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38 Comments

$4,034 in (Nocode) SaaS Preorders within 48 hours

It's 1:45 am in the early hours of Monday morning and I wanted to give up.

I was exhausted. Anxious. I had been working 14 days straight clocking in about 15+ hours on average per day. I’m hours from an early access + preorder launch and I didn't even know if my Stripe checkout was functional.

That was the morning of my launch. Not exactly healthy.

I got about 4 hours of (terrible) sleep that "night", woke up, fixed a few things on the website and said to myself "it's not perfect, but you've done your best".

After all, I'd already delayed the launch once. I couldn’t back out again.

So, at about 7 am I tweeted out my launch thread, posted my tweet in a few of my "Maker Mafia" communities, emailed a small waitlist and proceeded to wait.

After my Tweet thread started taking off and some initial sales from friends came in, it kinda went a bit viral - at least in some tech circles.

Because I’d previously delayed launch and pushed it off a few days, I hadn’t realised that I had committed to a meeting that morning at 10 am. The meeting lasted an hour and this is what I came home to...

It was a wild day. And the next day was pretty amazing too. I even landed the founder of Copy.ai, Chris Lu, as a customer and some companies with 200+ employees.

Here are my results from the 48 hour presell launch:

Revenue: $4034
Customers: 56

Early Access Waitlist: 139 people

Website Unique Visitors: 1,682
Launch Tweet Impressions: 44,552
Launch Tweet Engagement: 1,634
LinkedIn Post Engagement: 2,075

P.S. I’m a huge proponent of sleep. I don’t function very well without 8+ hours typically. However, I think there are times in life when a lack of balance is necessary for the short term. See these Tweets I wrote for more context.

  1. 6

    This is one of the most successful launches I've seen, you've done everything right. It was scarily easy and compelling to pre-pay... all the messaging was on point, even a personalised video message.

    This should be a playbook for all SaaS founders.

    1. 3

      Thank you very much for the kind words and support, Kieran!

  2. 3

    Congrats! Such an awesome launch. How did you figure out the need for this product. In hindsight is seems obvious, this is needed. But how did you discover the need?

    1. 2

      Hey Ondrej! Thank you! A few things on how I arrived at building Lanva:

      1. I love building in Bubble
      2. It was extremely challenging to build
      3. I used to experience these pain points in my last job a number of years ago
      4. I wanted to build a SaaS
      5. I saw some other products around that solved for some of these areas and so I wanted to wrap it up into one product
      1. 1

        Thanks for answering! I like how you start with Bubble. It's great when you find a tool that just inspires you to build :)

  3. 3

    Amazing to hear this side of the story, especially after such an epic Launch. Interested to hear that you wanted to throw in the towel! So glad you didn't. Amazing how things work out after sleep even if only a few hours. Agree with Kieren, one of the best Launches I have seen!

    1. 2

      Thanks, @leelaunches - you're the man! Glad it worked out as it did and I perservered. I'll have plenty more of that to come in the next few months haha

  4. 3

    This is huge mate !

    Do you use Bubble ? I find it a little bit risky to charge Lifetime payment with a no code. You have to pay monthly + videos need tons of space.

    How do you solve this issue?

    1. 2

      Thank you! But, great point @arturcookiejar. This is my go-to-market strategy, not my long-term strategy. There are certainly bills to pay :)

  5. 2

    Congrats @peps27! Lanva looks SO COOL and useful.

    Hope to see more details of your preparation for this launch (I believe you warm up people before launching?).

    Keep it up!

    1. 2

      Thank you so much Pablo.

      Over the last year and a half, I've just spent time in 2-3 communities really delivering value, being authentic and making friends. I think that paid dividends - although I didn't expect it. Find your mastermind or community and just be real.

      I did start talking about it publically in the week or so leading up to launch and "counting down" to the launch date.

  6. 2

    This looks sick, Alex. I've literally just bookmarked the page for future inspiration 🙌

    1. 1

      Thanks! Appreciate it.

  7. 2

    Nice launch! Could you elaborate on how did you created the tool with nocode? I'm really curious.

  8. 2

    I had the honor to have met you few days before your launch. Your countdown on twitter and your involvement with people were just brilliant to name a few of many things you did right. Excited to watch your journey with Lanva closely. Keep up the good work buddy.

    1. 1

      Ali! Thank you very much. Appreciate you :)

  9. 2

    Congrats on big success

  10. 2

    This is great story!! Congrats!!

    The video demo you have on the front page, is it available on YouTube? Cause YouTube also is great in spreading your word.

    Could you also share the distribution of traffic/onboarding from various social media sites & directly from your main site?

  11. 2

    Congrats on great pre-launch @peps27. Lanva as a solution is super effective for many creators and entrepreneurs . All the best for more bookings.

    1. 1

      Thank you very much for the kind words and support :)

    1. 1

      Thank you sooo much! Personal welcome video coming your way shortly :)

  12. 2

    Love how this story is unfolding. Congrats on the launch. Keep going.

    1. 1

      Thank you, Edmund! You know how much I appreciate you :)

  13. 2

    Congratulations for the achievement. May I askyou some questions?
    1)Did you #BuildInPublic? It seems you already have a strong waitlist and followers on twitter.
    2) How important do you consider was to have an audience at the moment of launching Lanva?
    3) What tips can you give us to build and audience?

    Thanks for your time
    PD: Nice purple background :)

    1. 1
      1. no. It took me 2.5-3 months to build. I knew it was going to be very complex to build and I didn't know when I'd be able to solve it so I didn't want to reveal my project before I knew it was even possible to build. I only had a waitlist of about 15 people that I collected from days before the launch. I started building in public close to launch and after.

      2. I hadn't really built up much of an audience. What I did do is be genuinely helpful to many people within a small number of indie / maker communities and I think that ended up coming back around when I asked them to help me share it. A lot even bought Lanva - which was amazing. So I'd say just be authentic, genuinely want to help people, build REAL connections (friends) and eventually when you have something, the same will often be returned to you.

      3. As mentioned above, I didn't start building an audience of people that I knew I was going to serve. I did have about 500 followers on Twitter but they were spread over many different interests.

      1. 1

        Thanks for taking the time to answer. I appreciate it.

  14. 2

    Just saw the tutorial video. Amazing idea and congrats. Is this what you used to program this SaaS and did you do it all by yourself?

    www.nocode.tech

  15. 2

    Great launch and the product looks really promising!!

    1. 1

      Thank you so much! :)

  16. 2

    It's been amazing to watch this unfold.

    Thanks for sharing and keep up the great work 🚀

    1. 2

      Thanks @dru_riley! You've been enormously helpful to get me to this spot. Can't wait to see where Lanva is in a couple of months.

  17. 1

    Wow this is so impressive. That's for sharing Alex! Wishing you all the best success.

  18. 1

    The pricing for this is madness :) Well done mate

  19. 2

    This comment was deleted 6 months ago.

    1. 2

      Thank you, Simon! Appreciate all the support and kind words!

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