RecordJoy

Converted to Web App:
The most significant design/tech change that we made post-acquisition was to convert the website into a try web app. Previously, when users were authenticated there really wasn't a change in the UI. Instead, they just had access to a new page where they could see their recorded videos and do some basic management of them (i.e. delete, add a password, copy the link, etc.).

Now, when users are authenticated, they're taken to a new UI Dashboard. From here, they can view their Library of videos that they've created themselves, they can view their Inbox of videos that have been sent to them, and they can manage their Settings (upload profile picture, update Enterprise settings, etc.)

Other Misc. Changes:
In addition to the large scale redesign and the development work that went into it, we made other "smaller" changes like implementing a broader use of Tailwind components, and redesigning some of the video viewing pages.

The hope is that these design changes will yield better conversion results once we start focusing more on growth.

AppSumo:
Post acquisition, the revenue coming in from AppSumo fluctuated anywhere between $300-$1000 per month for about 6 months. Then it started to steadily declined from there. Currently (about 1 year post acquisition) I'm only seeing about 1 or 2 sales per month come from that platform which only brings in about $40-$80 in revenue. Not ideal.

MRR Subscriptions:
In that same period of time, the monthly recurring subscriptions revenue went to $0. There were only about 3 real customers paying monthly, and they all cancelled their plans within months after the acquisition.

However, just last month I got our first net-new paid subscriber post-acquisition. I'm pretty sure this was sourced from running Google search ads, although it's tough to say 100% because our GA/tracking is pretty basic at the moment.

All of that said, our current total revenue is about $50-$100 per month when you combine our MRR with AppSumo.

Within the past year, these are the main tech changes that I've made to RecordJoy.

Blog:
We ended up replacing the blog with Wordpress. It was originally built as a custom solution that generated blog pages based on markdown files that were placed within a folder. I wanted a more robust approach and ended implementing Wordpress as the CMS for the blog, and set up GraphQL to pull the3 blog content from Wordpress into RecordJoy.

Chrome Extension:
We built a chrome extension based off an existing screen recording chrome extension that was open sourced. This provides a slightly better recording experience and editing options, and the plan was to offer this to paid subscribers as an added value prop. However, we ran into issues with a change in Google's requirements for screen recording tools. In order to deploy to extensions to Google, they need to have Google Manifest v3, and the open source tool we forked from was set up on Manifest v2. As a result, we decided to just wait for the project to be updated to v3 instead of doing the work ourselves.

Design Changes:
Most of the other changes that we've made are related to the design, which I'll summarize in a separate post.

Hello everyone! I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Joe, and I acquired RecordJoy from the previous owners (Ben and Michael) in April of 2022.

At the time of acquisition, I wrote about the process as well as my plans for growth in a twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/JoeSzewski/status/1534610749032636417

Some things have gone to plan, and others haven't. I'll summarize the previous year of ownership/growth over the next few posts, and then I'll start posting more real-time updates from there.

✌🏼

This last month, we've made major progress on SEO.

Free online screen recorder - 10
online screen recorder - 19
Free online screen recorder with audio and webcam - 4
record screen online - 13

A month ago all of our SEO results were mostly in the 30's and 40's except for a few long tail keywords. SEO seems like a viable acquisition channel now if we keep focusing on it.

It was a goal of mine to rank on Page 1 of Google for a major keyword ever since I started working on SEO. I actually stopped focusing on SEO for a while because I couldn't see any immediate results. What I learned is that SEO takes time, and after about 4 months, I noticed RecordJoy started to rank for some long tail keywords by checking the Google Search Console. I decided to optimize the title and descriptions for the keywords I was doing better at. Now if you look up Free Online Screen Recorder With Audio and Webcam, RecordJoy is at the very bottom of page 1. The next goals are to rank for more long tail keywords and perhaps get #1 for one of them.

We upped our pricing from $49 to $129 on AppSumo and had our best week ever in terms of sales. However, it was due to something we didn't expect. When we increased our price, AppSumo put a 48 hour "deal expiring" timer on our old price which put us on an Expiring Deals section of the site, which boosted out traffic tremendously. This allowed us to sell about ~$500 in a week.

RecordJoy finally started to rank on page 5 of google for "free online screen recorder". I had tried various efforts to get on the first page of google before but realized none of my efforts were having any affect. I guess it just took time, but we finally made it somewhere for an important key word.

We crossed $1000 in gross annual revenue today. I remember viewing other indiehacker products and wondered how the heck they were able to get to $1000.

Now that I experienced it first hand, I wrote up a blog article summarizing how we got to $1000 in gross annual revenue.

https://benjlin.medium.com/how-we-grew-recordjoy-to-1000-in-gross-annual-revenue-7af43e47c70b

After launching on Appsumo, we were able to achieve a long awaited milestone of 10 paying customers.

In total, we were able to get our first 10 customers from the following acquisition channels:

• BetaList / Product Hunt — 2
• Google Ads — 2
• AppSumo — 7 (with 1 refund)

Appsumo has been generating an average of 1 paid user every day so far, so I am wondering how long this rate will last.