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22 Comments

Blasted past $10k in monthly revenue, still growin

Super thrilled to report that, a year after launch, Thankbox has moved into $10k territory!

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And for June I'm tracking to get even higher. Here are a few of the latest highlights:
๐Ÿ’Œ Users are consistently leaving over 2000 messages a day in Thankboxes.
๐ŸŽ I now have days where users collect over $5000 for gifts for their friends & colleagues.
๐Ÿ›  I had to learn how to edit my Nginx config to allow more simultaneous connections because it was starting to hit the limits.
๐Ÿ’ท Received the first part of my grant funding, which allowed me to increase my ad spend.
๐Ÿ’ฐ Sold Thankbox number 7000! 6.1k of all sold Thankboxes have been in 2021 alone.

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Thankbox is now maturing as a business, dealing with many different users and running into problems I wouldn't have expected when starting. With that in mind, I decided to invest a sizeable amount into having a lawyer do a review and rewrite of my terms and conditions. This should be ready soon and help me sleep a bit better at night ๐Ÿ˜…

๐Ÿ™‹โ€โ™‚๏ธ While an increased ad budget is definitely responsible for a large part of the growth, it's definitely not the only thing. Networking effects are starting to compound now. More and more people are reporting that they found out about Thankbox through their work or friends.

๐Ÿ“Š SEO efforts are also paying off, with Thankbox ranking on the first page of search results for a lot of relevant terms.

  1. 3

    Once again, congrats man! Big, big milestone. And the product / idea is so, so cool! Looking forward to your 100K post soon! ๐Ÿ˜

    1. 2

      Haha, I have a feeling 10k->100k won't be as straightforward as 1k->10k was but I can dream ๐Ÿ˜‚

      1. 2

        I have some feeling that it'll be much easier than it seems. ๐Ÿ˜‰

  2. 2

    Congratulations! I just had a look at the Thankbox website and it honestly looks and seems like a great product.

    1. 2

      Really appreciate those kind words, Luca! I'm lucky I have a really good designer

  3. 2

    Hey this is great - two questions:

    1. How did you validate your idea in the beginning? How did you figure out the right pricing?
    2. Could you recommend a good guide for SEO and growth, based on what worked for you guys?

    Thank you!

    1. 2

      I actually didn't do as much validation as I probably should have in the beginning. In fact, I ended up asking a lot of the "wrong" people (other tech guys) who were mostly against it. It turns out that they aren't really my target audience, though. In the end I decided to build it anyway because I had experienced this issue and I knew there was a pain to solve.

      For pricing - I ended up looking at other products in the space and priced it similarly or slightly higher. You're always going to have people unhappy with the pricing but what I have seemed to work for me and most of my customers are ok with it. It's a one-off purchase low cost product so I don't have much room to increase the price, unfortunately.

      SEO is an area I'm still struggling with myself - my scores aren't the best and I need to improve it. One thing I did well, though, was creating a bunch of dynamic landing pages for the different use cases one can use a Thankbox for. For example I have https://thankbox.co/online-group-congratulations-cards and https://thankbox.co/online-group-leaving-cards - they both are different versions of my landing page targetting a specific use case. This is what has allowed me to get into decent positions on some terms.

      1. 1

        This is cool - thank you!

  4. 2

    Congrats on the milestone! This is the one everyone wants to hit. ๐Ÿ™‚

  5. 2

    Congratulations Valentin! Thankbox is a great idea! Very impressive.

    1. 1

      ๐Ÿ™Œ thanks a lot!

  6. 2

    Congrats!! What kind of paid ads have you used and did you managed this on your own?

    1. 1

      Hi Lem, thanks for the support. I use google Adwords and I have someone managing it for me for a few hours a week.

  7. 2

    Congrats, that's a pretty cool idea and execution! I read your interview and I think this one seemed to be the killer decision:

    "...they pay when they're ready to send it".

    Let them try the product. Because once they're hooked, nobody would say no. Awesome!

    1. 1

      Appreciate the compliment! Yeah, that's definitely one of the better decisions I made. It does mean I have a certain amount of abandonment but it's actually quite low. Most people go through with the purchase.

  8. 2

    Congratulations for that milestone.

    1. 1

      Thanks a lot ๐Ÿ˜Š

  9. 2

    Huge Congrats ๐Ÿš€

  10. 1

    Congrats @ValCanBuild
    I have two questions

    1. what marketing channel/websites you used to acquire your user
    2. how did you build intro video on your website?

    Thats great achievement congrats

    1. 1

      Thanks!

      My main channel is search ads but, like I said, I am also focusing on SEO and networking effects. I got my first users by relying on my own local network. I go into more details in my IH interview on the topic: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-i-launched-and-grew-my-startup-by-500-during-the-covid-crisis-d526999b35

      The video was made by a Fiverr guy I found - was really happy at it:
      https://www.fiverr.com/gur1buttar/create-an-amazing-2d-animated-explainer-video

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