This article is great. It’s not sensationalist like other articles of this ilk. It doesn’t have these unmentioned or glossed over factors like having an existing audience like you mention. And it has a level of tactical detail that I think others lack. It’s honest and shows perhaps a more realistic / representative sample of what it’s like to actually be a indiehacker. Thanks for sharing!
Great article and was interesting to hear the different steps taken and the associated success and failures. In particular, it seems that the most success of the product could be attributed to the competitor closing.<p>I wonder how the increased price impacted existing customers, especially when the price doubled at the end of the article? Were users notified of the change with the option to cancel? It seemed that a portion cancelled given the revenue: $750/month at $12 per user vs $1000 at $24 per user.<p>It would also be interesting to know how many new customers were there after the price change?<p>Did existing users have to agree to a new ToC when you made the price change or was this automatic, i.e. $24 taken out of their account the next month without their permission? What's the standard practice for this?
“I ended up trying out a PR service called Publicize for $500, which essentially has some lower level PR people come up with a pitch and then mass emails a list they have.”<p>I’ve always gotten these emails and thought of them as spam. Great to hear your experience using one for real
"Update 08/10/2020: this was written almost a year ago and I have since quite freelancing to work on my side project full time. As a result it is no longer a “side project,” but all the info here is still relevant!"
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I think it's worth mentioning that this has since turned into a full-time project (as the article mentions).
I'm in the same boat right now as author was in the start. Like, it's just a free service that I built as a side project that is clearly very useful to _me_ and a few users that absolutely love it, yet alot of people don't see it useful right now. Definitely learnt some lessons from this article.
Great article. Unrelated; I'm always interested in the corporate decisions solo developers make for their projects - did you start an LLC? sole proprietorship, etc. Care to expand on that if you can?