🦄 First User Fridays Issue #5 - How Sukh got Launchman its first users
The Story of how Sukhpal Saini was inspired to build Launchman and how he found its first users.
Hey all! 👋
Been in build-mode lately, growing the database of W3Design, a web 3 design pattern library. Haven’t been active on Twitter cause’ of this and I think I need an accountability buddy to share experiences with on a more personal level. There’s this community I discovered last week called Ramen Club that does just that (not sponsored!). 😅
That said there are perks to working alone imo cause’ I think it helps to really do deep work. To each their own I guess.
This week I had a really awesome and insightful convo with Sukhpal, learned a lot about programmatic SEO, how to price products on launch, and some strategies on how I’ll be looking for users for my own projects.
Hope this helps some of you, now let’s get started! 😁
First off, can you tell us a little about yourself?
Hey, my name is Sukh. I’m from Toronto Canada. Been working as a Full Stack Developer for the last 5 years. I also build side projects (28 to date) but none have ever really taken off like I would like them to, except Launchman. I started building Launchman 3 months ago and got the MVP to $5K revenue to date.
That's awesome man, I'm very jealous of full stack developers, you guys can literally build anything you want.
It’s definitely a great skill to have. The best thing is it can be applied to any industry.
What is the product you want to talk about today?
Launchman (launchman.com) is a Programmatic SEO builder built specifically for SaaS startups to get more organic traffic from Google.
Now based on the feedback/insights from the MVP, I’m building a V2.
What sort of updates are you bringing with the v2 launch, can you share some or is it hush hush haha.
The V2 will move from being a generic Airtable -> Website builder to being a full platform for Programmatic SEO for SaaS startups. The currently planned features include:
🤖AI Rewriter - Writing content for 1000s of pages is a cumbersome tasks so Launchman will generate variations of the same sentence using AI.
💡In-build Best Practices - Programmatic SEO is VERY new so there’s not a lot of education, best practices on how to actually build good programmatic pages that rank. With v2, you will be able to do full site audit and get insights on what things can be improved to get ranked better - thin content, not enough internal links etc.
🔗Automatic Internal Linking - Internal Linking is the key to Google actually indexing your pages. Launchman v2 will do this automatically based on your data so they don’t mark any of your pages as “orphan”.
Nice wow these are huge product updates!
I'm especially interested in the best practices and internal linking! Right now I have no idea how to do programmatic SEO but for founders I've talked to, SEO's a big deal and huge source of traffic for their businesses.
How did you come up with this product idea?
Over the last years, I’ve built a ton of products. Being a developer, it’s easy to see something working and try to replicate it.
I did this ~28 times and none of them ever generated any real revenue. The trouble always was that I could build a product but had 0 idea about how to market it. This is something EVERY developer struggles with. Too much time coding, not enough selling.
I tried everything from posting on social media to paid ads but it didn’t sit right with me. The first problem was it was hard being consistent - being on top of social media is a job of its own, and the other thing is you have to invest in the money for paid ads. Neither I could afford.
When I started learning about SEO, I saw that you can write, rank, and stay there for a longer period time (get consistent traffic) + people come to you so they’re easier to convert.
Once this was clear to me, I saw an immediate opening for a tool that can more or less automate the boring task of writing 1000s of articles and having to keep them up to date.
Very cool man. 28 is a lot of times to try and build an earning product, i'm only at the 8th mark and it seems a bit scary still and tiring, so I can totally relate..
Also I love how your story's a bit like peter levels haha, try and try until something sticks!
Yep, I think that’s the best way to do it. Do a project a month until one of them works. Funny enough, the one that works will be super easy to see because people will jump head over heels to get it from you.
Dude this. I’ve had my first glimpse of this with the product im working on right now! Really excited since it's obvious once you see the signs.
How were you able to find your first customers?
I had the target of getting first 10 customers when I first launched the MVP.
My first customer came after I posted in a SaaS FB group. I put up a small demo video asking for people to comment if they wanted access. ~13 people responded but only 1 of them ended up paying.
