Previously I wrote about my first and second month as a solo founder. I didn’t write about month three for some reason, so in this post I’ll describe month three and four. A lot has happend since that last blog post!

Two projects

Another idea was to build a subscription tracking tool. What if some tool could notify me about annual contracts that were about to renew? It would save me money if I wasn’t using that subscription anymore. This would also be useful for small companies, where somebody would sign a contract for a teammate which could renew by accident if the teammate left.

Both launched with a waitlist and had some sign ups, although the video tool sign ups seemed spammy. They were probably not actual prospects. I decided to invest some time in the subscription tracking tool because it was something that scratched my own itch. I had a working product after a few weeks of development and started extending it with expense tracking, because I was also interested in my subscription payment history. While at it, it was not much work to add a manual expense form. You see where this is going? I think it might evolve into a personal finance tool, but lets see how customers start using it.

Speaking about users, how is it doing? When the MVP was ready I launched 3 monthly plans with free trials. Furthermore I launched with one lifetime plan which is only available for the first few months. So far I’ve sold this lifetime plan three times and received numerous monthly plan trial sign ups. The early sign ups were promised a longer trial, so they haven’t reached the point where conversion to paid is required. Lets see in August.

Marketing efforts

Since I started using Google Ads in month two I received a promotional offer and received almost 200% free credit. I’ve used part of this to promote a project, which seems to work quite well and has resulted in some conversions. New marketing channels I tested were Reddit and Twitter. Twitter didn’t perform that great, although I did have some retweets and obtained a new follower, I don’t think I had sign ups because of my promoted Tweet. Reddit on the other hand worked quite good. I sold some lifetime plans and had some trial sign ups. Although Reddit is probably more expensive, it did have a better efficiency when comparing views vs clicks.

Sold Callcounter to a new owner

As described above I received quite some signals that a subscription tracker might be a viable product. That is why I decided to sell my api analytics product and focus all my time on a different project. I placed an ad on various marketplaces for SaaS sales and had quite some interesting video and text conversions with possible buyers. After a few weeks I was able to sell it. My company was still in the red up until that point, but selling Callcounter made it profitable for the first time! That is, I’m not able to give myself a salary, but all previous expenses are now covered for as well as some SaaS fees for the coming months.

Summary

Quite a rocky period, but in the end my new business is profitable and I’m very motivated to work on my new project. It is much more rewarding to work on a project that has some actual users, I’m looking forward to what the coming month will bring.

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