From 0 to 25k€: First year as a solopreneur creating a scheduling app

Dear Indie Hackers,

I'm Julien, the creator of Scheduled.so. As a French solopreneur based in Reunion Island, I'm building Scheduled to simplify the tasks of content creators. With Scheduled, you can publish your LinkedIn posts directly from Notion. Launched in August 2023, it's been a year of learning and growing. I'm eager to share the top five lessons that have guided my journey.

1) Be different from day one

Two months before launching Scheduled, I started Split, a Buffer copycat. With AI's rise, I believed I could do something better. However, I realized I was reinventing the wheel. I introduced this first app to a handful of friends, but they all asked the same question: "How is it better than X?"

X represented market leaders like Buffer, Publer, Agorapulse and Hootsuite. As a solopreneur, I couldn't outperform these tools. After two months, I trashed it and started using Buffer.

Within two weeks, I identified the real problem. I'm a fan of Notion for centralizing and organizing my content ideas. I used Buffer solely to schedule and publish on LinkedIn, but found myself repeatedly copying and pasting (CMD+C / CMD+V)...

Eventually, I had to maintain content in Notion and Buffer.

That's when I found my unique selling point for Scheduled. Over 60 people had scheduled demo appointments with me in two weeks in August.

If I were to launch a new SaaS, my first goal would be to stand out.

2) Experience the problem daily

When I launched the Buffer copycat, I started with the idea that every solopreneur needs to promote their business, and content creation was key.

However, I hadn't considered my own usage.

After discarding my first tool and starting to use Notion and Buffer, I realized where the real problem lay.

Maintaining content on two platforms and the long-term switching between them was frustrating. It was a mental load I wanted to eliminate.

This became the first problem that led me to use my product.

Today, in developing my product, I stick to this principle. I identify repetitive habits or time-wasting activities.

A common problem isn't always obvious, yet there are many.

Take this feature, for example: scheduling the first comment on a post.

Anyone familiar with LinkedIn will tell you that including an external link in your post decreases its reach. The workaround is to add the link in a comment and mention it in the post: "See comment."

With Scheduled, you can automate this task.

Experiencing the problem daily and using your product to solve it allows you to prioritize and act quickly.

3) Lifetime Deal (LTD) > Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

LTDs are often underestimated compared to the pursuit of MRR.

Without an established fan community, it's challenging for a first product to become profitable with MRR quickly.

LTDs were a great way for me to generate cash, build a fan base, and sustain the first year.

In my first year, 70% of the €25k revenue came from LTDs. The offer evolved over time. Initially, the price was very low for beta users (€45), and now the offer is €250.

I believe it's essential to test different prices according to your SaaS development and understand what best suits your target audience.

For solopreneurs, I've learned three things:

(1) Start an LTD above €90.
(2) Ask for more than an annual fee.
(3) Have an offer between €200 and €300.

Some believe LTDs mean eventually working for free for your users. To me, there's something worse: churn.

With LTDs, you have grateful users ready to talk about your tool, give feedback, and support you.

4) Bet on no-code

Solopreneurship taught me how easy it is to get overwhelmed and struggle to prioritize what's essential.

As my SaaS grew, it demanded more of my time to evolve.

No-code was a great way to simplify the workload in the long run.

Initially, 70% of Scheduled's backend was managed by n8n. As a SaaS that publishes content on LinkedIn, I had no technical enjoyment in writing code to call various API endpoints.

On the coding side, I preferred spending time building a parser that fetches and cleans content from Notion. Once done, various n8n workflows are triggered to publish content, post the first comment, update the status in Notion, and refresh the stats, etc.

The major effort is in building the right workflow. Once it's running, the maintenance cost is very low. Just set up proper error management to be alerted and correct issues.

n8n has 3 advantages for me:

(1) It's open-source, and you can deploy it on Docker.
(2) The cloud pricing starts at €20/month; even now, I'm only using 30% of my plan's capacity (the next plan is €50/month).
(3) There's a community that has likely already encountered any issues you face.

Tools like n8n allow for quick execution. If I want to deploy on another platform like Instagram or Twitter, I just need to create a new workflow with a few connectors.

5) Riding on others' growth

Thanks to others' networks on LinkedIn, Scheduled took off in its first year.

Sometimes, it only takes one person with thousands of followers to mention your tool as remarkable. Your community grows, and so do your users and customers.

Once you understand this, you can implement actions to multiply this traction:

(1) Reach out to the right people by offering them a plan on your tool.
(2) Encourage referrals and affiliations.
(3) Collaborate by complementing your offer with someone else's.

When starting out with no traffic, leveraging others' growth is a fantastic short-term lever.

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In summary, the five factors that helped me go from €0 to €25k in revenue in 2023:

(1) Be your product's first customer and use it daily to meet your needs. A decline in personal use equals churn. This helps you understand what's missing to retain yourself.

(2) In a saturated market, differentiation captures attention and makes people curious. If the first people you talk to ask, "How is it different from X?" you're not different enough.

(3) Opt for lifetime deals to generate cash quickly and sustain in the long term.

(4) Bet on no-code to alleviate ongoing maintenance and execute faster.

(5) Target individuals with larger networks to grow faster.

My goals for this year are to reach €5k in MRR and delegate as much as possible to launch a new product.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I hope these learnings inspire you in your projects ✌️