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40 Comments

$10,000 revenue

Over the weekend I shared that we had our first subscription customer churn, but this morning I woke up to find we had just hit $10,000 in revenue (by 35 cents hah)!

Leave Me Alone will be a year old at the end of next month. It's been a really long and slow journey to spread the word about our service, but I think people are finally starting to share outside of our bubble!

Last month and this month have been crazy, and will probably end up being outliers on the revenue graph since we had a load of big boosts in coverage when we were featured in Lifehacker, launched v2.0, and I was on the IH podcast.

It would be absolutely incredible if we could reach $12k by 29th November - averaging $1k a month for our first year. I'll keep you posted!

For our next move I have just finished creating landing pages targeting searches for alternatives to our competitors (thanks @harrydry for the excellent marketing tip) - these will go live in the next few days and hopefully we'll see some more organic traffic for "Alternative to Unroll.Me" etc.

Something else I'm going to focus on is customer engagement. We have used Intercom in the past to automate messages to customers who signup but don't convert etc, but their privacy values do not align with ours (they track the shit outta everyone). I am going to write some emails for various events like this, and we'll be sending them ourselves - manually at first, and then automated with a cron, to hopefully get some feedback on some pain points users are experiencing!

A lot of you have been asking for me to share more about how we built Leave Me Alone, the struggles, and how we have been making our money - there's always stuff on [our blog] but I also sat down and wrote 6,000 words for StarterStory.com (thanks for having me @patwalls), which will be going live on Thursday (24th Oct)!

  1. 4

    Congrats! So awesome! Crazy achievement as an indie hacker!

  2. 3

    Is it $10k MRR or what?

    1. 1

      Yup Josh is right, total revenue since we started Leave Me Alone in November 2018 :)

  3. 3

    Congrats Danielle!

    I think SEO will be your biggest driver of growth.

    1. 1

      I hope so! I am slowly seeing more impressions and clicks on the Google Search Console - it will be interesting to see if my new landing pages help. We have a couple of blog posts that rank quite well for alternative to 'x' searches!

    2. 1

      Really? What kind of search keywords?

  4. 3

    I think you guys could reach $100k in mid-2020. Congratulations!

  5. 3

    Congrats Danielle, This is amazing progress! Leave Me Alone looks great and it's something I'll definitely need to look into getting in the future with all the marketing emails I get.

    1. 2

      We can definitely help with that Jason! Let me know if you have any questions :)

  6. 2

    Congrats Danielle! That's a huge milestone :)

  7. 2

    Congrats Danielle and James! You both are big inspirations to me, and happy to call friends. Keep up the great work!

  8. 2

    Congrats! I'm so excited to hear your journey to reach financial success :)

  9. 1

    Great to hear you ditched Intercom :D

  10. 1

    Congratulations on the milestone! By the way, just heard the episode of the Indie Hackers podcast with you on it. Was inspired and motivated. Keep up the hard work!

    1. 1

      That's incredible to hear! Thank you so much for listening ☺️

  11. 1

    Awesome! Keep going!

  12. 1

    Great news and congrats! :D

  13. 1

    Hi Danielle, I am a fan of yours. Seriously I have almost 90K unread emails. lol

    1. 1

      Woah that's a lot! Did you use Leave Me Alone yet? 😅

  14. 1

    Sweet! Great job!

    I have a complementary feature idea for you that I think would fit well. Let me know if you're interested.

      1. 1

        Remember Google Inbox? The only reason I'd use it was to clean up my inbox. It did an awesome job organizing and grouping emails visually to I could just it an "Archive" button. i.e. calendar reminders, emails from the same person... not sure I remember all of the ways it grouped them. Aside from me hitting the "Archive" button on a group, it didn't materially change anything in my inbox.

        I wouldn't say it's one-time use, but more like occasional use. Every couple of months I just use it to help me widdle down the inbox.

        I still have that need and would pay some credits for it in your model....

        Anyway. Feel free to ignore the request, sock it away somewhere. In startups, it's best to focus on what's working and continue to double down. GL and keep it up!

        1. 2

          We do have plans to add an option to delete or archive unsubscribed emails on our roadmap. But we can't provide an archive or delete email button at the moment, since that would require a change to the email provider permissions we ask for, and changing these isn't possible right now.

          Plus this would be for subscription emails only, not a general inbox cleanup.

          If you're looking for a Google inbox replacement check out Darwin Mail by @joeytawadrous

          1. 2

            Cool thanks for the suggestion, may check it out.

            1. 1

              Let me know if you have any questions!

          2. 1

            Thank you so much for the mention, Dani :)

            I really appreciate it!!.. and a HUGE CONGRATS to your first $10,000 in sales :D

  15. 1

    Well done! I've been following you guys for a while now, and your growth and success has been an inspiration!

    1. 1

      Thanks Charles :) it makes me really happy to hear this!

  16. 1

    Congrats Danielle! Big milestone. And thanks for the mention. Looking forward to reading the blog on Thursday

    1. 1

      You're welcome :) you've given me lots of ideas to improve our marketing strategies, I am happy to recommend you!

  17. 1

    Congrats Danielle!
    Leave Me Alone looks awesome. And 10k milestone is great thing.
    Hope you will reach 12k until 29th November. I guess Starter Story give you some boost for this.

    I like your pricing page^^

    1. 1

      I hope so too! Starter Story may help a bit too, fingers crossed :)

      And thank you! Did you use the credit estimator?

  18. 2

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    1. 1

      We already support more than Gmail, you can connect all Microsoft accounts, Fastmail, iCloud etc

      What growth hacks did you have in mind?

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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