🎉 5 month — 5 products — $5,000 revenue

It’s been 5 months since I left my job in March 2018 and decided to focus on making my own products full time for 1 hardcore year to get $1,000 MRR.

Since that time I launched 5 products that earned $5,000 in total gross revenue.

TL;DR

Details and insights 👇

1. AndreyAzimov.com $792

Since day one of my challenge I started a blog about my progress where I share openly all the data .

Also each month I feel up with a revenue table for each product.

I opened donations via PayPal and made Patreon page so anyone who likes what I’m doing could donate $2 or more to buy me a pack of ramen.

It’s not a software product but I include this into my products list because I put in a lot of energy in these articles so for me it counts besides, it’s making money.

Results:

Total traffic: 9,729 visitors
Traffic last 30 days: 1,280 visitors
Total gross donations: $792
Patreon current recurring donations: $132

Good:

Set a public goal and write regular updates makes me more productive and procrastinate less.
A lot of people have supported me. I didn’t expect that.

To Improve

A good article takes too much time. Sometimes, I spend 2–3 weeks to write one. Instead, I could be investing this time into making products. and perhaps I shouldn’t include so many details.

A web app that generates websites from Google Sheets. Making websites on Sheet2Site domain is free but a custom domain, chat, and analytics is paid for $10 / mo or $60 / year. You can read the full story.

Results:

Total traffic: 67,626 visitors
Traffic last 30 days: 5,300 visitors
Total gross revenue: $1,054
Current MRR: $66

Good:

The product runs itself! It’s been 4 months without any significant updates, no automation (I’m still doing all manually), no ads or SEO and it’s keep growing.

To Improve:

This product solves a wide range of problems. It’s covering too much of different audiences but it’s not good enough for any of them. I need to make it more niche and desirable to to specific people like Susana (fictitious name) from San-Francisco, who is doing affiliate marketing and customize Sheet2Site for her to LOVE it.

3. ProgressBarOSX.com $2,120

A Mac menu bar app shows you exactly how much % of the life, year, month and day has progressed. Price is $5 (single payment). You can read the full story.

Results:

Total traffic: 18,444 visitors
Traffic last 30 days: 1,199 visitors
Sales: 423
Total gross revenue: $2,120

Good:

This is my most successful product so far that went viral and made most of my revenue. It’s a great example when something very small and niche could be LOVED.

To Improve:

Whenever I launch my apps on Product Hunt, I get this spikes of traffic that are only one time results. I haven’t found another way to have a more stable traffic coming from there. Therefore, I am considering now submitting this app into the Mac App Store.

4. MakeOSXGreatAgain.com $1,029

A Mac app that stops annoying things in OS X such as update notifications, iTunes opening, plus others. Price is $9.99 (single payment).

Results:

Total traffic: 15,395 visitors
Traffic last 30 days: 4,675 visitors
Sales: 103
Total gross revenue: $1,029

Good:

The app name and the website

To Improve:

Spend too much time on it (2.5 month). Due to technical problems with hacking OS X and almost giving up. It was probably the toughest product to make.
Too many not related features in one product decrease its value. It’s better to make 1–2 good niche features first then 5
A lot of negative feedback due to the high price

5. PreviewHunt.com $7.5

A web tool that previews and prepares your Product Hunt submission. I made it together with Max Rovensky

Results:

Total traffic: 3,293 visitors
Donated (Buy me a coffee): 3
Total gross donations: $7.5 ($15 divided by 2)

Good:

My first mini collaboration with making products. It’s pretty fast to build products (this took us only 5 days) with a clear idea and a good developer who is x100 better coding than you.
A nice free tool that was made to solve our own problems was launched and it was liked in the Product Hunt community.

To Improve:

In my case, donation for products has never worked. Although, the goal was to make it free from the beginning so, is all good. This is more a reminder that if you want to make a paid product, you need to charge money for it and If you want to share something for free, make it free without expecting anything in return.

Conclusion

It’s an amazing feeling to work on something than makes me passionate. Some days I could work 16 hours on creating my baby product. In some others, I don’t work as much but I know that my babies are working for me and making me money. This much more fun for me than working in a office job where I would exchange my time for money.
I’m at $5,000 total revenue in 5 months, so $1000/mo in average total gross revenue. This is cool but I have a goal in MRR not in Gross Revenue.
So why am I making products with singe time payments instead of recurrent ones? Because the ideas that I had so far are pretty simple and are a fit for single time payments. To avoid procrastination and wait until when I will finally come up with a perfect idea for a product with recurring payment (or just add recurring payment on all of my products), I am making things that seem good enough to myself. I think it’s because I don’t have much experience yet (5 months). So I will keep making products to learn from each next and then the next one, and so on . Good ideas are born when you do, not when you wait.
I don’t know how to generate stable traffic to my websites. All my traffic comes from Product Hunt and the press. I am considering that need to learn basic SEO and use AppStore for my future products.
I didn’t validate any of my ideas. Just code and launch. I will reflect on whether I will need to validate before start coding and do validation learning first.

Follow my progress to $1000/mo. No spam. Here’s a sneak peek of what I’m working on next.

And follow me on Twitter

And if you’re feeling really generous, you can buy me a pack of ramen by sending $2 to my PayPal address

or become my Patron

Check what happened next 👇

The crazy story of how my first Mac app got acquired I’m sitting a room, holding my pen about to sign the biggest deal in my life. OMG! Just like in a movie