Finally i have crossed to $5k MRR and proud to say that Visal List has attained ramen profitability. I was achieve all this in less than 11 months of official launch. The revenue has increased ๐ฏ% over previous month .
So how did i reach here? When i launched Visa List, i was very skeptical about the usefulness of visa requirements. But that quickly changed when it became viral and the traffic exploded in a week. I realised there is a huge need to for streamlined visa requirements, documents and all that. But with all the traffic, i only had ads here and there and no business plan in place. So couldn't generate much revenue. But over the period i added different channels to increase the total revenue.
Visa List is an Open Startup
#1 Traffic: The traffic whent down to 30K users after initial month traffic of 150K users so i concentrated on SEO and slowly but steadily i improved the traffic to 300K users.
#2 Partnerships: I started Partnerships with Visa agency for Processing visa for people who don't have time to do it themselves. This was for people who need visa, then what about people who don't need visa or who can get visa on arrival. So for them i got into a partnership with Skyscanner and started showing flights prices
#3 Pro Membership: So after thinking about how to sustain viability of visa list in long-run. It started as an experiment to see if people who really need use lot of the pro features would pay. I'm now confident and can say that this experiment was a success and you can should never really dismiss any ideas untill you give it a try first, especially if it's about revenue.
#4 Ads: I personally don't like to show ads. Everyone thinks that if you get traffic you can get revenue but this is not true. There ar so many parameters and permutations and experiments you need to do. There is a whole profession aroudn this called AdOps. It was not at all easy for me but i kept at it like everything else in my life and if not immediately but eventually i cracked it. Once i reach a threshold with other channels i will probably remove it but as of now this has been not only essential to keep me motivated but also has been a big contributor for the total MRR.
I wanted to share this big milestone with my community as i have learned so much and helped me in different stages of my indie hacker journey and i hope this may be useful to others aswell.
I would also definitely appreciate any feedback/ suggestions/ feature requests from my fellow indie hackers.
You can find where you can travel with your passport tension free with Visa List