Swipe Files

Just under a year ago I launched Swipe Files and got my first subscribers to the newsletter. Now, I just crossed 5,000 subscribers. 🎉

While I hoped and anticipated I'd get here at some point in the future, I didn't think it'd happen so quickly! The funny part is that I don't even send emails that often... 🤔 The mix of a high conversion rate from the landing page (redesigned and converting 3x higher in January), the referral program powered by SparkLoop, and my Twitter seemed to have really propelled it forward.

Next stop: 10,000

Swipe Files just crossed $2,000 in MRR. Since it's an annual subscription upfront, there isn't $2,000 in cash flow from the customer base month over month, but it's an easy heuristic to describe how things are going.

I happened to notice that I just crossed it as I updated my 1,000 True Fans Public Experiment page (swipefiles.com/1000) and saw the math work out.

This time last year, I was breaking ground in Webflow to create Swipe Files. It hasn't reached its one-year anniversary of being live and published yet, so I'm stoked to be able to reach this milestone before then.

This number has doubled over the last few months as I launched the community and steadily started attracting new members. The biggest thing has just been consistently showing up every. single. day in the community. I love those folks and want to give them everything I can.

Today the revenue for Swipe Files members exceeded the monthly costs for maintaining Swipe Files, which is about ~$200/mo. It's not much, but at least it's self-sustaining!

Feels good to have a product with recurring revenue that is now just adding profit. Can only go up from here, right?

After emailing the list of ~250 I had built, posting to Twitter, and a couple of Slack communities I'm a part of, I reached 10 paying customers!

Not quite ramen profitable but I can't complain at all. Second day of beta? I'll take that! I still haven't officially "launched".

A week early, we managed to finish up the prototype and get it into beta to actually start getting users and customers. The other Rumblers, my wife, and close friend Kyle were my first beta users.

We managed to work out most of the initial kinks and actually let people sign up.

When I launched the beta, I emailed the email list with an offer for 50% off the first year of an annual membership.

Basically immediately after pressing send, I refreshed Memberstack to see that I got my first paying customer!

Still a surreal feeling.

All 8 Rumblers met together for the first time to walk through each of our projects and show what we've built: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAoPkLKdl94

Swipe Files was the first to finish. I had to furiously create content for it that week as we wrapped up most of the design/building the week before.

What I didn't account for, however, was that there were going to be the inevitable things that don't work. Swipe Files is built entirely with Webflow, Memberstack, Jetboost, and ConvertKit. I spent about 6 hours the night before trying to fix the signup flow because I didn't implement Memberstack correctly.

I also spent a good portion of the demo day video fixing bugs that I had overlooked somehow before. 😅

Earlier in the week we finished most of the design/building in Webflow and just had to connect the other services.

The main thing I wanted in order to consider it as an MVP was to have ~20 teardowns loaded in for customers to start exploring. I ended up burning out at 17, but it was close and good enough!

In order to be able to search and filter for teardowns directly on the site, we had to integrate Jetboost, which allows you to do way more than Webflow can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7xx9QqFbBI

I know Chris well and he actually created Jetboost based on a prototype he built for my job board HeyMarketers.com

To actually make this a membership site, we had to integrate Memberstack with Webflow so that we could take subscriptions and lock content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6gd1klycaI

It's pretty amazing how simple it actually is. I couldn't even imagine building all of this with code. Just seems like a waste.