SaaS Pegasus

After more than four years of indie hacking I’ve finally managed to earn $100k from my projects!

The income breakdown is about 50/50 between SaaS Pegasus - a Django SaaS boilerplate, and Place Card Me, a wedding place card generator, with $5k coming from Chat Stats - an analytics tool for GroupMe groups (if you don't know what that means I'm not surprised).

I'm not sure I have any real wisdom to share on this milestone. It's been a long, slow grind with every product. What I will say, is that big numbers aren't as hard as you think. They just take time and consistency.

In my case I started indie hacking with the goal of earning just $1. That took almost 5 months. But the next dollar only took a few days. And now, more than half my amount have come in the last year (something that I think has been true almost the entire time I've been doing this).

My timeline to big milestones looks like this:

$0 - $1: 5 months
$1 - $10: 6 weeks
$10 - $100: 3 weeks
$100 - $1000: 2 months
$1000 - $10,000: 10 months
$10,000 - $100,000: 30 months

There's a complete set of income and effort broken out by product on my open startup dashboard.

On to $1 million!

After nearly 3 months and several wrong turns SaaS Pegasus finally supports more than one CSS framework! Now my customers can build Pegasus apps with Bootstrap, Bulma, or even both (toggling between them with a setting).

It was quite a journey. Pegasus has historically included Bulma CSS, but I've always wanted to support more than one framework. I initially hoped to add Tailwind CSS, but eventually gave up when - after a long back and forth with Adam Wathan - I realized that partnering with Tailwind UI wasn't an option.

So then I went to Bootstrap. And I will say that - having not used Bootstrap for a while and coming back to it - I really loved it! I found it combined many of my favorite parts of tailwind (e.g. spacing and flex utilities) with my favorite parts of Bulma (Sass and nice components out-of-the-box). I know it's not "cool kid" tech these days, but it I found it to be a super-solid experience. I may even choose it for future projects.

Anyway, this is mostly just a huge load off my shoulders. There was a big unmerged branch sitting there for months and that was stressing me out! Now having everything merged and cleaned up is a big relief that will allow me to move onto other projects.

I also hope this will expand my set of potential customers. I know it already helps several existing customers and have already gotten good feedback from a few.

In the past few months I've been pushing hard to create useful content about how to build a SaaS application in my technology stack of choice (Django). The content is part of my big picture marketing strategy for Pegasus (a Django SaaS template).

The basic strategy is to create as much great content out there as possible and get it in front of Django developers. I'm hoping this has many benefits including:

• Increasing awareness of Pegasus in the community and getting the content shared
• Establishing credibility of myself / the product by showing I know my stuff
• Creating backlinks that contribute to the site's domain authority
• (Eventually) ranking on search engines for lots of relevant queries related to Django and SaaS

The Guides page I just made is specifically focused on the last point. I realized that I've got all this content that I've put a ton of effort into and that collecting it all in one place is basically a guide to building a SaaS with Django. And, since I want Pegasus to rank on Google for everything related to "SaaS" and "Django" I'm hoping this page can be the content that achieves that!

It's unclear so far how well this strategy has been working. The content does get shared and appreciated, but thus far it hasn't really converted many people - mostly I think because the type of people interested in reading it would much rather build it themselves than "cheat" and buy a template. But hopefully some of the longer term / bigger picture effects around backlinks and SEO start working for me!

May was a massive month for Pegasus. I almost tripled my previous best month with over $4K in profit.

The increase in profit has come from two complimentary things that I did this past month:

1. Creating a promoting a guide to integrating Django and Stripe.
2. Adding an "Unlimited license" at a price point of $550 - slightly below 3x the cost of a single-site license.

The Django Stripe guide did really well on Reddit and has gotten picked up by a few popular Twitter accounts, including @ThePracticalDev (190k followers) and @fullstackpython (50k followers). It appears to have created a small, but significant step change in traffic, even after I stopped promoting it. And I know of at least two sales I've made to people who found Pegasus through the article.

As for the Unlimited License - I added it after a few people asked about using Pegasus on multiple projects, and seeing a similar option in related products. I was definitely not expecting to make any sales quickly, but ended up making three in the first week for a total of $1650 revenue - more than any previous month in total. Goes to show how big a lever pricing can be.

I wrote about these in more detail in my monthly open retrospective here, in case you want more details.

