🎉 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

1. AndreyAzimov.com: $792
2. Sheet2Site.com: $1,054
3. ProgressBarOSX.com: $2,120
4. MakeOSXGreatAgain.com: $1,029
5. PreviewHunt.com: $7.5

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.

2. Sheet2Site.com $1,054

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.

🔮 Check my new project

Applicant AI — AI Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

AI Body Transformation — FAT2FIT

Web3 Jobs — Find a job in Web3 and join the future.

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

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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