How RecordJoy got its first paying user.

It finally happened. I finally got my first paying customer ever for a SaaS product that I created, and it feels ~amazing~ !

I wanted to share with the community how I was able to monetize RecordJoy (https://www.recordjoy.com) and gain my first paying customer.

First, my cofounder and I decided to set a goal to get a paying customer within 30 days. This mentality enabled us to shift our focus from building blog content for SEO to focusing on things that would generate revenue.

Next, I decided to get a billing MVP up as fast as possible, so I decided to use a Stripe payment link. This took about 30 minutes to set up. The payment link is a lot faster and I recommend starting with it over doing a complete Stripe API integration. If i knew how easy it was to set up a Stripe payment link, I would have enabled billing much earlier on all my old side projects that eventually died before I got to monetize them.

I set the pricing initially at $29 for a lifetime membership. The goal was to test if our product was solving a pain that people would actually pay for so I didn't really give the pricing much thought. I figured I would keep lowering it until it hit 1$, and if no one still paid then I would have to think hard about continuing to work on RecordJoy.

Our plan was to limit access commonly features such as downloading videos or lower the amount of times videos could be watched unless a user upgraded to a premium account.

However, before I even implemented any feature gating, or a backend to track user premium status we got our first paying user! It was sort of bizarre, since all of the features were already free. Perhaps it was because I sold a lifetime membership that someone opportunistically thought it was a good purchase long term as we continued to add more features. We happened to launch on BetaList around the same time which brought a good amount of traffic.

After that, I decided to experiment with some popups that prompted people to sign up for the premium plan after they successfully uploaded a video and also added a promo code in the pop up.

If I were to summarize my learnings for others to read it would be to:

Step 1. Set a goal to get a paying customer in 30 days. This will keep you focused on revenue and not on things that may distract you.

Step 2. Start with a low effort billing mechanism, like Stripe payment links. Just add a link to a Premium plan in your header. You can manually track premium status using the email they enter in the Stripe payment link.

Step 3. Start with a lifetime subscription. Keep lowering it until someone pays.

PS: use code JOY29 to get a RecordJoy lifetime membership for only $29 :)