First product, first full month, made $200!
by HimanshuI'm a first time Indie Maker, and my first product had one full month of July after first launch on Hacker News at the end of June.
Here's what I did to get visitors and customers throughout the month of July, and also monitor health of website SEO and payments:
Early in month I started self promotion on Reddit in relevent communities via comments, which brought traffic and paid customers. However, I learned the hard lesson as first time founder that Reddit moderators will block you on promotions.
Github
The product is open source on Github, and my profile README has links which brings visitors and converts them into customers!
Product Hunt
I launched on Product Hunt during towards end of the month. The big lesson here is picking day of the week for launch is very important. I picked Tuesday. which is a peak day and big projects launch. In hindsight, I should not have launched on Tuesday or Wednesday.
I had shared my PH launch to my network on WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Twitter for the support.
Consider peaks days if you know you can get support from hunders of people or have a huge following on social networks or PH!
SEO
I'm actively monitoring Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tool, they suggest fixes for exisiting pages to have more pages indexed.
Stripe
The most failed payments were from customers trying to use Cash App. I'm not yet sure why though, perhaps customers don't complete their payment once they transition to Cash App.
Thats all, hope this helps you to try different things to market and get sales for your Indie project!
My conclusion after first full month is that if I can bring more visitors they would convert to paid customers!
Please do share in comments on how you increased traffic after your launch.
Here's the link to the product website: https://upvpn.app
