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Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week
- czue 6y agoHey HN. Author here. I wrote this up because I very hesitant to run a black friday sale for my product and was blown away by how much it impacted the business. Hopefully sharing the story (and lessons learned) might encourage others who are worried about the "ickiness" of sales to try them out. Also happy to answer any questions anyone has.
- forgingahead 6y agoNice writeup, and congrats on the success with the sale. I especially liked your graphic on the 4 buckets someone can be in when they encounter your sales pitch. Very cleverly presented, and definitely puts into context how little it matters if you happen to pitch someone who isn't interested. The trick is exactly as you write, find out whether they're interested first, and then only move forward if they are. Move on if they aren't! No hard feelings and it has zero bearing on the value or worth of your product or offering. Unfortunately, too many engineers project their own antisocial allergies onto the general population (myself included) and thus miss out on the greater business success that comes with being both a strong builder and capable seller.
- czue 6y agoThanks, yeah that "try to be a bit more markety than you are comfortable with" advice for engineers is probably my biggest takeaway and something I hope people get from the story.
- zweicoder 6y agoThanks for the inspiring post! I have a slightly unrelated question on your product itself. I'm curious how the model of SaaS Pegasus, where the source code is the core product, works? Is it possible for someone to just duplicate the same source code for multiple sites, for example, or share the code to their friends?
- Closi 6y agoAh, this framework looks perfect for a personal project of mine - shame I missed the sale! On the "single site" licence, how does this work if the site never goes live, or if I decide to use the framework on another personal project? Considering it's just a side project it's a big investment considering it might not even go live! :)
- czue 6y agoAh, sorry! (I did wonder whether to add a temporary extension of the sale timed with the blog release but decided it would be tacky... also I wasn't expecting the blog to do well!) Re: licensing, if you don't end up launching the first project you're welcome to use the single-site license on the second one and the software doesn't restrict you from doing that.
- huhtenberg 6y agoRe: Promoting through /r/django - enjoy it while it lasts, but you are playing with fire. Reddit subs are notorious for very quickly developing severe allergic reaction to anything of a self-promotion nature. A reaction that will go far beyond Reddit's standard 10% cap on self-promo posts [1] (which you are already in violation of [2]) and all the way to a permanent domain-based ban. [1] https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion [2] https://www.reddit.com/user/czue13/submitted/ https://www.reddit.com/user/czue13/submitted/
- czue 6y agoYeah, good point and definitely agree with this. I don't actually promote my product on Reddit, I just promote useful content I've created. My posts pretty consistently reach #1 on /r/django because (I suspect) I put substantially more time and effort into them than the average Django guide. I also try quite hard to be a good citizen and give back in a non-promotional way. Edit: I didn't know about those numbers/terms you added. Will take a look and update my behavior accordingly if necessary.
- abcxjeb284 6y agoI wouldn’t call your posts “self-promos”. You’re actually posting guides, not “2 lines of text now buy my product”. You’re already being a reasonable redditor.
- czue 6y agoThanks for saying this. Certainly how I feel, but I haven't read the rules...
- chowndown 6y agoI had my domain "banned" after arguing with a very self aggrandizing mod (and almost exclusively self promoting poster) in a particular sub. My offense? An instructional blog about how to scrape commonly requested data by many members of the sub.
- nickjj 6y agoI'm really happy to see him do well. He was a guest on the Running in Production podcast a few months ago where we talked about his SaaS template project and an app he built on top of it (Place Card Me which is mentioned in his post). He is a very friendly and super knowledgeable guy. If anyone is curious about his tech stack details we talked for ~50 minutes about it at: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/39-place-card-me-lets-you-create-printable-place-cards-online https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/39-place-card-me-let...
- czue 6y agoHi Nick! Nice to see you here, and thanks for the great chat :)
- darsoli 6y agoThe product seems to hit a really important use case (I have created my own SaaS products in the past, and subs, authenticaation, and permissions are huge PITAs). One suggestion - your homepage copy is very developer oriented and 'feature' oriented, whereas it could be less technical and more benefit-oriented. I think changing the copy / adjusting the focus could go a long way. See Outseta.com (I have no affiliation to them) for an example of a company that seems to be doing something similar to you but with more benefit-oriented, business/revenue-focused copy.
- czue 6y agoThanks for the suggestion! I agree with you re: the copy and being more benefit oriented. As is probably obvious I am a developer-first and a marketer a distant second. Also appreciate the pointer to outseta
- data4lyfe 6y agoFor Black Friday this year we tried A/B testing our digital product and saw a huge difference in conversion rates just on the subject line alone. It's pretty crazy how much a few words make a difference when it comes to people's inboxes getting pummeled with sales. [1] https://www.interviewquery.com/blog-ab-testing-black-friday/ https://www.interviewquery.com/blog-ab-testing-black-friday/
- enahs-sf 6y agoBeing able to test this and change on the fly when you get the data also makes a huge impact in terms of how much revenue you're able to generate during these critical periods.
