[HN Gopher] Show HN: An Experiment with One-Feature Tool Made $7...
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Show HN: An Experiment with One-Feature Tool Made $7164/Mo
My Raw Story on coming up with an idea, building and growing it.
It's very detailed, with the purpose of giving another founder an
insider look at one way of doing it. In January I launched an
indexing tool called Index Rusher, that forces google to index your
pages quicker, to get ranked for SEO faster. This whole project was
something I needed myself since I got over 20 products and paying
for an external one would simply cost too much. My initial idea
was that I would just build an internal tool for my use, that has
only 1 feature. No UI really, just 1 button. In the middle of the
process, I realized that I could actually run an experiment and
launch this tool publically with just one feature. Super simple. I
hired a dev who spent a month building it. It looked super easy at
first, but it turned out there were so many hidden snakes on the
way. Troubles with sitemaps, google APIs, and more. 1 month later
I launched it (In Jan). The launch didn't go so great, but I didn't
really have high hopes. Because nobody knew about this tool, I had
no traffic on the site. I still sold several licenses, which made
me pretty happy, it felt like validation, people needed it, even if
it solved such a narrow problem. At that point, I declared my next
stage of the experiment: Growing the traffic and revenue. I've
done a number of growth hacks in the next 30 days, resulting in
over $7k in revenue, but what's more important, the traffic on the
site has grown a lot and stays high and growing. This means I've
done a pretty good job on organic growth too, which will just
accelerate over time. Here is what I've done: Cross-linking. I
added links in the footer on my other products. This is one hidden
effect of having multiple products. Each may serve as a lead magnet
for the other one. In my case, I have the same audience for all my
tools, people who love one of my tools often check out the rest.
Being visible on social media. I monitor discussions around the
Google Indexing topics and add my replies there. I don't just spam
in replies with my tools, in most cases, I genuinely answer and
bring value. If my reply gets a reply, I may include my URL in the
next reply. Social Media and Blog posts. I've posted several posts
about Growth, where I mentioned Indexrusher since I actually use it
for me Growth. Traffic from Directories. This one was the top
channel of growth. Over 50% of the paying users arrive from web
directories. I used a tool that listed Index Rusher on 100
directories & websites. Sponsored listings. I "sponsored"
directories to place a banner for my tool on the top of their
page/list. Seeing the effect of "boosted" listings. The ROI was
good. About $2.5k of revenue came in from these boosts. Affiliate
partners Made a deal with a few affiliate partners who reached out
to me on X and he drove a decent amount of traffic and paid users
to me since he was launching on PH the same week, The total
economy of the project now Dev costs: $1500*3=$4500 - Godaddy
domain: $9 - hetzner Hosting: $10/mo - landing page on Unicorn
Platform: $9/mo - cost of sponsorships: $800 - Affiliate payouts:
$150 - listingbott for backlinks: $499 - seobot ai for blog: $99
- Stripe fees: $654 Total cost: $6711 Revenue: $7164 Profit:
$453. So, it's profitable! My next steps will be 1) Promote it to
100,000+ users of my Website Builder and reach out to more website
builders and pitch them the integration 2) Increase Word-of-mouth
effect 3) Perhaps try some paid ads 4) Add automated emails to
remind about Index Rusher users who signed up but didn't buy 5)
Launch a directory as a lead magnet 6) Launch little free tools as
lead magnets 7) Product Hunt launch 8) AppSumo launch I will
make a new post in a month describing how it went.
