Signature.email

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!

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!

To be honest I had no idea what to expect from launching on Product Hunt. I went between being worried whether I would even be featured on the home page to hoping that this would kick-start this project and it would start becoming the lions share of my monthly income. The result was neither of those!

Signature.email did surprising well on Product Hunt! It certainly helped that I sent out hundreds of emails and posted in a bunch of locations, but after those initial bumps I think people genuinely were interested in the product and Upvoted it, which was encouraging to me.

⬆️ 383 Upvotes
🏆 6th Place
👩‍💻 1,024 Unique Visitors
🎉 400+ Signatures Created
📂 114 Signatures Saved
💵 $77 Sold (Including one 19/m subscription)

So in terms of traffic and generating interest in the product I consider it a huge success. In terms of generating tons of income, not as much. For now, this project will probably stay firmly in the "side project" status for awhile longer.

My biggest learnings from the process were:

1. I'm glad I finally did it. I waited a long time to launch on Product Hunt because it made me so nervous.

2. People are interested in the tool and genuinely find it "cool". Email signatures aren't quite as boring/lame as I thought people consider them.

3. I need to clarify my plans more and refine exactly what they contain. I have some thoughts about this that I may post at another time.

Thanks again for all of your support fellow Indie Hackers, keep hacking away and make something great!

Today is launch day! 🚀 My baby Signature.email is on Product Hunt right now!

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/signature-email/

I am a freelance web designer and developer from Minneapolis, MN. I often found that making email signatures for clients was a pain. Coding it yourself was annoying, the free tools were too limiting, and the paid tools were too expensive!

I set out about a year ago to develop an editor that was tailored exactly for email signatures without limits on how many fields or images can be included. After hundreds of hours of development and thousands of email signatures created by users during the beta phase I am excited to finally launch it.

I put up the website in July of last year. Since then I've been working on the product and trying to get the word out there. I've had:

📊 9,451 Unique Page Views
📫 2,521 Signatures Created
📂 505 Signatures Saved
💵 $1,420 Made So Far

I'm starting to see some good results coming from my SEO efforts and hoping that this launch will create some additional traction.

Would appreciate any feedback on the tool, thanks for your support!

While I'm still working on developing the app, I've been in a bit more of a sales mode lately because I feel like I have enough built out that I can validate the idea.

I met with a branding agency in town last week to show them the idea, they said they loved it and would probably use it someday, but weren't ready to pay for it and use it right away.

I decided to throw $100 into Google Adwords with a limit of $15 a day to see if the landing page and the app could convert anyone, even if it wasn't at scale.

I was a bit disappointed the first day that I got 20-some clicks and NO ONE even created an account! Over the weekend I got 5-6 people total creating free accounts, which felt good. I followed up with each of them via email to get feedback from them.

Then this morning I got that lovely first Stripe notification on my phone to let me know that someone had signed up for a subscription.

AWESOME!

It's probably not sustainable to keep throwing money into AdWords right now as an indie hacker, but it did help to get me that first customer and show that the idea could potentially work.

I was looking through the live database to see if some of the people I've asked to beta test the signature designer had done anything yet and I came across a signature created by a random person who I didn't know!

It turns out that the site is juuuust starting to get a trickle of traffic from DuckDuckGo and Google. This person stumbled across the site, was looking to make a free signature for herself, and used the tool.

I followed up with her afterwards looking for feedback. She said:

"It also was one of the nicest creation tools I've used. Good design, and it gave me a lot of options to work with in creating my own signature. It also resized my image properly to scale! A lot of others don't do that right."

Not a paying customer or anything, but I'm still really excited by this. I think this shows:

A: That with some more effort I'll be able to get some decent SEO traffic to the site.

B: The tool was useful and different enough from the other options out that that it stands out.

Back to building!

Met with the first ad agency to show them the beta version of the product and get their thoughts on it. They agreed to use it for their own email signatures and said they would be interested in using it for distributing future email signatures to clients.

It was great to get some initial positive feedback, but I also realize that they know me and like me already, so there may be some of the "Mom Test" factor going on here where they don't want to give bad feedback. Paying customers will be much more valuable.

It's hard to show it off at this point, because all I see are the million things that are unfinished about it, but I know that I need to get some actual designers and agencies using the application to make sure it actually works and it solves the problem I am claiming that it solves.

So here goes...

After having made the static version of the signature generator I started thinking about how cool it would be if anyone could "build" one of these signature generators without knowing code or having Photoshop to resize images. I started researching the competition and decided there might be something to the idea. There are a number of signature generators on the website but generally they fit into two categories:

1. Have the ability to customize a single signature.
2. Pretty complex HR tools where you have to pay per user, set up everyone's signatures, and connect it to Outlook servers or something similar.

I always wanted to re-make the original email signature generator because it relied on PHP to POST the form input and then get it back via AJAX, which was unnecessary. I had been working with Vue.js lately and wanted to experiment with remaking the signature generator using it. I finished making an initial version in a few days. I also redesigned it to use a sidebar for the form and make the signature appear as if it were in an email.