Mugshot Bot
Automated link previews images. No design tools needed.
I built an MVP in one month and grew the product for a year. But now it’s time to pass the torch. It’s official, I sold Mugshot Bot! Here’s how it all went down.
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-took-my-saas-from-idea-to-sold-in-14-months-5a28599cbf
Mugshot Bot officially became a profitable SaaS with another annual subscription this morning! It took 77 days from official launch to get here.
Heroku dynos: $75 per month
Heroku Postgres: $9 per month
Total expenses: $84
MRR: $90.16
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Congrats Joe! In some ways this is more important than later MRR milestones as it allows you to keep things running. Now try to get profitable including the costs of your time. I love the dashboard from @czue
Have you tried Hatchbox to lower costs compared to Heroku? It's something I want to try in the future, but I have no experience with it.
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Thanks for the shout out! Three and a half years in and I'm still well under 50% of my freelancing rate. But you can't beat the trendlines and the fun. :)
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Thank you! Oddly enough, I'm at that weird state where Hatchbox would actually cost me more money than Heroku. Once I add a third/fourth server I think Hatchbox will end up being cheaper.
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Today's the day! Mugshot Bot is launching on Product Hunt and I would love if you could check it out.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/mugshot-bot
Every day for the past week I've been live-updating my post in Building in Public.
Here are some early learnings:
- Having someone in the London time zone to tweet about the launch when it goes live really helped.
- I had to reach out to Product Hunt support to get in front of posts with less upvotes.
- I'm trying a promoted tweet as early in the day as possible.
- gifs don't actually show up on Twitter, even though Product Hunt says they do.
This weekend I launched the Pro plan of Mugshot Bot. Premium themes, more customizations, and the option to remove the watermark.
I posted about it in a Slack group and got some solid feedback and response. And not 20 minutes later I had my first subscriber!
I collected emails for a week to gather interest in customizations while I built them out. It ended up taking way less time than expected! I launched yesterday and sent a quick email to all 16 people who subscribed.
I know the number is small but it feels good to potentially get in contact with users! It also helped me tune in on Mugshot Bot's messaging by forcing me to write a real email.
As inspired by Basecamp and Hey, I also turned off all open and click tracking. Each link has a UTM which I can track in aggregate via my analytics platform.
Signing off for the week with some quality achievements for Mugshot Bot.
👀 7200+ landing page visits
🖼 1400+ mugshots created
✍️ 3 blogs using it in production
🌒 dark theme designed
🖼 "Bold" - first premium theme designed
📄 registration form designed
Today Mugshot Bot crossed 1000 generated social images. The site received 1600+ hits in the last 12 hours from Hacker News which contributed to almost ⅓ of all generated images since launch last week.
I'm really excited to see where this goes!
It's official, Mugshot Bot is ready to create social images for your blog!
Give the bot a URL and out pops an image, ready for tweeting, sharing on Facebook, or anywhere else on the web. You can also copy and paste HTML tags to set up Twitter Cards and rich sharing on Facebook.
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