sheet2api
Turn any Spreadsheet into an API
Today I added an affiliate program to sheet2api.com.
https://sheet2api.com/affiliate-program/
There's 2 goals of this, to share revenue with customers so they can save money themselves and to increase revenue generally. Won't do any special promo of this, will just email existing customers and share on social media.
https://www.rewardful.com/ was used for the setup and seems fairly seamless as it integrates with our payment provider.
Will report back with results in a few months.
A little update. I experimented by removing the "free" plan, this caused MRR to go up, so this change will stay.
"Elite" pricing plan was added as some customers requested more (See blog post https://sheet2api.com/blog/introducing-elite-pricing-plan-high-traffic-applications/)
Next up will be improvements to the documentation (important now there's no free option). Along with some substantial feature updates.
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Yeah. Free plans do not seem to bring anything good actually. Either your product or service provides some value and if so it will be worth paying for it, or it doesn't and if so there is no point in giving it for free either. The important is to provide some kind of trial so that the potential customers can evaluate if the product has value for them or not.
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The more I work on my project, the more I want to remove the free plan (and it's not even Live yet!)
Like you said, if it brings value, then they can pay for it. Server, devs, etc... all this cost on our side too -
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Yes, I will experiment adding a 7 day trial option also to see the effects of this.
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Trial with credit card
Otherwise it's the same thing with free users.
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I disagree with that approach. If you require a credit card you are going to lose a huge amount of potential users, the friction is too high. On the other hand, users actually trying to cheat to use the trial are going to be a very little minority, at least that is my experience.
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It's not about cheating.
It's about purchase intent.
It's much better to get trial users on the basis of "default-upgrade" rather than "default-churn."
Give them some added sweetness to get their credit card on file (e.g. more free trial days + full access to all features).
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Maybe that approach works for services that give some stuff free forever and you need to upgrade to get more features. The question is if there is data backing which approaches result in more actual paying subscriptions?
There is another issue with providing credit-card first, and charging say 15 days or 1 month after, and that is with 3D Secure, you may need to trigger a flow which may get the user churn anyway 🤔-
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I think Neil Patel did an A/B test on this before, and trials without credit card came out on top.
The study was old though, and I'm also willing to bet highly-dependent on what your niche is.
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MRR or Revenue aside...
Your product is very lit. Congrats on everything you have completed.
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YES RICHARD!!!
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Thanks for sharing. Interesting. Here’s something that I hope you find interesting. Phil… https://abitgamey.substack.com/p/our-product-led-growth
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How does your product then compete with free packages like the Python gspread?
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Awesome milestone, very inspirational!
If you could do it again, would you start without a free plan (paid only)? Or do you think the free plan was necessary for initial traction?
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What does your product do?
It converts a spreadsheet into HTML templates?
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imagine doing free plans for your early adopters then when you upgrade ur product , make it pay as you go
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Older users are not forced onto the paid plans, they can remain on the free one.
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love the product. Great work!
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thanks for sharing!
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Woow, that is cool
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You should remove ”Do I need to enter my credit card details to sign up?” from FAQ
New feature 🎉
We've just added "Teams" support to sheet2api.
We've had several customers contact us requesting the ability to invite other people to their "team" and give them access to the same Spreadsheet APIs. We're happy to announce this is now possible within your account dashboard.
When you invite someone to join your team they'll get an email invite to accept. Once they've accepted they'll have full access to the same Spreadsheet APIs as the owner of the team does.
Read more on our blog post: https://sheet2api.com/blog/july-update-2022/
Launched in June 2020 with this initial goal, so this took longer than expected.
However I have been busy with other projects most of the time. I did toy with putting this project up for sale, however people were asking too many pre-sale questions which I do not have time to answer.
So we will continue. I have some ideas for new features for this year and will make some actual marketing attempts for once.
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Nice. Btw who are your competitors?
When I started https://sheet2api.com I had a rough goal of 1k MRR, so we're now half way there.
Growth has been steady the past few months as the product is slowly becoming the #1 within this small niche.
At the current month on month growth, it should reach 1k MRR by the end of the year.
Not that impressive but I'm patient so happy enough.
p.s. the Stripe "verified" revenue IH shows is always wrong, not sure why.
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Hey Richard,
Great idea. What do you think is the main hurdle for people not to go directly to use the sheets API? Is it that permissions and authentication is super complex?
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This idea is great!
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Congrats Richard! I remember seeing sheet2api around and thought it was a really neat idea. Nice to see the business case growing around it.
As a side note, I too noticed that the Stripe verified revenue has a lag. I launched over the weekend and had a few sales, and didn't notice the MRR bump until just right now on my app profile page.
I've had lots of customers asking how they can do various things using sheet2api.com.
So, to make life easier for them I've created a set of free HTML templates for building different sites using sheet2api as the backend.
