First paying customer after 8 months! What's next?
Hey IH!
After 8 months, I have finally made my first dollars with my product Turbolink. It has taken a long time to get up to this point, so I would like to share with all of you what I learned and my takeaways from this experience. I would also love to hear your feedback to help me continue this journey.
Background
I started developing Turbolink on January 2nd, 2023. I wanted to make a platform that could help myself and other creators sell their products online.
My MVP was simple: A platform that let users create a paywalled link to whatever content they wanted. Their customers would create an account, pay using Stripe, and the content would be unlocked for them to view and consume.
My vision was to create an all-in-one, inexpensive sales tool that had payments and authentication built in, without the complexity or the need for users to self-host.
Problems
There were a few issues with this MVP:
- People didn't have a need for this tool. The platform I made was too niche, and nobody who viewed the landing page was signing up to start using it.
- It was hard to get users to sign up. In order to sign up, users needed to enter their personal details and bank account into a Stripe Connect portal. Not only does it take a couple minutes, but who wants to do this after they just found out about the platform?
- I didn't market the product enough. Instead of thinking about what other people wanted, I only thought about making a tool for myself. This was a selfish way of thinking, and I realized that it would never win any users.
- The business model would never be sustainable. Turbolink only took a 2 percent cut of the sales made by users, which doesn't amount to much even with plenty of customers.
Solutions
After four months, I decided to completely rebuild Turbolink as a more diverse, polished platform. I used SvelteKit which made the development process much faster. I revised the paywall feature and added three new features, following what people actually wanted.
I also completely changed the business model. Users can now create up to two links on the free plan, or switch to the premium plan to create unlimited links.
Conclusion
Although there is still lots of work to be done, I'm happy that Turbolink has gone this far. I am working on polishing the existing features and adding new ones, such as link analytics and an API for creating new links.
I would be thrilled if you tried out Turbolink and let me know what you think of it!
Also, any wisdom, knowledge or stories of how to get passed the "first dollars" mark of the indie journey would be awesome as well!
Until next time,
Jack
