Swipe Conversion Strategies Database

About a week ago I launched Swipe as a community for founders. All Swipe customers have free forever access, but the community is switching to a paid model. All new members will be asked to pay a monthly or an annual fee (with a lifetime option).

Some benefits of communities:

1. Moats
2. More hands on
3. Accountability

Very excited for the future of Swipe and the members who participate!

Right now I am taking intro calls with anyone who wants to talk who is already part of the community. I'm also gathering feedback and will use that to improve the space and provide the connections to let people grow their businesses.

Yesterday I added Parity Bar to Swipe. Parity Bar allows you to set discounts based on where people are coming from geographically speaking. This makes products a bit more affordable to people in countries with lower costs of living and lower incomes.

To my surprise, I saw 4 sales come in almost right away -- as soon as I announced it on Twitter.

Also announced student discounts and had two students DM me, who then purchased.

Parity pricing works ;)

I'll be monitoring for abuse of course, but otherwise happy with the decision!

I wrote a post on my blog and shared it with HN. With a bit of work and a bit of luck it reached the front page. Sadly, I was not awake to see how long it stayed up there, but it generated 10k pageviews as of right now.

This generated $500 in sales. Not much, but something!

https://www.swipe.page/p/from-an-airtable-to-10k-in-side-income

Lessons from sharing on HN:

• Write for the technical audience. I could have just copy / pasted my article from IH, but I decided to write a new one that had more technical details.

• Share the HN post with friends so they can give you the initial upvote push. You'll still need a substantive post to last through the day, so it's not a sure thing.

• You only need about 8 points / upvotes and some engagement for the thing to start ranking. I noticed after about 8 points it jumped to 30 and so forth.. people started seeing it.

It was definitely a fun ride, just too bad that I was asleep for most of it (kid was waking up and crying).

Let me know how your HN posts went, would love to analyze them!

Hey friends! The day has come that Swipe has launched on Product Hunt!

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/swipe-c3ed98db-a38c-456b-ada2-e01708b74583

There is a 20% Discount code for the first 100 orders, in case you fancy a copy.

WHY SWIPE

I've been doing conversion audits for quite some time. It was never meant to be a full time gig -- I mostly focused on product design. But, as more and more people asked me about the audits, I decided to turn it into a service. Now, most of my consulting income comes from this.

While providing audits, I realized smaller startups and bootstrappers would actually benefit from some of the things I was noting for my clients, but knew they would not have the budget for a full-blown audit .. and in many cases, it just wouldn't make sense. So I created a product version that covers a wide base of situations -- but narrowed it to SaaS.

The inspiration came after seeing @kacper launch Scrapbook. In fact, I was one of his early customers! Great product btw!

After completing an early version of the product, I announced it here and got my first sale. This was very encouraging. I knew there was an audience because people came to me for audits.. it was pre-validated.

I then decide to try to sell it some more before launching. I got 9 more sales by building in the open and tweeting about Swipe occasionally. One other sale came from a cold email -- which was also inspiring because now I have a blueprint for doing more cold emails ;)

I gotta say, there was a significant delay between when I announced this product and before the launch -- but this was mostly because of us adding a new family member ;) I am hoping now that I am slowly regaining my time, I'll have more of it to devote to the product itself, and to ongoing promotion.

To date, Swipe has sold just under $1k.

Going forward I plan on starting blogging, running facebook ads, collaborations (email newsletters), and keep building in the open.

I'm also working on another Swipe product for e-commerce, but the goal is to get 100 sales on this one before moving on to the next.

I really appreciate all the people who have been tremendously supporting along the way! Even though this is an info product with no recurring revenue, it gives me some base to start promoting it at some scale. Not to mention, I already got a few SaaS ideas by building this, so that may be next!