Check out "sheet2api Templates" 👉 https://sheet2api.com/templates/
Can you think of any ideas for templates I should add?
I added a free tool to sheet2api.com this weekend. It lets you create an API from any Wikipedia.org article (as long as it contains at least one table within it).
Give it a try 👉 https://sheet2api.com/tools/wiki-api/
p.s. I also launched this on PH, because why not https://www.producthunt.com/posts/wikipedia-article-table-to-api
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I tried:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_64_games
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Switch_games_(A–F)And neither produced any results despite both clearly having tables. Is it because you only limit the results to come from the example or is there a certain type of table it's looking for?
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Some tables are incompatible, it looks like those above are of that type
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Is this a terrible joke? Right in your headline you say, "Every Wikipedia article table is now an API!" and nowhere does it say that only certain tables work and you don't even indicate which type of tables. Are you at least working towards making every table compatible like you are advertising?
I was initially amazed but now I'm disappointed.
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very cool!
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Very cool.
Today I raised pricing for all sheet2api plans (With existing customers remaining on the previous lower price level forever).
I did this after studying users usage patterns for the service, it's clear it's saving them a lot of time. Given this fact and that this needs to be a sustainable product I decided to raise the prices and see how customers react.
I've also been adding more and more valuable features to the product lately and will continue to do so.
I communicated this to customers one week in advance and have received no complaints, yet. Here's the email I sent:
"
Hi,
We're increasing our prices for sheet2api.com for all plans.
But not for you! :)
If you're an existing paid plan customer you don't have to do anything or pay any more.
Keep your plan as it is, and nothing changes. You'll continue at your current plan pricing forever.
If you haven't upgraded yet, you'll make significant savings if you upgrade before 28th Aug.
Doing so will ensure you remain on the current lower pricing setup forever.
Thanks again for your business. We appreciate it!
"
Feels good to finally reach this milestone after working on sheet2api.com for the last 5-6 months, on evenings and weekends.
There are actually 11 customers at the moment, but 10 sounded better for the title :)
Most of them signed up within the last few weeks, I also noticed that the articles I've been spending A LOT of time writing are finally ranking on Google search for the relevant searches I intended on. (So paying a tonne for ahrefs a while ago actually paid off there).
Costs remain fixed and this many customers means that the product is now profitable.
Another plus is that the customers are talking to me more now so I'm getting feature ideas from them which I'm more than happy to add, when they make sense.
Just a quick reminder to be patient. The past two weeks I saw a lull in new paying customers for https://sheet2api.com, despite having recently added some juicy new features.
Then out of the blue two new customers signed up to an annual plan within an hour. I guess that's how it goes some times.
This did make me realise I've no idea where those customers came from so next I'll set up some tracking for this.
Does anyone know any simple tools for that? (I want to see how they entered the site, what pages let to their ultimate signup, etc)
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Thanks for sharing!
HotJar is a tool that is easy to install, and free as long as you don't have too many users. It gave us really valuable insights.
On the other hand, like most tracking solutions, it is blocked by a number of users.
Mixpanel is also great but not so quick to setup and better for quantitative feedback, not qualitative feedback.
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I love the landing page design. Well done :)
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This is amazing! Congratulations 🎉
It happens like that sometimes, things get slow and then all of a sudden it’s coming together- that’s the journey! Keep on improving the service and adding whatever features are needed though and don’t underestimate social media marketing and word of mouth. Talk to those customers too and maybe ask them to fill out a survey or jump on a call (this actually works, especially if you offer something) to help understand where they heard about your product, what they like and what could be improved. I’ve Ben signed up to companies that do this where the Founder gives out their personal number and is open to communication.
App.Otta.com were really good at this and their strategy got early adopters highly engaged. https://members.italic.com/ Did this too via email!
These are the people who make or break a platform really so do seek them and their opinions/thoughts out. It’s great for the long run.
I don’t really know anymore about the tracking strategies but I’m following along to hear what others have to say on it too 😊
4 Comments
Hey Richard, how's your project going now? Do you still have paying customers?
Hey Richard, thanks for the update!
I was considering trying Rewardful too, but from trying to be an affiliate on it, I noticed conversions are rarely properly tracked (because their JS script that has to be included is blocked by many ad-blockers and privacy-friendly browsers). Did you consider or find any alternatives that don't use 3rd party scripts or cookies?
awesome! good luck on the program!
If you ever suspect some of your affiliates are tricking you and buying ads for your brand name, reach out! We at https://spoofdefender.com can give a couple free scans on the house for fellow indie hackers
@richardindie Nice!
I'm starting a SAAS niche affiliate directory. Just added your affiliate program to https://saasaffiliatelist.com/sheet2api.
Good luck on your affiliate program!