

โThe journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. โโโโLaoย Tzu
Two months ago Place Card Me, my little place card making website and SaaS-building testbed made its very first dollar.
Two months later, towards the end of October, it passed another major milestone: $100. With a few more sales it will pay back every dollar Iโve put into it so far!
Moreover, if you ignore the Y-axis, the revenue growth looks great so far:
Iโm now convinced that barring any surprising unforeseen changes (like Google deciding to kill my search rankings or a new heavyweight competitor jumping in) it will be feasibleโโโif not easyโโโfor the site to become a steady source of passive income, maybe one or two hundred dollars a month.
Pretty great, right?
Honestly, I am stoked. There were many times where I thought I was going to fail to earn a single dollar in six months. That would have beenโโโamong other thingsโโโsuper embarrassing for me.
At $100/month, I can cover all my hosting costs, many of my lunches, and maybe even the occasional night on the town!
The rest of this post describesโโโin possibly more detail than necessaryโโโexactly how that happened. And while a lot of what follows is specific to my own product, I hope the lessons and thinking can help guide and inspire others to continue to grow their SaaS businesses.
So it took me 5 months and 200+ hours to earn my first dollar. By comparison getting to $100/month was a cakewalk.
These were the major contributing factorsโโโin approximate order of importance:
Thatโs it!
Iโll talk more a about each of these below.
Many months agoโโโwhen I was first trying to figure out how to market my siteโโโI read Traction.
The book outlines 19 different channels you can use to get traction for a product, and provides a methodologyโโโcalled โbullseyeโโโโfor picking which ones to focus on. I found it to be super helpful in coming up with my overall traction strategy and Iโd highly recommend it to anyone that isnโt sure where to start with marketing and selling their product.
When I did the โbullseyeโ exercise I selected SEO as as the number one channel to pursue. As a result, I set about learning SEO and adapting a strategy that worked pretty well. Through the techniques described in that article, I was able to slowly target certain keywords and phrases until my site started climbing the rankings in search. And as this happened, I started getting more and more organic traffic until eventually making that first joyous sale.
However whatโs important to realize is that that sale wasnโt a miraculous single-event. It was the eventual conclusion of very simple game of probabilities.
One of out every N visitors to my site will eventually make a purchase. So if that first sale came after N visits, then the next sale should come after approximately 2N, and so forth. Therefore, if the rate of visits went up (which it did) then the rate of sales should also go up (which it also did). Itโs just math!
So far, I believe that the biggest factor in my appโs increase in revenue over the last two months is simply that itโs getting way more traffic. More traffic = more sales, plain and simple.
As an aside, I now have enough data to know what my sales rate is and enough traffic to run A/B tests to try and move itโโโbut thatโs a subject for another timeโฆ
The second increase in revenue came from a completely new distribution channel. That channel was Etsy.
Early on in my research of the wedding industry I learned that Etsy was an absolute behemoth in the space. In fact, a significant proportion of brides (and grooms) will search only on Etsy when theyโre looking for things for their wedding.
Realizing this made me want to figure out how to get in on some of that Etsy action. The simple way to do thisโโโwhich youโve probably guessedโโโwas to create a shop on Etsy and sell my place card templates there. This did require building out some tech to support a workflow centered around someone purchasing something on Etsy, but turned out to not be too complicated.
Those orange slices in the chart at the topโโโthose are my Etsy sales. In September they were actually higher than my organic sales, though in October I toppled them with organic.
Unfortunately, I donโt quite know how to improve my organic reach on Etsy so the numbers seem to stay much flatter over timeโโโat least so far. If anyone figures out how to exponentially grow a shopโs Etsy reach, I suspect they could make a lot of money!
Also please let me know if you know how to do this.ย :)
The last thing I did to increase revenue was raise prices.
The way Place Card Me works is that you can use it for free, but certain templates on the site cost money. When I was deep in the trough of sorrowโโโwondering whether I would ever make a single saleโโโI dropped the price of all templates to just $1. After several back-to-back weeks of regular sales I decided to start bringing them back up.
Specifically I did three things:
The combination of these changes actually increased sales rates. I believe that was mostly a result of removing the free designsโโโwhich I suspect created a psychological effect of making people think that they โshouldโ have to pay for a design, and were therefore more willing to do so.
One last funny anecdote: charging for custom uploads was actually an accident.
When I introduced the change that made all designs paid, I changed the default behavior of the site in a way that inadvertently caused the upload workflow to also cost money. The way I found out I had changed it was getting notified that someone had paid for a custom design! Of courseโโโonce that happenedโโโI decided to keep the change in place. Custom design sales are now the most popular single template/option on the site.
Iโm quite happy to be at $100/month in revenue at the moment, but itโs still a long ways away from anything that might meaningfully get me on a road to passive income.
In the next installment of this series, Iโll talk about how I plan to try and grow that number by at least 10x to $1000/month. It should be fun! If youโd like to follow along you can subscribe below.
Edit: Part 2 is now out! You can find it here. You can still subscribe if you want though.ย :)
Originally published at www.coryzue.com.
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