2020 Year in Review of a Part-Time Indiehacker
2020 has been my second year since I made my first dollar online as a part-time Indiehacker. I’ll go through my main projects, explaining some personal anecdotes and learnings. What you’ll read here are my humble stories and opinions.
The rise and fall of VoxRemover
VoxRemover is an online app that lets you separate vocals from instrumentals from any song you want. The business model is simple: one-time payment for downloading the full length of the files.
I released VoxRemover at the end of 2019, but the site’s primary growth has been through 2020. There hasn’t been any type of launch for this app on any site you already know, like IndieHackers, Product Hunt or BetaList. I launched it on Hacker News, but it got zero attention. I expected that since this project is based on an already popular open-source library. Sometimes adding a friendly UX wrapper to a tech tool can make you money but not that popular.
I tested the main idea using Google Ads for the first month. I invested around $1,000 and got back $747. During that time, I tried to make it profitable adjusting my campaigns, but I couldn’t.
Meanwhile, I was DDoS by one of my competitors. He was using a VPN while reverse engineering my site and a distributed network on DigitalOcean for the main attack. However, reviewing the Apache logs, the attacker made the mistake of connecting to my site for the first time without a VPN.
An IP from Lithuania. Mmm, interesting. At the time, I didn’t know who was behind the attack. So I checked on Google, who was in the space, and where they were based. Okay, the second result was based in Lithuania. Mmm, let’s make a quick search of the guy behind it. Okay, I found a few articles in the Lithuanian press regarding a trial where he was judged for blackmailing clients of a cosmetic surgery clinic after hacking the clinic’s database.
Some people just refuse to learn life lessons.
I stopped Google Ads and experimented with another marketing channel: organic search. I deployed a long-tail SEO strategy, and for the first four months, traffic and revenue were increasing daily. Peaking at 1,400 daily users and $94/day.
That’s it, I made it. I’ll be a full-time indie in no time. Moreover, I proclaim myself an SEO guru.
Oh boy, how wrong I was.
One day, waiting in line at my day job cafeteria, I checked the traffic, and it was way down than usual. After some research, I found that Mr.Google has made a core update on their algorithms, and my site just plumbed.
This felt like breaking up with your girlfriend. A broken dream feels the same as a broken heart. Maybe I am too soft. But really, businesses are risky, and one day is Google, and another is the market. Prepare for that.
Now I understand marketing efforts as eggs in a basket, don’t put everything in the same channel. Try to find at least two profitable channels for your project.
While getting a good traffic stream, I got the chance to A/B test conversion & pricing properly. Which made me realize that most problems I had before with my projects were traffic problem. How are you going to know how are you doing if you got 100 views last month?
- If I have 1000 views of my targeted audience and 0 sales, something is wrong.
- If I don’t manage to get a steady stream of, let’s say, 50 views per day, it means there is a problem with my idea or no way of finding a cheap marketing channel.
- If I have a business idea, I must have a marketing idea as well. I want to do X; how am I going to attract traffic? SEO, ads, a marketplace?
- If I have a marketing idea (something that I can do to attract traffic cheaply), what can I sell there?
Lately, I invested $978 on a new Google Ad campaign, thinking I knew more about Ads, and got back $400. You can call me a genius there, but I believe the main problem is that it’s quite hard to advertise a $5-$10 product on Google Ads and make money out of it, at least in the category I was bidding.
I am still struggling to rerank VoxRemover higher, and I haven’t found any other channel to get traffic cheaply. That’s some homework for 2021.
The viral launch of Tailwind.ink
One day I decided to train a neural network that creates beautiful color shades like the ones in Tailwind CSS and call it Tailwind.ink.
The model worked better than I ever expected, I wrapped it up in a simple HTML page and shared it on the Tailwind CSS Discord server. Some people reacted well to it and gave me some feedback. I implemented some suggestions, and I dropped the link on r/tailwindcss, where it was also well accepted and commented on.
I added some of the requests from Reddit because it felt like talking to my users. That thing I read on the $9 paperback books I buy on Amazon.
Without much thinking, I posted it on Hacker News. It went to the first position for a few hours and got 209 upvotes.
This is probably the closest I’ve been to being famous on the internet. People left incredible feedback, and they were sharing it on other sites.
I don’t know how much traffic that brought in because I didn’t add the Google Analytics thingy to the site. Once I installed it a few days later, I was getting an average of 50 hits per day.
I implemented new features and fixed some bugs, and it was time to launch it on Product Hunt. 355 upvotes and 3rd product of the day.
That brought substantial traffic, and it was shared in multiple sites across different countries and languages. Even some people bought me some coffee :)
The point with all this is that some ideas flow better than others.
If I drop Tailwind.ink on a Reddit or HN comment, it will be upvoted. Somehow this idea clicks in people’s brains, and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the popularity of Tailwind CSS, the design, the mix of buzzwords, or everything.
The mantra of “ideas are worthless, executing is everything” makes sense in most contexts. Still, if you share your idea on different platforms and nobody reacts to it, your proposition isn’t that good, or your target audience is elsewhere. Stop overthinking your copy, the best time to post, and the design of your landing. Of course, all of this matters, but at this point, it doesn’t matter as much as you think. Share your crappy page from the smaller to the bigger audience you can get. If it doesn’t feel like a snowball effect, you probably want to switch ideas. Otherwise, you’ll end up optimizing a local maximum.
How can I monetize this traffic? There aren’t enough visits to generate substantial revenue from ads, and I don’t see enough value at the moment for people to pay. So my idea now is to sell a premium Figma plugin that does the same as the original website, but Figma doesn’t have a marketplace yet, and I couldn’t find that much information on people selling Figma plugins.
I shared the plugin idea on r/FigmaDesign, and guess what — another hit.
Anyway, I created a prelaunch product on Gumroad, and I am still waiting to make the first sale. More than 100 views and no sales. Probably time to lower the price or discard the idea and give the plugin for free.
Homework for this 2021 is to translate this buzz into value, finish the plugin and, add some color accessibility features described in this post from Stripe.
The steady growth of Tuemilio
Tuemilio is a small SaaS based on a widget you install on your website to manage an early access list to your app. It was launched two years ago, and it has painfully slow but steady growth.
Now we are at $459 MRR after two years. That’s exponential growth, baby. In my defense, I’ll say that this has been done on the side without professional experience building software.
This year I deployed key features that were requested a lot, and I was neglecting, like custom email domains, an email builder, and a form builder.
I’ve been improving performance since MySQL isn’t that great for creating analytics dashboards. Increasing reliability with unit testing and some refactoring (there was some code smells that could kill cockroaches). I also improved the docs to reduce customer support.
In comparison to VoxRemover, Tuemilio needs lots of customer support. So think about it before idealizing SaaS.
Some homework for 2021 will be increasing prices due to the new features and some user’s comments saying Tuemilio is underpriced.
The word-of-mouth of LorcaEditor
My last project on the list is LorcaEditor, a grammar and style corrector for the Spanish language. It’s like a mix of Grammarly and Hemingway App.
I haven’t worked that much on Lorca Editor this year, so there aren’t many learnings here. I fixed some bugs and redesigned the landing page.
It has crossed 9,000 registered users, and its main growth channel has been what I suppose word-of-mouth.
At the moment, LorcaEditor is free to use, and the homework of 2021 will be to monetize it without disappointing the current user base.
If you are reading this, thank you for your attention. This year has been a little turning point where I can see working for myself sooner than later.
If you want to get in touch with me, you can do it on Twitter at @manceraio
Thanks again, and happy new year 2021.
