🚀 $1,200 Revenue from Launch - 3 Lessons Learned

Last Wednesday, I launched an MVP of PageFactory: a no-code tool to help people create and publish content for programmatic SEO.

Now that I'm one week in, how did I do? Stats for the first week:

• 273 emails on waitlist at time of launch
• 33 customers
• $1,235 total revenue
• 4 churns

I've been reflecting on the things I did for this launch, especially compared to other launches I've done. And a handful of things have come to mind that seemed to really work for me.

1. Over communicate

Starting at the beginning of June, I kept in touch with my list (at least once every couple of weeks) even if there wasn't anything particularly exciting to share. At first, I was scared that this would come across as spammy, or it would wear people out. I thought they would get tired of hearing from me, and unsubscribe altogether.

I can't say that didn't happen with some, but overall, the majority of my list genuinely wanted to know how things were progressing. I think it also helped build trust with my audience and kept the list "warm."

The key take away I learned from this is that good communication often feels like "over the top" communication. It's better to over communicate, than under communicate.

2. Get payment details up front

I've seen some discussion on IH about whether you should require credit card info in order for people to register. When it comes to your MVP, I'm definitely all for getting payment details during user registration.

The purpose of an MVP is to validate if people will pay for your product. Most of my current customers are on a 14-day free trial, which I offered because I personally like to try products before I buy them. But I required the users to enter their payment details before starting the trial in order to measure how serious they are about using and potentially purchasing the product.

For perspective, I actually had a total of 54 users begin the sign up process, but 21 people bounced when asked to enter their payment details.

We'll see how many of the free trial users actually convert. But asking users to "put a little skin in the game" was a great way for me to identify the serious customers from the not-so-serious ones.

3. Offer an annual plan

This is probably common sense for most people, but I had never bothered to do this in any previous launch.

Similar to getting payment details up front, offering an annual plan is a great way to measure how serious people are about your product. It's also a great way to get cash up front, to support you while working toward product market fit.

I think the thing I didn't realize before is that there is a certain subset of buyers who really value the savings typically offered by an annual plan. Even if the product isn't perfect, if it promises to solve their problem, these buyers are willing to invest a sizable chunk of change to see how things pan out.

All of the revenue I made in this first week was from the purchase of annual plans. I'll definitely include the option to pay for a year up front in any other future launches I do.

Overall, I'm really happy with how this launch went. Now the real work begins of learning how to consistently reach my audience and iterating off of customer feedback. And of course, fixing bugs.

If you like this write up, follow me on Twitter or my blog where I'm also sharing things I've learned and building in public. If you want to learn more about programmatic SEO, check out this article I wrote about experimenting with it.