14
11 Comments

$70k lifetime revenue reached!

$70k sounds like a huge amount, but keep in mind that the profit is only around $35k (due to CodeCanyon's fees) and spread over 5-6 years, so the average is around $5k-$7k/year.

Here is the (profit) breakdown by month, since 2017:

profit

Some notes:

  • On November 2017 userTrack was promoted in the Black Friday sale on CodeCanyon and sold around 100 licenses in 1-2 days.
  • Starting in 2020 I am working full-time on userTrack and switched to selling directly through Gumroad (instead of CodeCanyon)

Most sales came from the CodeCanyon discovery and from organic traffic (since the switch to Gumroad).

Let me know if you have any questions about userTrack or those numbers!

  1. 2

    Awesome job.
    I appreciate you showing a summary of your journey over 5 years. Great things take time and persistence and your product is showing that!

    1. 1

      Thanks!

      It's a really long story, and until this year userTrack has always been a side-project, so I had a lot of other stuff happening while I continously worked on updates and provided support for userTrack. I am actually thinking about writing a short book about my experiences, as I think it might be interesting/useful for others working on similar side-projects, but I first want to see how the story ends (eg. if this year goes well enough or I have to find a job to sustain myself).

      1. 1

        A small note, I started working on userTrack in late 2012 (as it can be seen in the product page on IndieHackers), so the userTrack story actually started about 8 years ago.

  2. 1

    Congrats on the milestone, Cristian! I'm in the analytics space as well and it's good to see others making some hard earned $$ with their products.

    I'm curious a about your business model. Would you be able to share where most of the profits come from? I see that you're selling licenses for self-hosting, but also as a plugin for Wordpress. I'm curious which is more successful for you. Also, have you tried any other models in the past?

    1. 1

      Hi Razvan,

      Thank you!

      The WordPress plugin is also self-hosting, only that the installation is easier as it uses the already existing WP database.

      The profit share varies from month to month, but it's usually around 60-70% for the standalone version and 30-40% for the WordPress one.

      Some people also like the monthly subscription while others prefer the one-time lifetime version, so I am still keeping both.

      On CodeCanyon I was very limited to the pricing model, as I was forced to play by their rules within a strict system. So far I only tried lifetime license and monthly subscription. I have also thought about and considered other models (freemium, SaaS with hosting included, agency focused only, etc.), but I think the current model is the best for me, customers and their users.

      1. 1

        Thanks for the answer! I went straght for the generic SaaS model with my product and it's interesting to see other models like your with CodeCanyon for example 😃

  3. 1

    Congrats, that's amazing. I can see a lot of potential with your tracking tool. Your landingpage could need some improvements ;)

    1. 1

      Thank you! I also hope that I can grow the tool a lot more in the near future now that I work full-time on it.

      I agree with you, I have been changing continously the landing page over the past few months, but I need to spend a bit more time on it and take the time to create some nice explainer/demo videos that could really boost the conversions.

      Do you have any specific feedback/comment for the landing page?

  4. 1

    It is always interesting to know the real statistics. And what do you think, is it worth moving from CodeCanyon to another distribution platform? What pros and cons.

    1. 1

      I moved away from CodeCanyon mostly due to the fact that Envato no longer cares about the marketplaces or authors the way they used to do.

      The props of CodeCanyon are their huge audience and that you don't have to worry about payments, licenses or downloads. The biggest cons is that they take a huge cut of your profits and you have to always play by their rules.

      I would say that CodeCanyon is a really good place to start if you just work on your products as a side-project, but if you want to grow bigger and start your own marketing, it makes no sense to pay for ads and then give 50% of the revenue to CodeCanyon just for handling the payment. If you just want to create products and not spend any time or money on marketing, then CodeCanyon is a great choice, otherwise I would recommend using something like Gumroad as you have a lot more control and, very importantly, you can directly contact your customers and build an audience. With CodeCanyon you don't get the contact information of customers, so if you ever release a new product, having an existing CodeCanyon audience wouldn't help much.

      1. 1

        Thanks for your opinion .)

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 15 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments