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!

Glad you found it useful!

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.

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.

It would also be interesting to know how many new customers were there after the price change?

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?

Oh, I should have specified this. I didn't change the price for any existing customers. I just changed the price for new customers.

Yes, please do! Really highlights the impact. Great work Jack

“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.”

I’ve always gotten these emails and thought of them as spam. Great to hear your experience using one for real

Yep. I think PR can be effective but you really need to pay a lot for it. At the higher rates, PR people have connections they can leverage.

"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!" ----- 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?

Just did an LLC. Was the easiest option.

Can you try blog marketing next? like adding blog with "tips" it seems such blogs are industry standard, and I always wondered if they work

Yep. Going to try that along with general content marketing.

What was the reason behind getting someone prominent to post on Product Hunt on your behalf? Is there some benefit over submitting it yourself?

At the time, when a user submits to PH it shows somewhere for all of their followers. So if they have a large following, it helps. Think it still works the same but not sure.

You need to get a certain critical mass of upvotes early in your submission to get "featured" (which shows your post to random people who browse to producthunt.com). Easiest way to do that is to get someone with a lot of followers (either on ProductHunt or Twitter) to post on your behalf.

I think that person’s followers get notified. I get notifications when friends of mine post on PH.

Great write up. Would love to hear what it feels like to run your own product. Does it feel like it was worth the risk and effort?

Yep, it feels totally worth it. The product is something that I wanted to use myself and I use it just about every day, so just that makes it worth it.

Did you email a lot of reporters about your product?

How did you make the list of reporters to email?

Did you email them pre-made articles?

I emailed some reporters a while ago. Found articles about similar apps and then got their emails. I didn’t email them anything pre-made. I don’t think reputable tech blogs would want pre-made posts but I could be wrong.

The ‘200 million SaaS businesses in the world’ is a typo right? Where did that stat come from?

It's a hyperbole.