This is my 4th attempt at a micro-SaaS

Hey Indie Hackers!

Welp, the code is done. I've deployed the beta. I've sent the link to testers. I've warmed up the Jsfxr Pro launch list. This little sound effects generator is ready to roll.

This is my 4th time around the round-about. It's my 4th time building a micro-SaaS from scratch to completion and then shipping. I learned a lot from the first three attempts, and from various other projects, and I think this one has a real chance at becoming a sustainable business.

My business hypothesis for this project is simple: eyeballs == $$$. I finally got this simple fact through my thick engineering skull: if nobody sees your thing, nobody will buy your thing. So many indie hackers struggle with this. We focus on the building and hand-wave away the distribution and marketing plan. Then when the code is done we move on to the next thing without even telling anybody about what we made. That's insane!

One simple metric helped me understand the impact of eyeballs (i.e. marketing): revenue-per-visitor. One day I gathered together all the stats from the different things I've made and I worked out this number for each project. All I had to do was divide the total revenue for each project by the total number of visits to that project's page.

The results varied wildly. The games I made had the lowest revenue per visitor. For the games to be sustainable I would have to get a huge number of eyeballs on them. One of my other micro-SaaS projects had a very good revenue-per-visitor number, but the problem was the visitor number was low. In the sweet spot were my music and audio apps. They have a reasonable revenue-per-visitor and just enough visitors to be making a steady bit of side income.

Once you know the revenue per visitor you realize there are two ways of increasing total revenue. You can either increase the ratio, so you get more revenue for each visitor, or you can increase the total number of visitors. Increasing the ratio is generally done by optimizing conversions and pricing. Increasing the visitors comes down to marketing.

With Jsfxr Pro I am going for the latter strategy. I am focusing on the denominator, the "per visitor" part. I run a free version of Jsfxr at https://sfxr.me which gets more than ten thousand hits per month. A lot of those visitors come from search. My basic hypothesis is that with a denominator that high and a Pro product that is at least as good as my previous audio apps, I should see higher revenue. Basically, the distribution channel is already flooded with visitors and I am just inserting a Pro product into the stream.

I'm launching in a few days, so let's see how it goes. The site is in beta right now and I have sent the link out to testers. Once final beta testing is done I'll be launching and will post an update here. I'm excited to see if my hypothesis pans out!

Thanks for reading. 🙏