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Show HN: An Experiment with One-Feature Tool Made $7164/Mo

67 points by johnrushx ↗ HN
My Raw Story on coming up with an idea, building and growing it. It's very detailed, with the purpose of giving another founder an insider look at one way of doing it.

In January I launched an indexing tool called Index Rusher, that forces google to index your pages quicker, to get ranked for SEO faster. This whole project was something I needed myself since I got over 20 products and paying for an external one would simply cost too much.

My initial idea was that I would just build an internal tool for my use, that has only 1 feature. No UI really, just 1 button.

In the middle of the process, I realized that I could actually run an experiment and launch this tool publically with just one feature. Super simple.

I hired a dev who spent a month building it. It looked super easy at first, but it turned out there were so many hidden snakes on the way. Troubles with sitemaps, google APIs, and more.

1 month later I launched it (In Jan). The launch didn't go so great, but I didn't really have high hopes. Because nobody knew about this tool, I had no traffic on the site. I still sold several licenses, which made me pretty happy, it felt like validation, people needed it, even if it solved such a narrow problem.

At that point, I declared my next stage of the experiment: Growing the traffic and revenue.

I've done a number of growth hacks in the next 30 days, resulting in over $7k in revenue, but what's more important, the traffic on the site has grown a lot and stays high and growing. This means I've done a pretty good job on organic growth too, which will just accelerate over time.

Here is what I've done:

Cross-linking. I added links in the footer on my other products. This is one hidden effect of having multiple products. Each may serve as a lead magnet for the other one. In my case, I have the same audience for all my tools, people who love one of my tools often check out the rest.

Being visible on social media. I monitor discussions around the Google Indexing topics and add my replies there. I don't just spam in replies with my tools, in most cases, I genuinely answer and bring value. If my reply gets a reply, I may include my URL in the next reply.

Social Media and Blog posts. I've posted several posts about Growth, where I mentioned Indexrusher since I actually use it for me Growth.

Traffic from Directories. This one was the top channel of growth. Over 50% of the paying users arrive from web directories. I used a tool that listed Index Rusher on 100 directories & websites.

Sponsored listings. I "sponsored" directories to place a banner for my tool on the top of their page/list. Seeing the effect of "boosted" listings. The ROI was good. About $2.5k of revenue came in from these boosts.

Affiliate partners Made a deal with a few affiliate partners who reached out to me on X and he drove a decent amount of traffic and paid users to me since he was launching on PH the same week,

The total economy of the project now Dev costs: $1500*3=$4500

- Godaddy domain: $9

- hetzner Hosting: $10/mo

- landing page on Unicorn Platform: $9/mo

- cost of sponsorships: $800

- Affiliate payouts: $150

- listingbott for backlinks: $499

- seobot ai for blog: $99

- Stripe fees: $654

Total cost: $6711

Revenue: $7164

Profit: $453.

So, it's profitable!

My next steps will be 1) Promote it to 100,000+ users of my Website Builder and reach out to more website builders and pitch them the integration

2) Increase Word-of-mouth effect

3) Perhaps try some paid ads

4) Add automated emails to remind about Index Rusher users who signed up but didn't buy

5) Launch a directory as a lead magnet

6) Launch little free tools as lead magnets

7) Product Hunt launch

8) AppSumo launch

I will make a new post in a month describing how it went.

47 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] thread
Igor_Wiwi
have you built the seobotai as well?
johnrushx
yeah. I ended up building most of the tools I needed to get more productive on doing the growth and marketing for my products. I'm a solo bootstrapped marketer. So I had no choice.
ahstilde
Do you cache already submitted pages?
johnrushx
yeah. I save them all in database to keep track of the stats. Submitted pages might get deindexed by google later, so I keep checking their status every day.
akamaka
Great write-up!

Does your pricing plan (“Lifetime Deal”) mean that you will make more money up front, but potentially have to spend more years later to maintain the service even after new signups have declined?

johnrushx
what you say makes sense for corporate software, where LTV is high and customers stay with you for years or even decades.

In microsaas b2b that targets other startups, the average customer churns in about 4 to 18 months.

So let's say I priced my tool at $15/mo, as many of the competitors. This would mean that an average user LifeTimeValue would be somewhere around $199. Which means that selling it for $199 upfront actually is a better option for me, because I get money upfront and it's exact same LTV.

Some users will pay 199 and stay with for 10 years. But some will close down their site in 3 months. So in average, I will get same outcome.

When it comes to sign ups, if the startup is healty, its signup must be growing Month over MOnth. Not just as cumulative value, but in general, if I had 10 sign ups this month, I must get at least 11 next month, to maintain 10% MoM growth and double every year. In this case, my revenue is not recurring, but if you zoom out and look at the numbers, then it's like a floating window, I get growing monthly revenues, even from LTDs.

So long story short: revenuewise, there is no difference between $199 LTD or $19/mo. But marketing-wise, LTDs are far better, I stand out from all the competitors now and my growth rate is pretty high.

akamaka
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the detailed answer!
jaflo
What tool did you use to submit to all of the directories?
johnrushx
it's https://listingbott.com

disclaimer: I'm the author of this tool too

Shadowmist
> Being visible on social media. I monitor discussions around the Google Indexing topics and add my replies there. I don't just spam in replies with my tools, in most cases, I genuinely answer and bring value. If my reply gets a reply, I may include my URL in the next reply.

