ManyRequests
White label client portal for agencies
This morning we achieved our 2020 revenue goals!
We launched our software, ManyRequests on 1st of July (so 2.5 months ago) and here are the things we did for client acquisition:
-
Community. We started 2 years ago (long before our software was built) a community for agency owners called Productize.Community. Since 2 years we've shared content every day to help agency owners and freelancers learn how to productize their services.
-
Content/SEO. We run a blog and write about topics that our audience is likely to search on Google. This is long term but has brought a few customers already.
-
Direct sales. This one is short term but a good way to get customers is to reach out to them on LinkedIn. The idea here is to not be salesy, start conversations and build relationships.
-
Email marketing. Finally, members of our community + blog subscribe to our email list. We have an onboarding sequence and also send a weekly newsletter. Finally we also send a monthly product update. To grow that list we created free resources such as ebooks and a productize service database.
We just launched ManyRequests v2 last week (https://www.manyrequests.com) and here are a few stats so far:
• 100+ new trials in the first week (now averaging at 30 new trials/day)
• Several upgrades
• And $16428.22 in processed transactions on our platform (We integrate with Stripe)
The road is still long but we're on a good track!
Two years ago I started a small Facebook group for productized service business owners, with no real objectives in mind: Just sharing insightful content and examples of productized services I found.
The group was pretty dead for about a year in a half but I started investing more time in it back in July 2019.
It took 1.5 years to get to 1000 members, and then only 6 more months to get to 2000 members (around January 2020).
Fast forward to today: The group is really active and has 2360 members. I've pre-sold our SaaS there (ManyRequests) and made about $15,000 in revenue doing that.
I'll write a case study about my learnings and how to build a Facebook community and how it can be beneficial for your product / service. Let me know what you'd be interested to learn :)
Here is the link of the group for those interested: https://www.facebook.com/groups/192719694795609/
Early in July, Gabriel (@gabolecointer - my co-founder and CTO) and I had the idea to pre-sell a one-time fee access to ManyRequests, our SaaS, in order to fund the development costs.
We successfully did that! In total we got 60 customers (some customers bought more packages as they run several businesses) and we've given them special perks (such as access to a private mastermind, lifetime access to our SaaS, and future access to Wordpress themes to build their productized service / tech-enabled agency).
This was a fun experience and I will relate shortly more on how we did that.
We will spend those $8k on the following this:
- Developing an awesome product for productized services owners and agency owners
- Developing top notch Wordpress themes so you can have a turn key website for your service
- Server costs to ensure reliability and that we're always available
Let me know if you have any questions!
-
2
Great job! I do this periodically and its a great short term infusion of capital that can really help your bottom line. Havent seen any impact on MRR long term either. Closed out a $25K round last year one month
-
2
So happy to be a part of this one! Excited to launch v2 of our website when this is ready.
-
1
I'm confused: what do WordPress themes have to do with MR? :)
-
1
Developing an awesome product for productized services owners and agency owners
I am a web developer looking for a co-founder, I have a good product for agencies and developers.
can we talk ? -
1
Great work!
-
1
Congrats. As a percentage how many people purchased straight from the landing page vs people you had to speak to and explain more in detail?
Wishing you luck
-
1
Hi @Vinrob! Congrats on the pre-sale, I'm doing the same sort of thing for my new product. What did you find was the best avenue for acquiring those initial customers?
-
1
I run a FB group with 1.2k members and share content almost every day to them so that certainly helped! Then we set up a newsletter a few days before the deal and asked users to reply "Save my spot" to gauge interest beforehand.
Before we officially launched about 80% of the spots were reserved that way.
-
1
Ah that makes a lot of sense, I'm really starting to learn how powerful Facebook groups can be. Good luck with everything!
-
-
-
1
Do you think you could have sold the same thing for a higher price and got more money?
If you sold for $1000 and got 20 customers you would have got $20,000 and had 20 extremely interested customers. You would have been able to spend more time with them etc.
-
1
I think we definitely could have sold for a higher. I am sure the $1000 price point (or higher) could have been attained if we already had a live products / users. But we had given very little information about how our product worked so those early adopters really bet on us (even though there's a money back guarantee)
-
-
1
Thanks for sharing, great job 👏, its a pretty smart idea to do this because in a way those people are invested now in both the products progress and, should the worst happen, they are aware they wont get anything for there money which is less pressure for you. May i ask how you priced each lifetime access account? And how much you ended up selling them for? Also what format did you use to sell them e.g just on a web page or via a funding service etc?
-
1
Hey @tonycodes !
-
Pricing - I thought $99 and $149 were incredibly attractive prices. We might have priced a little too low but since we were at the very early stage of development I felt it was still good.
-
We did the offer via our own website: https://www.manyrequests.com/pricing which I announced on my FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/192719694795609/
By the way - even with the pre-launch offer, we still gave a 30 days money back guarantee in case users do not like the product / do not see a fit.
-
1
Hey @Vinrob
Thanks for clarifying, i'm actually thinking now if this may work for me, although as my service is resource based i'm thinking of perhaps giving an extra year for every year of pre-paid hosting 🤔
-
-
-
1
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
We pre-launched ManyRequests and got our first users.
We are super happy about this and will be documenting in a blog post how we did it.
But in short: We used our Facebook group of agency owners / freelancers / productized services and launched a small amount of spots. We also did a live QA on Facebook to answer any questions.
Comment