The Exchanges

Q I imagine a lot of people watching this are like, why would you give up that much of a product that you built? I'd love to hear from you about the pros and the cons of lifetime deals. I talked to a lot of founders. Some of them love it clearly like you, some of them regret it. So let's talk about it. What are the pros and cons? Yeah.

A So one of the, see the biggest benefit of Ltd is cash infusion validation and early feedback. Initially when you are starting a company, when you're starting a product, you essentially have zero customers. You are looking for people who can use your product and give you feedback through Ltd. We got both the things. There are a couple of downsides. So the biggest downside is high platform cut because in our case rocket up to 40% of the revenue. And the second downside is we got a lot of angry customers reaching out to you for feature requests. For, uh, missing features for bugs and stuff. And also when you launch equity, you attract a lot of cheap customers also. So, so that sort of gives perception your product is not that great. So these are the three downsides of, uh, Ltd.

AI assessment note: “the biggest benefit of Ltd is cash infusion validation and early feedback.”

Q Okay, so the pricing is interesting. I'm also curious about the platform's role. What did they actually do for you? And also, more importantly, what percentage cut did they take of the lifetime sales?

A They actually do everything for you apart from the product. What Rocketer did was They marketed our product across a lot of different platforms. They did multiple things. They have a list of hundreds of thousands of customers who are ready to buy LTDs. The first thing they did was they sent email to all of their customers and they talked about Supergrove with them. The second thing which they did was they created ads for Instagram and Facebook. And the third thing which they did was they basically created all the marketing assets. Like they created screenshots, videos, which we still use. Some of these even today. So they created all these assets and they launched super for us. Essentially our role was build the product and the second was support, which is really crucial for entity because you are going to get a lot of queries and stuff. So those are the only two things which we did. Everything regarding marketing was actually done by rocket up. So for this rocket up to click, 40% of the cut, which translates to around a 40,000 dollars for us. Obviously it's a big cut. 40% is a huge cut. But if you think about it at that moment, we did not have like, we had only like one or two customers. Almost close to zero dollars, but just by launching our product through them, we were able to generate 40,000 dollars.

AI assessment note: “So for this rocket up to click, 40% of the cut”

Q Okay. So that's sort of interesting. You looked at the existing competitors in the market. You realized that their solutions just weren't all that great. That gave you the confidence to build something. Could you dive deeper into that sort of validation strategy?

A So one thing which I always tell indie hackers is don't try to create a new market, just work on the validated market. So what I suggest a lot of people is go for products or go for markets, which are actually generating revenue. Once you have identified the validated market, your next step should be to figure out what are your competitors. So deeply understand your competitors, use their product day in, day out, try to understand what are their core flows. Try to come up with a new way to Solve the core flows. So once you are able to come up with a sort of a one percent increment in the quality of the product, like you can just go ahead and just build an MVP after that. What I did was I did exactly this. So I actually studied my three competitors who were like the biggest competitors in my market back then. One was Tapleo. The second one was contenting. The third one was authored up. Tapleo was the, like the biggest in the market. They had like numerous features, but the Core feature, which is basically content creation piece was not that great. And after studying all these products, I realized the demand in the market is so much that even products like these are able to like earn revenue. So I realized that I can solve this demand really well.

AI assessment note: “deeply understand your competitors, use their product day in, day out”

Q Okay. Interesting. So yeah, I mean, definitely pros, definitely cons. What I think is cool about it is the early feedback. So I guess my next question would be for you is did that lifetime deal, those hundreds of customers join, did that actually help improve your product?

A Yeah, definitely. We had actually around more than two 50 plus LTD customers. So there is a churn in LTD customers. Also the only like 10% of these customers are really going to use your product after a certain period or around 20 to 25 customers. They genuinely use the product every week. They used to give us very brutal feedback because we were really new in the market. They were not really for life. So they used to message us on intercom. Some of the customers were able to get our numbers also From internet. Some of these customers were really good. They actually helped us shape the roadmap. So they gave us a lot of good insights into content creation on LinkedIn that actually helped us improve the product massively.

AI assessment note: “They actually helped us shape the roadmap. So they gave us a lot of good insights”

Q Okay, cool. I mean, the last objection that I hear is that Doing an LTD will kill your future long-term growth because you can't make any money from those people that you sold the LTDs to. What do you think about that?

A That's actually not true. What I've realized is you, uh, in future, you can actually upsell them. So that is another thing which you can do. And also at the same time, what I feel is you don't want to launch LTD for a long period of time. So for example, we launched LTD only for three days. So the very good way to ensure you are not overselling entities is just limit the timeframe and also limit the number of users you are going to like support. So we limited that to 300 users. So because we launched only for three days and, and also like we, we did a lot of upselling to these LTD customers that actually helped us build our subscription business as well.

AI assessment note: “That's actually not true. What I've realized is you, in future, you can actually upsell them.”

Q Interesting. I mean, on that note, I would love to hear about the transition. I mean, you went from LTD Strategy, uh, that sort of kickstarted the business, but then you transitioned it to a subscription. I think a lot of people watching would like to hear what worked for you in terms of that transition and what advice would you have for other people trying to do the same?

A One of the biggest thing that we did just after launching LTD was we actually make sure our customers were happy. So we were really obsessed with our LTD customers. We used to spend like one or two hours every day on intercom, answering the question, helping them through content creation. Like we sometimes used to help them manually and then used to convert those workflows into features inside Supergrove. So we did this for a couple of months. It actually helped us a lot in improving the product. We also added these tools called clarity and mix panel to really understand what these customers were doing. So we used to basically see which feature set they are using, which feature set they are not using. We did this like for a couple of months, but then we created this plan of launching our product on product home. So what we did, we actually launched it on product and we were able to become like product of the week in product and actually give us 50 customers also. So one of the key things, these LTT customers actually helped us make our product and launch better because they actually evangelized our product everywhere. I was not the only person talking about my product that day. We had like 10 to 15 really happy LTT customers who actually talked about us on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Product Hunt, and they also shared about our product On these platforms, like WhatsApp groups and …

AI assessment note: “these LTT customers actually helped us make our product and launch better because they actually evangelized”