I see what you did there.

jaflo
Worked on me!
johnrushx
to be honest, I exchange value for attention. That's what good internet is about. Im not just promoting stuff for my own sake. My key goal here is to give as much value as I can first. If I earn respect this way, then I'm allowed to share my tool.
satvikpendem
You should make this an actual clickable link just FYI, as it will then serve as a backlink when HN renders it via an <a> tag.
johnrushx
is that allowed? don't wanna get banned :)
satvikpendem
Yeah, it's fine, since others have asked for the link.
bombcar
Wait <a> tags work on HN? I thought it just auto-linkified?

Like so: https://listingbott.com

satvikpendem
The generated HTML on HN when you inspect the source is like so:

    <a href="https://listingbott.com" rel="nofollow">https://listingbott.com</a>
It is a nofollow link so not sure how much SEO juice you'd get out of it, but if I google Index Rusher right now, I get this HN post as the second link, where the first is the product's website itself.
Arubis
A little tangential; were you satisfied with the dev work? Did you use a marketplace or an existing connection?
johnrushx
it's an existing connection. I've never tried to hire on a marketplace. The prices are either insane. Or if you go for an affordable price, then the quality is super low.

I you need advice, I'd say: find some folks on twitter who build MVP on fixed price. They care a lot about their reputation. Also you can see on their twitter feed how they communicate and etc

callalex
How do you handle the existential threat of relying on one product of one company (in this case Google search indexing)? Do you just hope for the best? Do you set limits on how much you will invest in your tool? Do you do some kind of fancy-pants risk analysis?
johnrushx
it's a good question. In my case, I have 20+ products. So if one product dies due to google cutting their apis, I will be fine. But if this was my only product, I'd be stressed tbh. I remember what happened to founders building on top of twitter api when twitter cut the apis and made it super expensive. Lot's of founders still didn't recover from that
ShikhaM
This is great! btw what do you mean by "Launch a directory as a lead magnet"?
johnrushx
I can show you real example. In Nov I launched https://allgpts.co/ and https://osssoftware.org/ Both went viral in internet with millions of visitors.

Since I have ai agents, it was pretty relevant to place links to my agents on allgpts and it drove very good traffic. So allgpts served as a a marketing channel for my ai agents.

Same happened with osssoftware. Directories are one of the best and cheapest ways to win traffic.

sourabh03agr
Great read! On being visible on social media efforts, how do you measure the ROI of your efforts, like how much time do you spend vs how much revenue does it bring?
johnrushx
I use intuition. I have a discord channel with all the events: sign-ups, payments.. So whenever I do an action on social media or anywhere else, I see those notifications and often my intuition gives me a pretty good answer if it works or not.

Overall, social media is the single best way to promote saas tools.

alberth
What’s “Mars Verse”?

(Referenced in the footer of your website)

johnrushx
it's the Holding Org that unites all 20+ tools under one umbrella, both tehcnically (all these tools are built using marsx.dev) and legally (all these tools are owned my marsx (the company i own)
nmfisher
This post is (barely disguised) spam. You own three of the tools listed in the post without disclosing that fact.
johnrushx
the reason I didn't add the "disclosure" is that it's "Show HN". My guess was that adding this lable means "I'm showing my tool".

Anyway, I added the comment. not sure if there is any effect on the overall point of the post and its value.

nmfisher
It's not just the lack of disclosure. You're claiming (for example) you spent $499 on a listing tool - but you actually own that tool, so you presumably spent nothing. You've fabricated a good portion of your post.
johnrushx
I said the "project economy". I didn't say: "I spent". In the end, I calculated the profit as if I didn't use my own tools, because that's what the reader of the case study wants to see.

The point of the whole post is to take one real case study. If you follow my steps, you have to pay for tools, so for the reader it's not important at all if I personally paid or not.

You don't get the point of the post at all. It's a case study on how I brought an idea to implementation and grew it to 7k revenue. What's the point of bringing up all those details? I didn't "fabricate" this case. This is a real case.

If I used other tools that aren't mine(i used godaddy and hosting..) would there be even the slightest difference for the key point of the article? If I start the article but saying: "I used my own tools...." would it make any difference to the main point of the article? for the case study?

johnrushx
disclosure: 3 tools used to grow the main tools are also my tools(I'm the author). - unicorn platform - listingbott - seobot ai.

(can't edit the post, so I'm writing it in the comment)

what
So this is just an ad for your products? Unicorn platform, listingbott, seobotai, and now index rusher.
johnrushx
this is "Show HN". So showing my product is the goal of this label. Regarding the rest of my products used in the process of growing Index Rusher, what's wrong with it? Should I use Webflow instead of the unicorn platform for my website? Should I hide in the step-by-step story the fact that I used Unicorn? I'm not really getting why some readers focus on this. If the key point of the story is to describe every step.
ijustwanttovote
How did you build 20+ products?

I'm trying to build one but cant get over the paralysis.

Any tips?

johnrushx
very simple. as you see in this post, 3 products used to grow the main products are also my products. So basically I build products to solve my own pains and problems. Every day I get new problems, I solve them manually first, then I turn this solution into a product, use it for myself, iterate, once Im happy I let other founders try it and that's how the new product is being born
daemn
Great and inspiring story, who is your buyer/audience would you say?
johnrushx
thank you, busy founders who have websites with over 20 pages
daemn
From what you see, what kind of founders?