My little side-project is now making around $2500/mo MRR .

Here's:
- what I learned
- what went well
- what didn't go well

...plus some bits of advice if you want to launch your own paid product.

(thread)

/cc @IndieHackers @levelsio @csallen @patio11

First, a bit of context: https://pixelpeeper.io 

It's a mini-SaaS for photographers who use Lightroom. The price is $25/year or $49/lifetime.

I've been running it for 3.5 years now, but I don't work on it full-time. It's a nice extra income, but not enough to replace a salary.

What went well:

- I solved my own problem
- focused on a niche (photographers who use Lightroom) with no competition
- had good timing (Instagram's peak popularity) and a bit of luck
- used the boring tech I knew well, so I was able to move fast

What went well (continued):

- I built & launched the first (bare-bones) version in 2-3 days
- posted on relevant subreddits, got traffic & lots of press coverage immediately, which brought substantial SEO traffic
- iterated quickly enough to ride the initial wave of traffic

What didn't go well:

- I completely neglected SEO & content, which affected my traffic long-term
- picked a high-churn niche that's too small to grow the income
- early on, my prices were too low, which attracted high-maintenance customers
- didn't charge early enough

What didn't go well (continued):

- I spent 2-3 months building a macOS version only < 20 people used
- the product didn't work for everyone (people had to find photos that included metadata on their own), wasted traffic
- got way more press coverage when the product was free

My advice:

- launch early: people will ignore flaws if you solve a problem
- your customers probably aren't on HN & ProductHunt
- nobody cares about your tech stack (unless you build a tool for nerds)
- you'll always get negative feedback and that's fine

My advice (continued):

- those who won't ever pay are the loudest ones to complain about the price
- build a B2B, not a B2C product (but that's a whole another story)
- ignore all advice, every case is different, so do whatever *you* think makes sense

Feel free to AMA

A few people have asked how early is *early enough* to launch, so I though I'd show you the very first version of my product.

It's so basic that it hurts to look at now. No signups, no content: just the homepage and the about page. But it was enough to get the ball rolling.