The next couple were my Indie friends - Anthony Castrio from Indie Worldwide being one of them.
This gave me a lot of confidence so I started tweeting about it. I would get DMs of people wanting to try the product, get on a call, and get them to close. Word of mouth and Twitter’s Build in Public is now my major traffic source.
From 13 people that's a pretty high conversion rate I'd say!
I was very surprised when the 1 did convert.
It's a really great surprise probably ahah best gift an Indiehacker could have hahaha.
Yep exactly.
Would you say that a video demo especially helped, instead of just a text post?
Because not a lot of people know about what/why programmatic SEO is, I decided to do something more visual. In hindsight, a text post would have worked too but I would just have to get on a ton more calls. The folks would have no idea what the product is, how it can help them. With a visual, they already have some ideas based on their business and it’s easier to get them onboard.
Got rid of the educational friction so to speak.
In that post did you disclose your prices initially or felt around the interviews to see how much people would pay?
I already had the product and wanted to see how other businesses would use it. Instead of doing extensive interviews around pricing, I just decided to put an offer together - 1 site for $10/month to see how it would be received. Had 0 problems with the pricing. People were happy to see that price tag. Over the month, I ended up increasing it to $20/month and saw no churn.
Very awesome, thanks for this pricing tip, cause at first I've been thinking that pricing it a bit affordable might let the product be perceived as cheap?
I can make arguments for both sides but personally because it’s a product in a brand new category, I wanted to see if 1. people get the importance of it 2. They wanted to use it. Once these two were established, picking a price point would be easy.
I would say if your product is in a category people already know about, like a new email marketing tool, then it makes it to do extensive price discovery. You already know that businesses pay for email marketing so it’s a question of how much.
A really good of doing price discovery is what Steph Smith did where you do staggered price blocks like:
First 10 sales at $10
Next 10 at $20
Next 10 at $30
This way you learn the price sensitivity for your product very quickly without having to do a lot of calls + you prompt people to make a binary decision right now. Should I buy this rn at low price or wait for it to get better but more expensive.
Can you share other ways of how you find your customers now?
I’ve been deep in development for the last little bit, will start marketing again starting next month. I’ve been planning to pitch founders directly over Twitter DMs by building a sample project for their business and showing them how it can bring them more traffic.
Any reason that you’re taking this approach over a more low touch strategy?
Yep, for launchman that’s the best way right now.
I can talk with customers more directly and hear their needs/reasons they would or wouldn’t use the product. By going low touch, I wouldn’t receive this feedback.
Over time, I’ll build a content repository, more Twitter presence to make this process a little easier.
Okay love this, makes a lot of sense too, it's sort of a two-pronged strategy, sell and get feedback and use it for the next sales pitch.
Yep for a new offering, you have to be present in the sales cycle.
By content repo, do you mean which words your interviewees have used and reformat it for ad copy?
I mean more educational content, blog posts, case studies. This way someone wanting to learn about the space, best practices will ultimately stumble on the product.
That also makes sense since it takes more time for a content repo to yield results, with 1-1 it's immediate and very concrete for iterations.
The features you've shared for the v2 launch, any reason for those features specifically?
Users have asked for them specifically + what I am already observing from industry SEO experts. The ideal result for the customer is to generate more revenue. That’s the entire point. I want the v2 to do exactly that.
Can you share an approximate of how many users you currently have?
80 free accounts, 13 paying.
Can you share your current revenue numbers?
Total revenue is $5K which includes product + my consulting time. MRR is $195.
Very cool, congratulations for that man, hoping to reach that also for my product!
Lastly, do you have some insights that you can give founders who are just starting to look for their first users?💡
Do 12 products in 12 months as soon as you can. I guarantee you that you will find that 1 thing that works.
That's a marathon for builders, an exciting challenge too.
Where can we go to learn more about you and your projects?
I’m most active on Twitter at https://twitter.com/thisissukh_. if you want to learn how to build a SaaS, check out saasbase.dev too.
Thanks for the time and thanks for the insights Sukh!
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That’s it thanks for reading everyone! See you next week! 👍