I think you can learn a lot from seeing their sites (none are gorgeous). I’d also consider PPC to acquire customers, but perhaps you could have an alternative pricing model (per book, per month, per year, audio versions of the summaries.)
You could always offer a handful of “life-time accounts” to try and bump the short-term revenue enough that you can flesh out your library more (I feel like that might be a limiting factor for customer acquisition).
Feel free to reach out to me on twitter if you’d like to continue the conversation @ckluis.
Have you thought about trying to up sell the entire book at the end of each summary? (Might get a few amazon.com clicks with each summary.)
Do you know your churn rate and the lifetime value of each customer? I imagine it's too early, but once you have a good estimate you will know exactly what you can spend on adsense to drive more PPC traffic.
Like it. Let me share my story.
Six months ago i read articles how Buffer, Drip and ConvertKit started and got an inspiration to do a SaaS project.
I love reading and trying to hack the process using different tools and projects. Some of them worked, some not, but no one gave me back.
The question was: to make a reading habit? And i found an answer: bite-sized reading — 5-10 minutes a day.
Next steps:
— i bought a domain (https://bookcelerator.com/summary) for $12;
— hire a freelancer to craft summaries of books a want to read ($35/summary, $70 total): «Zero to one» and «Hooked»;
— created accounts on Mailchimp and Paddle (payment provider);
— and launched an automation.
It took me 10 days to read summaries by myself, broken down into 5-minute daily emails. Then i realized i really like the process and it helps me with my reading habit. I posted a link and my story to Facebook and Twitter and got first 4 clients from my network. Now Bookcelerator is $200 MRR in two months, has 5 summaries to read (i will post 3 more on every weekend).
The problem is i don't know how to grow to $1k to quit my job and make it the full-time project.