July Report: 2.8k Revenue, 5k Signatures Created!

So last month for June I wrote on here that I had actually started earning some regular monthly income with signature.email after launching on Product Hunt in May. Its amazing to think that signature.email has been mostly in its final form since September of last year, but it really took a few bigger risks like purchasing some expensive placements on blog posts and putting myself out there by launching on Product Hunt to give it traction. The transition from thinking about this as a “side project” to thinking about it more like a “client” project has been fun. I can actually justify working on it a bit during my work day and not just on nights and weekends.

💵 $2,778 Revenue
🎉 4,800+ Signatures Created
📁 1,344 Signatures Saved
👩‍💻 4,752 Unique Web Visitors
🛎 50+ Sales/Support Requests

I’ll try to document some of my thoughts and learnings as this product is in its infancy and starting to grow a bit:

Sales and support requests have become a larger part of my time spent over the last 2 months. I’m still at the phase of the product where I get a support email and I immediately assume that it must be something wrong with the product and that I screwed up! There have been a few of those, but there are also plenty of other times where the customer just did something wrong on their side and just needed some instructions. Phew! Maybe someday I will have more confidence in my product! (Email clients and HTML/CSS support is tricky). I have a simple contact form set up on the site as well as the Drift chat widget. I can’t say its overwhelming yet, but I generally get 2-5 support requests a day. Being on call with the real time chat widget has been tricky. Luckily the audience for this product is all business related so the majority of the requests come in on weekdays and are generally from early in the morning from european countries until the end of my business day. Many of the requests are sales based, about things that I need to explain better about the product, how it works, its capabilities, and how the plans differ. Those kind of things I have slowly been working on the purchase process to clarify.

One of the new things that I’m trying to get used to is that I am much more worried about changing the product now that some things are working about it. I wonder if I could increase the pricing more, or have I found some kind of sweet spot? Can I afford to add new features if it causes more bugs and causes customers to become annoyed and leave? I am generally good at working fast and getting something going without drowning in all of the details. But I have a lot to learn about making a product more reliable and adding processes to better guarantee its reliability. I need to keep working on this because it's a lot easier for me to think “its working” and start to get distracted on a new idea rather than continuing to refine this one.

One of the things I did this past month was to collect some testimonials from customers who are using the product. I tried to identify some of the people who had used the product the most and sent them emails asking for a short write-up I could feature on the home page. Of those people I probably only got one back. I had much better luck going back to those customers whom I had helped via support and asking them for a testimonial. It was honestly really humbling and exciting to read what people said about the product and how helpful it had been to them. Many of them mentioned how they liked working with me on support, so I think that reaffirms that marketing the product as an indie developer and not some faceless company has been the right move.

I’m super excited that my search engine ranking has continued to improve, Google traffic provided around 368 hits this month. I’m now in the middle of the second page of results for “email signature” and “email signature generator”, which is amazing. I can’t believe I have been able to compete with some of the big players in the market. I think the biggest factor is getting some more blog posts to link to me, which I have continued to write to blogs and ask them about. I did a few link exchanges with folks as well. I added more text to the home page with those testimonials, which may help a bit. I also did some work to try to speed up the home page according to it’s lighthouse ranking, but I have a long way to go there unfortunately.

My goal this month was to hit $2,500, which I did and got close to 3k. My next goal is to hit 5k in a month. I think it may still take 5-10 months to accomplish that. One of the things about my product is that the majority of people are purchasing one-time cost “Solo” signatures which don’t add to my MRR. As it is right now I’m only adding about $300+ of actual MRR a month. In order to reach that goal I am planning on adding more features to the paid plans to make them more attractive. I am also going to work on a set of templates that would only be accessible if you are a paying customer.

Let me know if you can relate to some of my worries or if you have questions about anything else. Keep going out there and keep trying new things. Don’t be so afraid to put yourself out there and talk about your product!