 |
|
Hello everyone! This is Tony 👋 |
First of all, happy new year! 🎆
I wish you and all of your loved one’s health and happiness in the new year!
This month’s issue is late because I was on vacation 🥳
|
|
I did not take a break after I quit my full-time job in September.
In December, I reached 3K MRR with Black Magic.
I finally have the confidence to take things a bit slowly, take care more of myself, and go on this vacation I really need.
So what happened in December? In this issue, I’ll write about:
- Magic Sidebar’s launch stats
- My entire marketing strategy for the launch
- What’s next in 2022
Let’s get to it! 😄
After 2 months of beta testing and waiting for Apple to approve the iOS app, I finally launched the latest product of Black Magic: Magic Sidebar on Product Hunt! 🥳
|
|
|
WE MADE IT! 🥇 #1 Product of the day (for the whole day) I’ll report back in 14 days to see how many % convert! Thank you, EVERYONE! I’m so HAPPY!!! ❤️❤️❤️ https://t.co/XGWeTWGFAu |
With the overwhelming support from you all. We have reached:
🥇 #1 Product of the Day
🥈 #2 Product of the Week
🥈 #2 Product of the Month
Thank you, everyone!
|
|
|
Super grateful to have your support! ❤️ |
As of now, ~17 days after the launch, here are the stats.
Before launch:
- 👥 1,660 active users
- 🤝 248 paid users
- 💵 $2,164 MRR
Launch day (16th Dec → 17th Dec):
- 👥 2,091 active users (431 new trials sign up)
- 🤝 252 paid users
- 💵 $2,228 MRR
17 days after launch (now):
- 👥 2,845 active users
- 🤝 292 paid users
- 💵 $3,141 MRR
|
|
|
I wish Paddle give me a better charts so I can zoom in around the launch period 😅 |
As you may notice, a huge chunk of customers come some time after the launch. That’s because I have 14-day trials, and people usually take time to assess if Black Magic is worth the purchase.
I ran the numbers for those who signed up for trials within the launch day to see how many converted after 14 days.
The conversion rate is 3.2%, which is a good conversion rate according to people on my Twitter 😄
|
So today is the end of the 14 days trial from the Black Magic’s launch. 14 people out of 431 new sign-ups I have from the launch subscribed to a paid plan. That’s ~3.2% conversion rate. This is ok, I think 🤔 |
I’m more than happy to declare that this is a successful launch! It’s also my best launch ever on Product Hunt! 😸
Let’s just get right into it: Here is how I do marketing and all things that contributed to the success of this launch.
1. The background
Before the launch. Even before the beta program. Even further than that. I built an audience on Twitter. From this tweet, you can see that I had 13.9K followers when I started the beta program 2 months ago.
That’s not a small audience at all, and the success of the beta program and the launch are heavily affected by the existing audience I have.
That’s what you should do, even if you don’t have any product at the moment: building an audience.
(I plan to write about my journey building an audience on Twitter at some point, this issue is already too long! – Stay tuned! 😊)
2. The free users
I have ~6,500 free users before the beta program. Most are people who use the other fun features of Black Magic like Profile Progress Bar, Real-time banner, etc.
After 2 months of beta program, the total free users was ~9,800.
Free users require a lot of resources to serve (server cost, support, etc.), but there are a lot of potentials to convert a lot of people to paid customers.
The launch announcement also helps to gather more attention/support, which is extremely valuable!
So, if possible, you should offer some free features or free tiers of your product!
3. Offer free beta & build in public
It almost feels wrong to consider this as marketing, but it actually helped me a lot during the 2 months of running the beta program!
The beta was not actually “free”, it was an invite-only beta. I ask people to reply to my tweets to get an invit
