I made $500 in a month with a product built using 3 no-code free
tools
This was my product's first full month. It's not a lot, I know. As an email marketer, I charge $150 per hour. But making money with a product rather than a service for the first time feels nice.
What I built
Something I use every day for my job, but instead of a dump with random notes, I created a nice-looking and organized database.
Essentially, I collect email marketing sequences from successful companies to see how often they send emails, how many, using what ESPs, if they use double opt-in, offer discounts/lead magnets, etc.
So when I get a new client from a space I've never worked before in, say, fintech SaaS, I can go there, get an idea of what other players are doing, and put together a first version of the basic email flows pretty quickly.
How I built it
The whole setup is pretty basic, as you can imagine. Everything under a free plan:
- Airtable to build the database of content and users
- Softr for the web app
- Zapier to send welcome/trial emails through Gmail (lol)
How did I get visitors/customers?
- Personal network. This one was definitely huge. Some people who know me and my work as an email marketer bought the product without blinking.
- Newsletters. Related to the previous, two people I know run newsletters focused on SaaS and e-commerce, respectively, which are perfect target audiences for my product. They included a mention, which led to 1/3 of the sales.
- Reddit. I shared the project in a couple of related subreddits. Interestingly enough, some comments were pretty brutal, but some people who didn't comment bought a membership, and I even got a couple of DMs from people interested in hiring me as a consultant. Don't get discouraged by the loud haters!
Some March stats:
- Content: 82 new emails (206 total)
- Traffic: 1.1k
- Sales: €416
- Expenses: €0
Lessons learned?
- I think one of the major wins was to build a very scrappy first version and start showing it to people who gave me some amazing feedback.
- Test everything 100 times. As someone with a non-technical background, even using no-code tools felt like a challenge. Zaps returned errors all the time, Softr logic too,... took me a while to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.
Bonus
Today, I'm launching at Product Hunt. I'd love it if you could take a moment to upvote the project there! I included a special launch-day discount in case you're interested in giving it a try.
Overall, amazing results for a first full month live. Way more than I expected.
Feel free to AMA.
Yes, David!
I've been waiting for this, congrats!
Love the newsletter strategy
Thanks! Can't do it without building relationships. Those mentions would've cost me hundreds of dollars otherwise.
Congrats! this is so good! I'm trying something similar with The Actions List, although it's definitely not as slick as yours!
Thanks this gives me some encouragement for a product that I built a while back which I use every day now. https://donedb.com
I love to hear an origin story! Makes me want to keep going with my idea.
sounds cool, and you have used the free version from all of those tools?
I still do!
cool job!
This is a great start – wishing you a successful launch!
Congratulations and thank you for sharing such a wonderful story with us!!
Such a nice example of building a product based on the pain points that you identified through your services. Congratulations!
Pretty amazing with no code!
Interesting and truly said create first version and test market..
Very interesting.All the best for your launch. How do you plan to scale?
If number of automations increase or data scales?
Hey,
Love your story :) Would love to interview you for my no-code newsletter! Interested?
Hey Kat, I totally missed this! Sure, I'd love to, let me know what you need : )
Curious where did you get your personal network from. Was it through your connections in social media platforms? I'm building my network myself, but still figuring out whether should I focus on LinkedIn or through blog (from blog I'll ask them to subscribe to my newsletter).
Congratulations! Definitely a good number to start with.
Just wanted to understand if you had a few initial signups you tested the product with or if you opened it for beta users to test out the product.
Also, please share the stats after the productHunt Launch. All the best!
If you can sell and build you're unstoppable. Congrats for taking the leap with no-code!
Congrats!
Did you look into any email providers to use instead of Gmail? If so, why didn't you use them?
I need to find some subreddits to post my product(s) 🧐
I almost thought you'd used Proton instead of Gmail. All iz well.
Congratulations! Hope to hear your next good news soon!
Nice one
Congrats David!, It's a nice start. I hope it gets better
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Congratulations! Glad to see an indie hacker making his way :)
Great job on launching your product and seeing some success (I myself just launched my mvp so this is really cool to see)! I wish you the best of luck with your Product Hunt launch, and congratulations on the progress you've made so far!
Thank you, Nathan!
Congrats! That's the indie hacker way and I hope you keep growing!
Thanks!