I built a thing
I was minding my own business and scrolling X (formally Twitter) when I encountered a post from a designer that put subscriptions logos on top of a calendar month. The UI/UX was stunning! People were loving it and the post got a lot of likes, replies and basically a lot of engagement.
Right then and there I decided to do a thing - build it. I limit myself to 1 month to release an MVP and see if people are liking it and decided that the pricing model should be a “pay once own it for life”, because it’s kinda funny to pay subscription to monitor other subscriptions.
The technology I chose to do it is a Chrome Extension, because I can store your data locally and don’t need a server (help me with the pricing model of paying once) and I can inject a button to your Gmail and get the subscriptions data from the receipt email (it also good timing).
I was off to the races, and it’ll not be an understatement to say that I underestimated the amount of work I thought would be required. Nonetheless I finished the Extension and the website a few days before my deadline and I was thrilled!
This is my first product that I’m launching, charging for it, and actively searching for customers. I was a true indie hacker / solopreneur now. But how do I get customers? How do I tell the world about it?
I got back to X and started asking people, joined indie hackers communities, started to follow some solopreneurs and read their posts, and then I realized that distribution is really hard, maybe even harder than building the product.
I started writing replies to posts about related topics and insert my extension if it’s appropriate. I listed my extension on product hunt, betalist, chromehunt, microlaunch, uneed, dealhunt, pitchwall, tinylaun.ch, launchingnext, and saashub And I got a few sales 🥳
I also added the website to other platform, to get backlinks. Like land book and dribbble.
The sales were the fuel to keep me going. Every email notification about a new sale was a celebration. I can’t describe the feeling of someone paying for my product. But there was one thing that bugged me: I was out of ideas about features and updates. Sure, I caught a few bugs and fixed them, but what’s next?
And then the ideas start to come to me, from paying users, in the form of feature requests. I was so happy I got to work immediately and hammered most of them in a week! Even updated the website to reflect some of the new features.
Where am I going from here?
- Keep finding free directories and launch my extension in them.
- Working on the website SEO.
- Find Subreddit and Facebook groups to post in (I’m mainly focused on X in my personal life so most of the traffic comes from there at the moment).
- Will add a 7 days trial.
- And I have one other big idea for the product that I’m considering implementing but not sure yet.
To all of my readers that want to support and buy it, here is a 10% discount code for the first 100 users: BLOG10
The link to the product: https://subwatch.co
The link to the chrome webstore: chrome webstore