After spending the better part of the last month working on it, I finally decided to pull the trigger and publish my Django Stripe Integration Guide.

After publishing, I posted it on /r/django and made #1 for most of a day. All of the feedback has been super positive, which helps me feel better about all the effort that I put into making it.

And with basically zero other (successful... damn you Hacker News!) promotion it's also getting picked up in other places, including on someone's Google Assistant home screen, as well as getting Tweeted by @fullstackpython on Twitter (which has 50k followers). This re-affirms my content strategy of "make above and beyond content, and people will naturally share it".

I haven't seen a super-meaningful uptick in sign ups or sales yet, but hopefully that will come later as more people find the guide and then (eventually) convert to customers.

After literally months of coding I've finally shipped the biggest release to Pegasus since the project has started - the addition of Stripe Subscriptions for your app. This represents the culmination of hundreds of hours of work, including building out an entire subscription tier on another one of my apps (Place Card Me) that I did almost entirely as a learning exercise to help inform the design of this feature.

Now with a clean install, a bit of config in Stripe, and a few one-line commands, it's possible to set up subscription billing in under 10 minutes. It was pretty difficult to decide what level of customization and flexibility to support, versus making it dead-simple, but I'm pleased with where I ended up. And I've already gotten some really positive feedback on the feature from some existing and new Pegasus customers which is validating.

Honestly, with this release Pegasus finally feels like a compete, first-class product. I rode that whole "if you're not ashamed of your product, you launched too early" advice for the better part of a year. But Pegasus is finally something I am not ashamed of. Hooray!

When I was doing my annual end of year reflections, I realized that Pegasus is a perfect flywheel product for my current life.

"Flywheel product", is a riff on the flywheel business concept: a circular feedback loop in your business in which every element feeds into other elements in a virtuous growth cycle. Once you have a flywheel business you just have to get it spinning and then it grows and improves from there—almost on its own.

The most popular example of the flywheel comes from Amazon, where their focus on product selection and price brings in more customers, who then attract more sellers, further increasing the selection of products and reducing price. And continuously growing the flywheel.

So how is Pegasus a flywheel product?

Well its whole purpose is to make launching SaaS products faster and easier. And meanwhile, my whole career revolves mostly around launching and growing SaaS products.

So Pegasus makes my job way easier. But that's only half the wheel.

The other half is that every new project I launch is an opportunity to improve Pegasus itself. My first experience using Pegasus led to a handful of new features, improved docs and cleaner code. Next, I’m going to add subscriptions to one of my products, and that’s going to end up back in Pegasus as soon as I figure it out.

Literally every new thing I build is an opportunity to make Pegasus better. For everyone. Forever.

So I’m super stoked about this revelation. Because I really enjoy building and launching new things. And getting to use and improve Pegasus with every new product launch just makes it all that sweeter.

Synergy!

(This thought was part of my annual year-in-review post here: http://www.coryzue.com/writing/master-plan/)

A few days ago I decided to double the cost of Pegasus (which I am going to do later today).

Before I did that I emailed my list with the news that prices were going up soon and that it was the last chance to get in on the early-access discount. In the four days between the email going out and the price hike I made 5 sales! That number represents more than 30% of my all-time total.

Creating a sense of urgency really works!

Some more details in my monthly retro: http://www.coryzue.com/writing/aug-2019/

Less than two months from launch, Pegasus just landed its 10th customer!

The primary source of customers continues to be new people discovering Pegasus for the first time via organic search. Which is great news in terms of it being a steady revenue stream. Though at the same time I'm realizing that there's an inherent cap on the number of people who are searching for "django saas" that probably limits me to about 5-ish sales / month if the current trends continue.

So I think in addition to increasing prices (which I still plan to do this month). I need to start thinking about what my next inbound lead stream will be. Guessing it is going to involve content marketing around technical django topics that I think would be relevant to prospective customers...

... to a grand total of three sales! Which makes four sales all time! :)

Of course growth is quite a bit easier when you're starting from such a low starting position, but I'm still excited about the future of Pegasus.

To me the most exciting part is that two of the three sales came from inbound leads that just popped up this month (one was someone on my list who I had already been in touch with). This implies to me that the revenue is more sustainable than e.g. if they were all from my launch mailing list.

Apart from that, July was punctuated by the #30daysofgrowth challenge I participated on here.

More details on July here: http://www.coryzue.com/writing/jul-2019/