Author : johnrushx
Score : 43 points
Date : 2024-02-21 20:43 UTC (2 hours ago)
| brian_herman wrote:
| Good job keep it up!
| johnrushx wrote:
| thx for support Brian
| Igor_Wiwi wrote:
| have you built the seobotai as well?
| johnrushx wrote:
| yeah. I ended up building most of the tools I needed to get
| more productive on doing the growth and marketing for my
| products. I'm a solo bootstrapped marketer. So I had no choice.
| ahstilde wrote:
| Do you cache already submitted pages?
| johnrushx wrote:
| yeah. I save them all in database to keep track of the stats.
| Submitted pages might get deindexed by google later, so I keep
| checking their status every day.
| akamaka wrote:
| Great write-up!
|
| Does your pricing plan ("Lifetime Deal") mean that you will make
| more money up front, but potentially have to spend more years
| later to maintain the service even after new signups have
| declined?
| johnrushx wrote:
| what you say makes sense for corporate software, where LTV is
| high and customers stay with you for years or even decades.
|
| In microsaas b2b that targets other startups, the average
| customer churns in about 4 to 18 months.
|
| So let's say I priced my tool at $15/mo, as many of the
| competitors. This would mean that an average user LifeTimeValue
| would be somewhere around $199. Which means that selling it for
| $199 upfront actually is a better option for me, because I get
| money upfront and it's exact same LTV.
|
| Some users will pay 199 and stay with for 10 years. But some
| will close down their site in 3 months. So in average, I will
| get same outcome.
|
| When it comes to sign ups, if the startup is healty, its signup
| must be growing Month over MOnth. Not just as cumulative value,
| but in general, if I had 10 sign ups this month, I must get at
| least 11 next month, to maintain 10% MoM growth and double
| every year. In this case, my revenue is not recurring, but if
| you zoom out and look at the numbers, then it's like a floating
| window, I get growing monthly revenues, even from LTDs.
|
| So long story short: revenuewise, there is no difference
| between $199 LTD or $19/mo. But marketing-wise, LTDs are far
| better, I stand out from all the competitors now and my growth
| rate is pretty high.
| akamaka wrote:
| That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the detailed answer!
| jaflo wrote:
| What tool did you use to submit to all of the directories?
| johnrushx wrote:
| it's https://listingbott.com
|
| disclaimer: I'm the author of this tool too
| Shadowmist wrote:
| > Being visible on social media. I monitor discussions around
| the Google Indexing topics and add my replies there. I don't
| just spam in replies with my tools, in most cases, I
| genuinely answer and bring value. If my reply gets a reply, I
| may include my URL in the next reply.
|
| I see what you did there.
| jaflo wrote:
| Worked on me!
| johnrushx wrote:
| to be honest, I exchange value for attention. That's what
| good internet is about. Im not just promoting stuff for
| my own sake. My key goal here is to give as much value as
| I can first. If I earn respect this way, then I'm allowed
| to share my tool.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| You should make this an actual clickable link just FYI, as it
| will then serve as a backlink when HN renders it via an <a>
| tag.
| johnrushx wrote:
| is that allowed? don't wanna get banned :)
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Yeah, it's fine, since others have asked for the link.
| bombcar wrote:
| Wait <a> tags work on HN? I thought it just auto-linkified?
|
| Like so: https://listingbott.com
| satvikpendem wrote:
| The generated HTML on HN when you inspect the source is
| like so: <a
| href="https://listingbott.com"
| rel="nofollow">https://listingbott.com</a>
|
| It is a nofollow link so not sure how much SEO juice
| you'd get out of it, but if I google Index Rusher right
| now, I get this HN post as the second link, where the
| first is the product's website itself.
| johnrushx wrote:
| really? How does it get indexed by google so fast? posted
| an hour ago. pretty cool
| ionwake wrote:
| great write up! Thanks
| johnrushx wrote:
| you're welcome
| Arubis wrote:
| A little tangential; were you satisfied with the dev work? Did
| you use a marketplace or an existing connection?
| johnrushx wrote:
| it's an existing connection. I've never tried to hire on a
| marketplace. The prices are either insane. Or if you go for an
| affordable price, then the quality is super low.
|
| I you need advice, I'd say: find some folks on twitter who
| build MVP on fixed price. They care a lot about their
| reputation. Also you can see on their twitter feed how they
| communicate and etc
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