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$1,600 Last Month. Gaining Traction!

I launched signature.email right at the end of May, and it did surprisingly well. It earned #5 product of the day and got 383 upvotes on launch day. I was surprised to learn that upvotes keep growing, so as of today is has 733! Wow! That said, I only earned $77 that day, so I was a bit disappointed.

Traffic from Product Hunt lasted longer than I thought, but it still slowed after a few days. I got one more big push from PH on June 9th, and I never quite figured out what that came from, I'm assuming some kind of weekly summary email?

So then it was back to the drawing board with getting long term customers. I had already gotten a paid placement on a blog post that started in April that was providing some regular traffic. Then finally I heard back from a blog I had been bugging for MONTHS about adding me to their post about email signature generators. They said they were willing (for a fee) to add me. That went live on June 9th.

My search engine traffic went up for a short time soon after the PH launch, I was ranked at 19 (end of the 2nd page) for a short time when searching for "email signature generator" but then I fell back to in the 30's (4th page) as traffic on the site died down. I am doing an exchange of services with an SEO firm here in town where I put in hours on their marketing website and they give me some analysis and strategy with their time. My SEO ranking is slowly improving and in the last week I'm seeing about 5-10 users a day coming from Google.

With about 100-200 users coming to the site a day I started to see some customers! I was getting quite addicted to the thrill of seeing the Stripe new payment notification so I had to turn that off. (anyone else experienced that?)

I also lowered the price of a "Solo" signature from $29 one time to $19 one time in the middle of the month. I felt like that was more in line with what customers were willing to spend, and I think that was a good decision.

6 Annual Starter Plans ($199)
5 Monthly Starter Plans ($19)
12 Solo Plans ($19 was $29)

All in all I ended up making $1600 this month, which was HUGELY exciting. I am getting pretty regular support requests and some helpful feedback about the product. It's a learning curve trying to keep customers happy but learning that I can't build a new feature for everyone that requests something.

I have a million things I need to be working on both on the product side and the marketing side, but its tricky because I still have freelance client work that demands my attention. And while $1,600 is more than I have ever made monthly on a side project before, it's also not enough for me and my family to live on full time. So the balance will continue for the near future.

Just trying to be honest about the journey and where the last month has taken me, let me know if you have questions!

  1. 1

    Very cool idea! I haven't heard of anyone offering consistent email signatures across companies. And if you're growing revenue, I'm clearly not the only one who thinks that ;)

    1. 1

      To be honest there are a bunch of other companies already doing this. I’m not exactly unique in the space. I think the unique things about the product are the flexibility of the editor and the simplicity of the sharing feature.

  2. 1

    Congrats on the $1600. Use it to remind yourself that you have something that people want. Keep plugging away. You've got this! 🙌

  3. 1

    Man, awesome. Good work, that part when you had to turn off payment notifications, not many are there still!

    1. 1

      Hah, well, I thought I would only turn it off when there were so many it got annoying/disruptive to working.

      It ended up that I turned them off because every time my phone buzzed I was annoyed at my friends for texting me or some other app for sending me anything. It was fun but kind of too addictive!

  4. 1

    Hey Jesse! Congrats! I remember you telling me about this idea in a coffee shop not too long ago. $1600 of revenue is nothing to sniff at.

    I'm curious how you're handling sales tax. I see you're using Stripe and Rewardful for affiliates - is there another plugin you're using for sales tax for each state?

    1. 2

      Hey man! We should catch up again sometime! Right now I'm not "handling" it at all, I figured I could just pay sales tax out of my earnings rather than charging customers additionally for it. But it does look like that is something I will have to look into soon.

      1. 1

        Let's do it! Can you send me an email? It's my username AT gmail :)

  5. 1

    I am curious to know how did you come up with this idea?

    1. 2

      I want to post something longer about this, but it was the combination of two things:

      1. I used to make some custom email signatures for clients and another developer I know gave me this template where he would allow someone to fill in their name and details and add it into the signature so they could copy and paste it. I liked the idea and thought about turning it into a SaaS a few times but always thought there was "too much competition"..

      2. I was listening to some Indie Hackers podcasts about a year ago and they were talking about how competition isn't a bad thing, that it proves there is a market and businesses are willing to pay for that service. That made me want to start working on the idea.

  6. 1

    So happy to see the growth. Love the idea and it looks very amazing.

    Did you ever think about creating alternative to pages, mostly regarding competitors? I think these might work well for you :)

    1. 1

      Yes! I totally need to do that! Though it seems like there are a lot of websites with similar links, so I’m not sure about the impact it will have.

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