Surprise Gift to

We decided to bring more traffic to the website, so I searched google again on how to send a gift without an address and found a bunch of Quora questions. I answered all of them (~8). Now the traffic increased, and we are at ~27 average visitors per day. We also posted in Reddit threads, created posts on Blind. We have successfully crossed 80 orders.

At this point, we were around ~25 orders and got a bunch of emails at once. I thought it was spam on the website but quickly realized that I got 27 orders and all the emails are related to those orders. This is a big milestone that one customer trusting SurpriseGift with 27 orders is big deal for us. With these orders we crossed 50 orders in total.

So after the Product Hunt failure, we started applying some of the tricks I learned by listening to podcasts and audiobooks to find the right channel. I posted on Reddit, got a good amount of traffic (~200) for two days in total and not even a single order. It made sense because I posted inside projects thread, but my customer is a professional employee that wants to gift to their colleague. So I searched google and found a question on the Amazon developer forum, asking how they can send a gift without an address on Amazon. So, I quickly answered the question. The traffic from 0 visitors per day went to ~ three consistent visitors every day from the amazon forum. It felt nice; we were on a trip to CA the next week of the launch.

I was sitting in a park; I got an email saying someone ordered on Surprise gift(I set up an email notification if the order is received). I couldn't believe it. I quickly logged in to the stripe dashboard on my phone and saw that a customer was created, and yes, we got our first order!! He ordered a $250 worth mic to his online friend; at that time, we were charging only $3 per order, and with stripe charging us 2.7% + 0.30, we were processing this order at a loss, but hey, we were trying to validate the idea. We were so happy that he trusted us with $250 bucks.

The first platform we chose was Product Hunt. It's our first launch on PH, and we got three upvotes for it: Me, my wife, and the hunter (my manager at work). Yeah, it's a big fail on PH, but we didn't feel bad, you know why? We spent only a week on it, and we were busy finishing it in time rather than pushing our hopes high

It took 7 days, but I'm finally done building the minimum viable product for SurpriseGift.to. We worked mostly nights and weekends, and we coded the whole thing in Laravel and Tailwind since that's what I'm the most comfortable with. We planned on processing the orders manually. We have added only a form on the front end with a nice tailwind home page, added some stuff like how it works steps, FAQ, and Crisp chat. Once the order is placed on the webpage, we have added a dashboard that comes with laravel and displayed the orders in the table.

2 weeks ago, one of my colleagues left the company to pursue a Product Role at a startup. I wanted to buy a physical book that gives more insights and helps her in the new role, but it will be a matter of privacy if I ask her where she lives. So, I bought an Amazon gift card, sent her the amazon product link, and asked her to buy herself, yeah not so clean job. And last year, I wanted to send something nice for my reports but couldn't do it because I cannot ask for their addresses. And few more situations like this seemed like a recurring problem.

So I thought I had to solve this and started working on Surprise Gift along with my wife.