there might really be something here from a business perspective!

I thought I'd share a few things about the launch that went well and a few things I would improve if I could have my time again.

Taking the time to do the research

As I mentioned above, the first idea for Frontend Mentor came to me 2 years ago. During that time I've been talking to members of the community, running surveys, gathering feedback and iterating the platform.

By the turn of the year I had a good idea of what a valuable MVP would look like for the subscriptions. But instead of diving straight in I tested the water with one-off purchases of the design files for the challenges and premium challenges. The premium challenges are designed to be showstopper portfolio pieces to help people in their job hunt.

That validated that people would pay for these items individually. I also started getting a lot of requests to simplify everything with a subscription, which gave me even more confidence.

Taking the time to do the research has allowed me to monetise in a way that seems naturally with what the community need. If I had rushed it I could have easily come out with much weaker offerings that didn't align with the goals of the platform.

Building interest

I was consistently talking about the subscription launch with the community a good 3 months before the launch. This built up a lot of interest. One thing I didn't do was collect emails specifically for the subscriptions launch. This is something I could have easily done and I'm sure it would have led to more sales.

However, I was consistently talking about the progress we were making in our bi-weekly newsletter that goes out to 7k+ subscribers.

Lack of a pre-sale option

Following on from not creating an email list, we also didn't offer a pre-sale option. We didn't do this due to a lack of a hard release date. In hindsight, we should have set a release date that gave us some wiggle room and had a pre-sale.

Lots of people were asking about it and there were a number of people that were worried they'd miss the Super Early Bird batch for our launch discount.

Having a pre-sale with the Super Early Bird discount would have put everyone's mind at rest and would have allowed me to drum up sales from a much earlier date.

Not using a time-based launch discount

I decided to offer two tiers of discount at the beginning, but they would be numbers-based instead of time-based.

I split the first 500 subscribers into Super Early Bird (first 250) and Early Bird (second 250). A much better option would have been a pre-sale with the large discount and a time-based smaller discount immediately after launch.

As it is, we're still offering Early Bird discounts as we haven't gone through the first 500 subscribers! I don't see this as a huge problem in the grand scheme of things. But I'm sure our numbers would be bigger by now with Super Early Bird pre-sales mixed with a 3 day (for example) Early Bird discount.

The lack of a pre-sale option also led to a flood of people hitting the /pro page immediately after launch, which took its toll on our servers. We also temporarily got blocked by Chargebee because there were too many requests going to their servers! So it was a bit of a manic launch when it could have been much calmer.

---

All-in-all I'd put this in the column of "successful launch" based on my expectations.

There have been 10 refund requests out of 284 subscribers, which isn't great, but I'm sure it's to be expected on a first version.

Now the hard work really begins of serving our PRO subscribers' needs and evolving the offering!