LINQ Me Up

I was working one evening on LINQ Me Up, and pondered while looking at Paddle's dashboard regarding my subscribers and one-time credit purchase sales.

I noticed a percentage pausing their monthly subscription and then reactivating it after one or two months. On a nice podcast (Startups for the rest of us by Rob Walling) I listen to from time-to-time, a relevant suggestion was made, that providing a yearly subscription will give your users more value for less money, prevent them from pondering about keeping their subscription (as it's paid for an entire year), and provides more cash up-front.

Thinking this might be a good match, I decided to add both a yearly subscription, and the possibility and separate UI visualization for upgrading to a yearly subscription for users that are already active on a monthly sub.

This, along with some fixes and upgrades under the hood, makes me wonder if the value will be enough for users (most likely, users from higher income regions) to buy a yearly plan.

Fun to figure out how to make the flow UI-wise, and with Laravel Cashier utilizing the Paddle payment platform.

Let's see if the (two months) cheaper subscription (compared to subscribing monthly) will make it easier for .Net developers to start using LINQ Me Up

I've been AFK for 3.5 weeks because of vacation with my family to campings across Europe. Loved the offline time, and I've seen some credit packages being sold for my micro-saas (LINQ Me Up)[www.linqmeup.com] and a couple more people buying subscriptions.

MRR growing

A week ago, my MRR has grown up to $19 MRR, making it just profitable (Digital Ocean taking about $12 per month, AI API calls costing me about $4 per month, and couple of bucks for Carrd site).

Outreach leading to nothing

I sent a short email asking for feedback, ideas, troubles, etc. to everyone that has ever bought credits or a sub, but no response. It seems hard to get people telling what they like or don't.

Beneath the generated/converted LINQ code response, people can star the outcome (1-5 stars where 5 is super, 1 is bad) and the average score (all-time) is now around 3,7 so not too bad. Some people think the service is good, others don't.

Affiliate linking was added, but it hasn't given any results for now (besides a couple of clicks). I still think it's a nice building block to use for other projects

Should I sell my micro-saas, could I even?

I've been thinking about this questions since I was AFK last month.
I have a micro-saas that learned me a lot, and gave me a nice starting ground to create other products with.

What's sellable about LINQ Me Up:

• Over 1500 validated accounts
• $19MRR on 4 subscribers, and a couple of credit sales per month
• Running on digital ocean on the App platform
• pushing to master updates the instance, hot-swappable without user noticing
• It's built on Laravel (updated to 10), and neatly coded
• It has great micro-saas features, like: authentication, accounts with email validation, forgotten passwords, Ads management added, star-ranking, slide showing resources (useful for affiliate product links, own content blogs, ...)
• Clean and easy menu and page structure
• All the plumbing is ready for basic micro-saas stuff so you can pick it up and try to scale it OR make something else from it.

Let me know what you think: is this something I could sell? How would I determine pricing? (thinking hours invested?)

After being distracted with other things, I regained my focus on linqmeup.com, and found out that since 2 weeks, my referral system (share a unique link as a user, and if someone subscribes you gain free credits) was used over 10 times.

I created some queries on my db to find out metrics like:

• amount of user(account)s registering per week
• cost per user
• amount of conversions

It appears that my weekly gain of users is now about >80. Not many people pay for my service, but there is a need as i sold my first bundle for (one-time) conversion credits and got a second person to buy a monthly subscription.

There are a lot (!) of gmail accounts being used and (fiddling with chatgpt) I notice 1-3 people registering for a second time, and some fake (temp) emails being used.

Right now, I'm going to let this go, and focus on growing the number of users and finding out what is missing for the 99% (what would they need before buying into this).

The way this is going, I hope to see 1000+ registered emails by the end of June and hopefully the numbers game will increase the amount of paying people.

This is a fun ride though, and I am glad that I finally got traction (SEO, referral, my content online is being picked up).

Still a lot of people from countries like India, Iran, Vietnam, etc. I hope that the referral system will become more used than fake emails and that this will lead to more quality leads.

Not a profitable thing yet, but there is a glimpse of possibility here.

I'll post an update on the next twist of this awesome learning path ahead!

Here we are, after shipping linqmeup.com freshly at the start of 2023, I've now retrieved a steady growing curve of about 5-7 users per week. I've hit the 100 mark last week, and only one person purchased a subscription.

Adding a referral link program that earns users free credits didn't cut it. I've noticed people from Africa, Iran, India and more registering for an account and using the free credits at start. Only to stop using the product after....

... unless... there are several weird Gmail, and some temporary email addresses being used to register people.

