Screenshot Creator

Today, I woke up and was pleasantly surprised to see that someone had purchased the $15 export package and the $19 subscription plan.

Later on, another person purchased the $15 export package, for a total of $49 made today! 🎉

One customer even left some feedback saying that they are 10/10 likely to recommend Screenshot Creator to a friend.

This is amazing and shows that people really appreciate my product. It makes all of the time and hard work I spent toiling away without any customers worth it.

I was a bit apprehensive about removing free exports and raising prices a few days ago, but it may have actually had the positive effect of making the product seem more premium, as well as lowering the amount of abuse that I see with temporary email addresses.

I've been seeing an uptick in the number of users who create temporary email addresses just to get the free 3 exports that come with every new account. Unfortunately, because people are abusing it, this means that I've had to remove this perk.

I considered other ways of stopping the abuse such as banning the domains of temporary email address providers, but that's a cat-and-mouse game that I do not have the time to participate in right now. And many of the people creating temporary email addresses probably would never pay to use the service anyway, so they're not really users that I would want to have.

In addition to removing the free exports, I've also increased my prices, specifically for my monthly plan. I've thought for a while now that my monthly plan has been priced too low for what they get, which is unlimited exports in a single month. So instead of $14.99, I've changed it to $19.

I also updated the pay-as-you-go pricing because I've discovered that people were only purchasing the smaller bundles. So instead of having four bundles of 5, 10, 20, and 30 exports, I now have four bundles of 5, 10, 15, and 20 exports and have updated the pricing accordingly. I think people only purchase the pay-as-you-go bundles when they only need a few exports, so the smaller bundles should help them save some money.

I launched Screenshot Inspiration on Product Hunt today, which is a free curated collection of 100+ app store screenshots. It includes apps such as Jour, Mailchimp, Byte, Canva, and more.

It's a collection I put together to help people find inspiration for their app store screenshots, as well as to promote Screenshot Creator as an engineering-as-marketing project.

After 2 months, Screenshot Creator finally reached 200 users!

Most of my traffic comes from Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, direct links, and Hacker News, which corresponds with roughly the audience that Screenshot Creator is supposed to serve.

I've had a slow trickle of a few visitors every day ever since my Product Hunt launch. I'm hoping to do a bigger marketing push soon and invest more in SEO in order to increase the traffic that's coming in.

I got my third paying customer today! This customer was a bit different from the first two customers; instead of purchasing the Pro plan, they actually purchased the pay-as-you-go plans: first the 5 export bundle, and then the 10 export bundle (for a total of $21). I expect that they figured out later on that they needed more exports than they actually got, which is why they purchased twice.

I sent a thank you email to this customer as usual, and they actually replied back (unlike the first two customers). They said that in retrospect they probably should've purchased the Pro plan (since it would've been cheaper than purchasing the two bundles). They also wanted me to send them the invoices (since apparently I didn't have that option checked in Stripe 🤦‍♂️). You live and you learn, I suppose!

Really excited to share that I got my second paying customer for Screenshot Creator yesterday. This customer also subscribed to the $14.99 Pro plan, which brings my MRR to ~$30.

I recently had some doubts about continuing with this app, since I wasn't sure how to continue marketing it, and I didn't think many people would pay for it.

But getting two customers in one month, especially when they came during a time when I hadn't put much effort into marketing, seems to be a sign that people are actually willing to pay. It's a great motivation booster to see that people are getting enough value out of the product that they spending money for it!

I feel super blessed and am definitely re-energized in spending more time improving the product and marketing it some more. In my opinion, SEO would likely be a good marketing channel for this kind of product, although it is quite a long-term play and will likely take a long time to pan out. I may also do some content marketing as well.

Excited to see what the future holds!

Someone subscribed to the Pro plan for Screenshot Creator for $14.99 / month yesterday :)

It's not a lot of money by any means (and this is a high churn, competitive business where they could cancel the subscription at any time, so I don't even think it as real recurring revenue), but it provides validation for my product. People are actually willing to pay money in order to use it! It's an unreal feeling.

I shared this news with some of my friends and family but most of them don't fully appreciate the hard work that goes into creating a product from start to finish and having someone actually pay you money for it.

The kind of direct relationship you have with your customer where you actually see the exchange of money for value is something that just can't be replicated with a normal office job, and is one of the main reasons why I love building stuff in the first place.

So yes, hopefully this is a signal that the 2nd, 5th, and 10th customers are just beyond the horizon!

Screenshot Creator has finally reached 100 users, a week after it officially launched. Really excited about this milestone, as it shows that people actually have a need for this product and are willing to sign up to use it!

Now on to the next challenge, which is to get my first paying customer :)

The day after launch is one of the hardest days, in my opinion. It's that period of time where you don't really know where to go from here. I've gotten a few users from my launch, but none of them have converted to a paying user yet. So the big questions are: are people just not willing to pay for this? Are my prices too high? Maybe the timing is just not right for them to pay, through no fault of my own? Or maybe I should change my pricing model altogether?

I've emailed my first users asking for some feedback in order to get more clarity. I'm also starting to add more metrics into the app so that I can more clearly analyze the conversion funnel and see what people are doing and where they are falling off. It's always difficult to know what the best next steps should be. A lot of us are just stumbling around in the dark hoping that we're getting just a little bit closer to our goal.

Screenshot Creator is featured on Product Hunt today! https://www.producthunt.com/posts/screenshot-creator-3

I was hoping to get 20 new users from the launch, and I have so far exceeded that goal. Here's hoping that I can get my first paying customer today 🤞