- jamestimmins 6y agoUdemy is a great example of a company that devalues their product by offering so many sales. They constantly advertise that for a short time, courses that cost > $100 are selling for $12.99. But anyone who has visited their site more than once knows it's trivially easy to always pay $12.99, regardless of popularity/rating/length. The result is that instead of seeing them as a great deal, I view all Udemy courses as lower quality (whether deserved or not). Which is a shame, because some of their creators do a fantastic job and have a high quality products that could sell for Wes Bos-level prices.
- dlkinney 6y agoJCPenney, Macy's, and Kohl's were sued (successfully) for the same kind of perpetual sale racket. A "sale" is a "misleading advertisement" if the product never actually sells at the "original" price. Note that this is distinct from Amazon's stricken price, which is the suggested price. You'll see that none of Amazon's own products have a stricken price unless it's actually on sale. Since Udemy defines their own pricing, this forgiveness does not apply. They're ripe for a lawsuit, frankly.
- skinnymuch 6y agoGetting away with it until you’re worth $3.5B through fundraising is pretty good. Makes it seem like you shouldn’t care about the issue. It only becomes an issue when you’re already really successful.
- Chris_Newton 6y agoThis can be a tricky area to navigate at the moment, even if you’re an honest merchant. A lot of people in one industry I’m familiar with that has been badly hit by the coronavirus situation got together and started a movement to basically do discounts across the industry for as long as the virus lasts. It really is a sincere attempt to help customers who will in many cases be taking a hit themselves. This is a small world, and many of the businesses in it are small and might be on first-name terms with at least their regular customers, so I think there is a genuine sense of everyone being in it together at the moment. However, it does also make sense as a purely commercial decision. Some sales making at least a slight profit is clearly better than almost no sales at normal margins in the current environment, and it’s in everyone’s interests, including merchants’, to avoid losing customers for good because they can’t themselves afford to continue in the field after all this disruption. So, at what point does having a price that is X% below what you would normally charge cease to be that, because it has itself become what you normally charge? Is it deceptive to say prices are reduced by X% right now if you reduced them 3 months ago as the virus started to affect your market? What if it was 6 months, or 9, or 12? Does it make any difference, either morally or legally, if you intend (but presumably can’t prove it) to put your prices back to normal once the virus situation has been sufficiently dealt with? If so, does it make any difference how long that takes? What if you discover in time that your reduced rate is actually a better price point and you do want to keep it even after things get more back to normal? These seem to be surprisingly difficult questions at the moment, even if you’re just trying to keep your business afloat and help your customers out a bit.
- frankbyte 6y agoI wonder if the email format made such a big difference, maybe people just like to save money. They wanted it and got it cheaper. End of story. But I don't anything about this so I might be wrong.
- mr-wendel 6y agoI've developed, maintained, and extended web platforms that all could benefit from what Pegasus seems to do. These platforms have driven up into the million-per-month range of sales for consumer (and team!) based products. The vast majority of the platforms are trash, yet power jaw-dropping amounts of sales and usage. I think it perfectly reasonable that Pegasus has all the underpinnings these kind of platforms would use and greatly benefit from. What kills me is that hosted platforms of this nature tend to either: 1) completely suck; 2) have costs that only large corporations can afford and benefit from. That said... I'm curious what obstacles prevent the author from growing this into a hosted SAAS solution that focuses on enabling externalizing provisioning (e.g. via webhooks) and customized sales flows. It seems like there is a solid foundation in place!
- czue 6y agoI would love to make Pegasus a hosted platform, and it's certainly been at the end of the giant tunnel of work ahead of me in terms of the long-term potential I see. The most concise answer as to why I haven't done it is that I'm just one person, and I'm not smart enough to have figured out how to do it yet in the ~2 years I've been working on Pegasus. To me the huge difference between a code starter kit like Pegasus, versus, e.g. Shopify, Webflow, or any other hosted no/low-code product is that at the end of the day you end up with a codebase that is maintained by developers in a totally standard framework and language that they can do anything with. No code / low code tools are inherently difficult because they have to put in place this firewall/abstraction layer that hinders your ability to customize. The same thing that makes them great for simple things makes them bad for difficult things. So anyway, I think a hosted version of Pegasus should still give the power of anything you want to do with a Python/Django application, and I'm sure that's possible to do in a hosted way, but I find the prospect of building such a thing in a scalable, secure way quite intimidating.
- mr-wendel 6y agoMy hat off to you, all the same. I hope you find a way to pull it off. What you've already produced is impressive. Cheers for the great response to this and other comments!