It seems my product is interesting and usable, just not enough to pay for it.

This makes it not viable for me at the current state.

i've been wondering: are there any fellow indie hackers that have good experiences from adding ads, or any other way of monetizing their service in this kind of situation?

I'd really love to get some insights on what is good to do at this point. I love the growth, but when it's only gaining in cost, not in income, this will grow towards its own end within the near future.

Code Hard, Ship Harder 🔥

I've gone through a lot of steps for linqmeup.com the past two months..ie:

• working on pricing
• SEO
• adding starring feedback
• adding free credits after registering
• playing with the amount of free credits
• adding referral url functionality to gain credits by sharing

And now (April 14th) I've finally got my first paying customer. The customer used a test gmail account and paused the subscription, but a subscription was purchased nevertheless!.

A small step for my wallet, but a large step for my mindset.
If 1 out of 69 registered users purchases the product, I might gain more.

Even fixed a bug for the person, and got my first actual user response. So, although slowly, my curve is going up.

And another experience: breaking the zero income barrier!

Code Hard, Ship Harder 🔥

As some might have read on this tweet, 31th of March was my deadline to get people converting into buying credits or a subscription.

As this didn't happen, I decided to look at one thing I was interested in; the composition of my user base. Filtering out the disposable email accounts that got through the immense filter list, the real users appear to be mostly from lower income countries.

So I decided to lower the credits pricing to $0,25 a pop, and the subscription to $4.99.

One interesting thing I have left to try (and learn from by implementing it) is a referral system. Instead of using easy existing services that make you pay for using them, I decided to follow some online guidance on how to implement this myself.

I'm gambling on the fact that the people that HAVE found and used LINQ Me Up and don't want to pay, might find it useful enough to share it when they get free usage credits from sharing.

Thus letting them spread the word for me, and with a large user base, I tend to find people who have enough value to pay for my SaaS.

Let's find out soon. I'll share an update when the feature goes life and how it goes.

Today I reached my deadline for my micro Saas linqmeup.com. I have added free credits, added more and lowered the number for new registered people.I’ve reached out - zero response.

I’ve added star ⭐️ ratings only got 4 ratings (3 5/5 and one 3⭐️). I’ve added functionality. Even got people coming back using their free credits. So I know there IS a usecase. But zero conversion (both credits and subscription).

Even lowered my prices since many users were from low income regions. No dice 🎲.

I think I’ll send a mail next Monday stating that I’d love to hear feedback and/or provide an offer else im going to leave the tool on auto pilot as it isn’t viable to keep spending time.

it’s probably something nice to have but not worth asking fund for or just paying up. And I do understand. I’ve even using cool Saas too… 👇🏻

Any tips or thoughts from you are appreciated as always😁.

Learned a tonne from building this little project so that’s a win for sure.

I even get it when paying for Saas might feel like damn, can’t put money in that for now. I had a similar experience with awesome Saas services like @sidebird_io that works so great, but I just didn’t have funding to pay up for a sub free trial. But the least one can do is giving a shout out or a review or give feedback.

Any tips or thoughts from you are appreciated as always😁.

Learned a tonne from building this little project so that’s a win for sure. Also having building blocks and routine are golden.

I’ll give it a go on Monday and elseautopilot.
#buildinpublic #developer #linqmeup

Shoutout to all the people who supported and used linqmeup.com. This journey is awesome! #microsaas @IndieHackers @ProductHunt, and @wip

Code Hard, Ship Harder 🔥🔥

I've given myself until 31th of March get a paying user for linqmeup.com.

Until that deadline comes, I'll be communicating about it, finding & reaching out to potential users and asking users (currently, about 15 people actively tried it using free credits) for feedback.

Zero response
What's hard, is that nobody responds to my enquiries. Which I understand, as time is valuable. So I'm guessing that the value of the product isn't even enough to spend a few minutes giving me input to improve it.

That's why I put the deadline in place.

Tweaking features
I've been adding:

• output scoring for users (give 1 to 5 stars to indicate if it was good)
• anonymous mail filter to prevent accounts from mailinator.com and alike to be used (for security and preventing misuse)
• option to choos method- or query syntax (I've had a bit of response on Twitter, and one response indicated that option would be nice to have).

Also, I'll probably add an option to switch between C# and Visual basic code, and I am checking out some basic implementation to let users get credits when they bring in active referrals...

Concluding
It is hard to find out nobody is converting (not even buying a single credit) but I find myself not emotionally down.

If this doesn't work out, I'll have the building blocks to create another project fast, and I've learned a lot about shipping and on how to quickly iterate features using push-n-deploy.

Off we go