$2,000 MRR in one month!

Hey, thanks!

I'm going to be doing a big write-up for it, but I have a short blog post written about it here.

Basically, you need to test that you can get noticed at the channel. How you do this depends on the channel, but here are some guidelines:

• For 1-1 channels, reach out and ask to do an interview for a piece of content. It's a great way to explore a customer and their pain. At the end you'll have a great piece of content that you can publish, and you'll have made some friends in the industry. Or if you don't get responses, at least you know that the channel wouldn't have worked anyway.

• For community-based channels, post valuable content and see if it gets noticed! You can try a curated post, or you could write something original. The point is to see if, when you post something useful that's associated with the pain you want to solve, it gets noticed and appreciated.

• Some channels, like SEO, can't really be tested. But you can predict them. I would talk to an expert in this space if you're solely relying on SEO, because you don't want to gamble your product's success without at least having confidence that the channel should work out.

There's a lot more here and I plan to do at least three blog posts, but I hope that helps!

ditto, I'm always concerned with overpromising because some feature ideas are just not feasible, and you always run the risk of nailing down a market on a mock-up that you deemed too expensive (resource-wise) to build. Congrats and would love to hear your thoughts on this!

Hey Samuel,

Sorry to hear about your shitty HN experience. I don't like going there because it's a lot of negativity.

I think there's a difference, though, between pretending like the product doesn't exist and pre-selling without a product. When I pre-sold, I wasn't hiding the fact that the product didn't exist yet. I was just saying, "Look if you like this and want to get in early, you can pre-order and help shape the direction of it."

I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with going that direction.

Hey there!

Good question. I think that this is really more of a mindset thing. If you're thinking of pre-sales as the "cheap way out", then yea it would make sense that organizations wouldn't buy.

On the flip side, you're essentially selling consulting services when you pre-sell. You're saying, "I am making this software that you desperately want. If you pay me now you get to be part of customizing it to fit your exact needs. That's worth more than having the actual software built and ready to use, since your use case will be personally considered during development.

I did a podcast recently on Product Journey, and @benmann did a great job of helping me clarify my thinking around this. If a Google Doc isn't enough to clearly show the value, then you should go more in-depth.

But the point is to get just deep enough that you can get people on-board. That rarely is a fully-functional, feature-rich MVP.

I like this section from The Foundation's blog post on how to pitch the pre-sale:

Once they say it’s golden, it’s time to pop the question.

“Through this process, I’ve discovered that this problem is costing you thousands of dollars a month. This software would alleviate that loss in capital and save you time and frustration. If the problem costs you $12,000/year and I offered you a lifetime solution for only $6,000 one time, would you take me up on this opportunity?

If they answer yes, get the payment immediately, whether it’s a credit card or a checking account number. Then process it through an online payment system, which you will set up after you get your first pre-sale. If they say “no,” ask them why and write down every reason why they wouldn’t buy in. This will teach you the objections, which you will figure out how to overcome.

Thanks for the support Freddie! No plans of stopping anytime soon! Also, membership should be up within the next 10 days, which I'm hoping will eventually double the value of your subscription!

I posted a free article to each of the communities I thought would be good sources of traffic. At the bottom, I asked people to email me if they wanted access to the second article. Once there, I talked to them and did customer discovery, and asked for pre-sales.

You can see each of my conversations in the template here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/my-notion-template-for-validating-ideas-bce4497119

Hey Ruben,

Is this for the free issue or for the subscription?

I just checked and the stripe checkout seems to be working fine. Would you mind trying a different browser?

Here’s the link for convenience: softwareideas.io

Thanks Valerie! 100%

Thanks RJ!!

Thanks Diego! Also I just responded to your email - sorry about the deliverability issue

Yep, I paid over $1,000 for access to all the data 😅

Just me for now and the foreseeable future! My immediate goal is to grow to $10k MRR so I can go full-time on the project.

Hey thanks Fitz! Really appreciate that. Issue #8 drops later today!

Thanks Jason!

Thanks Akhil!

It was during the pre-sale phase. Once I started talking to people and asking for money up-front, I had 10 out of 35 say yes. I had told myself up front that I would be okay with 10 out of 100, so that was way better!