How We Made $49 in 3 months
Back in February, Kirill Shilov and I began working on Coldlytics. This morning, I woke up to the most beautiful email I’ve laid eyes on - our first paid subscriber 🎉.
Despite the title, I won’t detail how we spent every evening & weekend coding, how we ran countless demos & strategy sessions to get our first beta users, or how we drastically pivoted twice. Instead, I want to convey what that $49 means to us.
The past few weeks were tough. Having finished our Stripe integration, the party was ready to go and we patiently awaited our guests. Some turned up but the conversation wasn’t great. In spite of our efforts to provide a high-touch experience, they drank the punch and left. We found ourselves in the trough of sorrow, or perhaps even the crash of ineptitude.
See the thing is, we’re both technical co-founders. We’ll throw up a serverless app before you can say Asymptotic Notation — that’s our zone and it’s where we prefer to hang.
But last week, following our futile attempts to find a 3rd co-founder, we closed down our IDEs and embraced the world of growth. Then boom (or ding?) — the email from Stripe arrives.
That $49 is not money. It’s an energy source. It’s given us newfound motivation to continue building our business. It’s reignited our ambitious vision and reenergized our discussions.
So next time you happen upon an early-stage, bootstrapped product, consider what the subscription fee means to them. Their product may not be perfect now, but it damn well could be one day, and your $49 might make or break it.
