Reached $500 in sales in 1 week with my new product! (no AI)

[clmorgan]

Proof

$500 is not A LOT but for a new project... hey! It's the Matthew Principle for us, I hope - or at least the first step.

I have to mention there's no AI in our product, so that's the 2nd anti-hype signal I'm sending you.

Context: we are an eSignature tool - think: DocuSign competitor

Background​

We've built "in private" for some 8 months. While that goes against the common advice (and my natural predisposition too - my current $3.5k MRR (other) startup was validated with some 20-30 pre-sales before we started building), it felt like a more sensible approach because:

• We're talking about eSigantures, legality, etc
• We didn't initially know what our unique angle is, but...
• The core product would've been the same regardless of our unique angle

So we went ahead. The second we decided what our unique angle would be (2 months ago), we turned lean and went about launching.

Which brings us to... today! We did soft launch recently

Pre-launching​

Since...

• My brother and I (co-founders) are non-technical
• The product was being built
• We had those 8 months on our hands to... well... prepare

We've done this: we've built as much as we could for our future marketing. Results shared here (all the numbers, with proof)

P.S: We've even gotten 5 Wikipedia backlinks! Not that it would matter, but it might be a signal

Launching​

We're still figuring this out. But so far we've made $500 in (disclaimer: lifetime deal) sales!

As others have pointed out in the past, selling LTDs is easier than selling subscriptions.

But I think we need that in order to accelerate the product - and then get up to speed with competitors, so we can apply our unique angle even more

---

(Our product is this: SignHouse)

 

[jmunxong17]

@clmorgan Thanks for adding no AI, sick to death of seeing non novel OpenAI API wrappers

 

[daddydubya]

@jmunxong17 I was just thinking the exact same thing

 

[charids13]

@jmunxong17 Theres a lot of those wrappers. Do they make money, or are they just really easy to make?

 

[cayamaka]

@charids13 Both... for now. It's a hype that will die down soon and then the real AI products will emerge.

 

[jmunxong17]

@charids13 Yes and yes. But get your economics textbook out and check what happens to lucrative products with low barriers to entry in the free market. They’ll return to normal profits and many will die out.

 

[charids13]

@jmunxong17 All I heard was low barrier to entry and higher than normal profits.

 

[jmunxong17]

@charids13 Lol yeah, make the most of it imo

 

[brianehall]

@charids13 They did make a lot of money but I think the hype will be dying down soon. AI’s (let’s talk wrappers here not those pioneering new models) gone through a similar hype cycle to crypto:

High barrier to entry > First entrants make a ton > infrastructure gets built to make building these products easier (APIs, models-as-service, vector databases etc.) > huge influx of new products filling every vertical possible, everything makes money > incumbents incorporate features into their products > lower barriers to entry > people start shouting at each other that they’ve copied ideas and can no longer make money

AI-wrappers are at the low barrier to entry part now. Embedding AI in your apps will be expected in the next year, not a ground-breaking feature that prints cash (it’s why there’s a ton of lifetime deals going on with these products, smart founders are cashing in on the hype and not dreaming of $M exits). Those with highly innovative products or niches will win with wrappers - as will developers and consultancies.

 

[irishamerican4christ]

@clmorgan Title correction: "reached $500 in sales in 8 MONTHS and one week". And now we're trying to use a kinda fake post as marketing. Don't get me wrong, this is great progress, but a bit cheesy.

 

[cayamaka]

@irishamerican4christ So if you time a 100 meter sprint .. it's the time of the sprint + all the time spent training for the event?

 

[irishamerican4christ]

@cayamaka Nope, it's just the convention that matches the context. For startups, it is generally the time from when you start working on the idea to when you get revenue. And, in this case, my feeling was that OP was actually trying to market, rather than share his sage wisdom.

 

[cayamaka]

@irishamerican4christ Im with you on the feeling of a 'hidden' PR push. But dev time and going public I really don't think you can combine the way you did.

 

[seekinghispresence]

@cayamaka Thank god running a business and running are two completely unrelated things

 

[clmorgan]

@irishamerican4christ We didn't have anything for sale for 8 months

 

[cayamaka]

@clmorgan I'm not a big fan of name and shame competitors, but you have chosen to make it your absolute main point? Is there a reason for that?

 

[clmorgan]

@cayamaka We've got inspired by https://usefathom.com/ and https://plausible.io/ - plus there is some negative sentiment with *some* smaller players about DocuSign

 

[jbb2]

@clmorgan This cost you $100,000 to make yea?

 

[clmorgan]

@jbb2 I'd say less than that *to build it*, technically speaking

 

[jbb2]

@clmorgan Hey I checked your site, I think you should trim the demo video down, the video is 9 minutes and alot of that fumbling with the ui, I would make another take and make an imaginary real world example like signing a contract for cleaning services or something, quickly mention the additional features but you want the demo to go from a to be in a much shorter time, you are 100k in the hole but you have 3k mrr, your job now should be fine tuning your funnel to get sales.