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From an Airtable to $9.2k in Side Income
- mrhappyunhappy 6y agoNot a life changing amount but not bad. How much time would you say you spent on all of the promotion parts?
- sak5sk 6y agoHmm, good question. Hard to say really, but it is not a trivial amount of time. The launch itself was literally at least 20 hours. I did get 4 hours of sleep ;) But to promote the whole thing it probably took several days. Yeah that sounds about right. For me it is more than just about the money - I do okay as a consultant. There's just a somewhat of a special feeling when you create something - a product - and sell it. It's just not the same as providing a service. I hope that makes sense.
- peepopeep 6y agoThanks for the write-up! Im curious, how did you promote ph launch? Did you have a mailing list to let everyone know? Where did the support come from or was it just through luck?
- sak5sk 6y agoNo list. As I said in the post, I had very little audience. Most of the success is due to me randomly messaging my Twitter contacts and asking for their support. I messaged ahead of time (maybe a few hours before?) just so it wasn't out of the blue. Everyone agreed. Some were already customers (I made some sales before the launch) so they left honest reviews of the product. I think the other part of this being successful was the giveaway tweet, plus all the friends who just wanted to support me. I am really thankful they did!
- mrhappyunhappy 6y agoNot trivial at all! Yea, I know that sell your own product feeling. Congrats and subbed. Cheers!
- encoderer 6y agoThe life changing part is realizing you can make $10k from your own creative work.
- sak5sk 6y agoMy affiliate marketing background also tells me that if something is profitable, chances are you can scale it. So this is my goal - figure out ways to scale this thing. It's too fun to just drop now.
- drchiu 6y agoA lot of hard work, judging by your write up. Congrats! Tangential to this, I am noticing a lot of info product MVPs being built on Airtable.
- sak5sk 6y agoThank you! Yeah it was a lot, and I had some setbacks along the way .. neighbors house caught on fire, people died. Had a son born ;) Airtable is great, and a good way to quickly validate some ideas.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kordlessagain 6y agoStarted reading, hit the term "airtable". Looked it up. Another company brand. > One workspace.platform.source of truth. > Endless solutions. > Orchestrate powerful business solutions with a single source of truth. The only limit is your imagination. Give me a break.
- simonw 6y agoAirtable is worth taking seriously. They built a really good web/mobile/SaaS Access-style database product, which allows non-engineers to design and use a relational database. It's very well built, and it's having a big impact.
- yawnxyz 6y agototally. We're using it as a CMS and it's friggin excellent
- brokenkebab 6y agoObviously I'm not a target audience, but could you elaborate what your product is in dev terms? The text didn't enlighten me sufficiently.
- sak5sk 6y agoI assume you know what an airtable is - a glorified google sheets. The other part is information containing strategies to help a website turn more visitors into people who actually sign up and pay. There is a preview on the site itself, may make a bit more sense.
- txu 6y agoIf you're a front-end dev, you'd probably worked with PMs on building features that helps the product grow. This guide covers many of those features. If you're a backend dev, you'd probably been asked to create database tables to save marketing or business data. AirTable allows many business people to create tables and gather info , and selling info without involving backend dev. It will be interesting to see how the self-serve business tools (nocode) will affect the type of work devs will be asked to do in the future.
- aaronblohowiak 6y agoIt will make the work much more interesting, but potentially make it harder to break into
- lxe 6y agoIt's a list of tips and examples of how to change your site design to increase conversions.
- gbourne 6y agoEnjoyed your write up and journey. One idea I haven’t heard mentioned often is on Product Hunt give a lifetime subscription to users with a time limit of 24 hours. A great idea for early supporters. Also, I'm a big IndieHackers fan - a great community that really supports the start up community.
- sak5sk 6y agoThank you! Saw your comment on Twitter too ;)
- yodon 6y agoLooks like a great list. A couple questions about this sort of list: 1) Do you find there are optimizations that skew more important for Enterprisey products (which tend to have longer decision cycles and more stakeholders involved in the decision process) vs. Consumer products (which are frequently able to drive more impulse style purchases)? 2) If so, is it possible to sort or filter your list towards one direction or the other?
- sak5sk 6y agoEnterprise businesses definitely have longer purchase cycles and their decisions hinge on multiple people with multiple touch points. While Swipe is not really tailored to enterprise, it does contain some items that may help. You can sort the list by difficulty to implement, or anticipated outcome. I also added tags for the different types of pages you can apply the strategies to -- home page, landing page, onboarding, app, blog, etc...
- jiofih 6y agoA product about optimizing products, followed by a series of blog posts about making such product, making-of videos, and finally an ebook telling you everything about the launch of the product and how you can apply that to your products (hopefully real). Aren’t we all tired of these marketing treadmills?
- thomas 6y agoIt’s turtles all the way down
- nelsonenzo 6y agoI think the key difference is authenticity. This person admits they have a day job, they continue thier day job (at the moment), and they made 10k - not quite enough to buy a Lambo. If you were seriously considering launching a product, this looks to have some usefull information. Certainly looks better than the 'marketing 101' or 'seo for Google's books on Amazon.
- kyriakos 6y agoThis is absolutely right. Most of similar products sell themselves as experts in the field and try really hard to convince us that they offer some special magical recipe. This guy seems sincere about what he's giving.
- nicoffeine 6y agoFor most of the modern economy, it's marketing treadmills all the way down. The primary idea -- that a product will make the consumer's life better -- is what is being repackaged and resold over and over again. In most cases, consumers are buying the quick shot of dopamine they get when they swipe their credit card, not the product itself.
- dexwiz 6y agoThe fact that “shop therapy” is a term makes me shudder.
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- supergirl 6y agohow is it "side"? you have a full time job too? are they ok with side projects?
- geerlingguy 6y agoMaybe in an idiot, but reading this whole thing, I'm trying to figure out what 'an AirTable' is and why someone would sell access to one. Is it like a FileMaker database in the cloud? Serious question, since I've seen it mentioned infrequently and it sounds like it could be something neat, or just over hyped marketing like NoSQL was at first.
- celim307 6y agohttps://airtable.com/ https://airtable.com/ Think of a smartsheet or other beefed up cloud spreadsheet. It’s actually pretty decent
- sak5sk 6y agoAirtable is Google Sheets on steroids. The benefit of using airtable is that you can present a locked preview of the product, so the "view" is visible to everyone you share it with / or if you embed on the site like I did.
- johnnyg 6y agoI'm a grump but this isn't $9.2k in income, it is $9.2k in revenue before expenses and taxes. That said, you're out there doing the work, trying things and being transparent to others - good on you.
- sak5sk 6y agoFair enough. I don't have any expenses, everything I use is free. Gumroad DOES take a fee, so there's that. And taxes.. always taxes. Thanks for pointing this out!