Successful launch, made $0

I worked on SVGX, a desktop tool for managing SVG assets, for the better part of a year, and last week I launched it on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/svgx

Here are some of my thoughts on why I consider it a success, despite not making any money.

Why no money?

While building the app I often wrestled with questions like "what should I charge for it?" and "should I even charge for it?". It would have been a pay-once-own-forever scheme, but I just couldn't decide between charging $20, $3, $8, or even $1.

Eventually I decided to give it away for free, despite putting a lot of time and effort into it. This simple decision freed me mentally and removed the anxiety of trying to find the perfect price point.

I built the app primarily for myself, so sharing it with the world for free doesn't cost me anything, but has the potential to help others with a similar problem to solve.

It probably sounds naive, but having a relatively small following indicated I would be better off in the long run if I generated some goodwill before attempting to sell a product.

Finally, I felt that getting the app into more hands was more important than the small amount of money it might have made.

Now, there is one thing that I'm charging for: the source code. I have a way to sell access to a private GitHub repo using Gumroad, so I thought I would try this business model to see if it works.

So far there has been zero interest in the source code, and it's not hard to see why:

• a very tiny subset of users are actually interested in the code itself
• the app is built with Svelte and Electron, so the stack is pretty niche
• the price might be more than most people are willing to pay ($20, but I offered a 30% off coupon at launch)

Why success?

All things considered, I am happy with the launch and declare it a success. The trick is to keep expectations very low from the beginning.

SVGX is my second launch on Product Hunt. To give an idea how niche the first product was, it only ever got 3 votes. In contrast, SVGX got 145 votes the first week, and while it didn't make the daily or weekly top charts, I am thrilled with the attention it got.

In the end, I leveled up my product launch experience, and gained a handful of new Product Hunt and Twitter followers.

I am a little blown away by the number of people who downloaded it: 475 for the Mac client, and just over 300 for Windows. This makes me wonder in retrospect if I should have charged for it after all.

I won't lose any sleep over it, though. I am fortunate enough to have an ever-growing list of 100+ ideas, and I may just charge money for my next one.

A product launch doesn't always need to make money in order to be termed a success. I gained: experience, exposure, insight, new followers, and confidence to build more products.