From $20 to $375 in Revenue : March 2024 Update

And why I live a "double life", starting Youtube, Lifetime vs Recurring Debate, and my React Native experience

The mighty oak was once a nut that stood its ground. -- American proverb 

Given that this newsletter is titled "The Road To 10K MRR," let's start with some essentials. Live Poker Theory generated $375 in revenue this month, up from $20 in February. 

So I had a 1,781% m/m revenue growth, fantastic 😁 ! Of course, I started from "pretty much unmonetized", and did finally set up some monetization. But the "catch" is that I offered some $99 lifetime deals. 

In this newsletter, I'll discuss:

• My initial efforts to monetize the site

• My thoughts on offering lifetime deals vs subscriptions

• My initial adventures on making a poker strategy YouTube

• Why I live a "double life"

• Why I'm building a React Native version of my app, even if hurts my momentum

I'm very mixed about offering the lifetime deal. I mentioned that I might offer one in my Discord, and as soon as I added monetization, someone I had never seen before chirped up and asked, "What happened to the lifetime deal?" I didn't want to not take someone's money, especially since I applied to TinySeed on a whim, and they rejected me, saying that I hadn't made enough money. 

So, I set up the lifetime deal and didn't link to it anywhere on the website, I didn't email it out to the list, I just posted it in Discord, and 3 people quickly bought it, which does show the appetite was there.

One challenge is setting a key metric to grow. Free users were a nice early sign, even if many indie hackers look down on them, it’s still better than no users. But now one-off payments cloud the “revenue” target since it’s unclear if a $20/mo sale or a $199 lifetime sale is better, though the lifetime numbers will always be bigger and inflate revenue more.

Going forward, my key metric will be number of paying customers. Curently, that number is five (not counting myself or any friends). While I’m mostly desperately trying to ship a native version of my app that I describe below, hopefully I can get to at least eight customers in April to stay on at least 50% month/month growth.

Lifetime vs Recurring 

I have mixed feelings about selling lifetime deals because this is not a one-off quick project where I plan to move on to other things in a few weeks. At the same time, I've probably spent way too much time on this project with way too little validation, so the biggest benefit of this deal was the psychological support. 

$99 is not a cheap or trivial price for consumer software, so if three people find my hidden link to pay me $99, presumably, they're not the only three people in the universe who think I'm building something worth paying for. 

Another thing that I did to cover my bases a bit was explicitly note that I reserve the right to determine a version of my product is "feature complete" and only offer an upgraded version of the app if they purchase again. But realistically doing that would be a lot of work I’d probably avoid.

The lifetime offer vs the subscription model is a fiercely debated topic in the Indie Hacker community. Many businesses aggressively seek out recurring revenue, but many Indie Hackers make the following case for lifetime deals:

1. It's all just LTV (Customer Lifetime Value). Realistically, many people will churn, sooner or later. If someone subscribes to your app for 16 months at $10/month and then cancel, you would have been better off if they bought at $199 upfront. 

2. Consumers have subscription burnout. They are tired of managing subscriptions and remembering to cancel them and want to feel like they "own" a piece of software. By offering a lifetime option, you attract these customers who might otherwise hesitate. 

However, the subscription model has many advantages:

1. Despite churn, subscribers do make your revenue somewhat more predictable. Besides being reassuring for yourself, if you ever want to raise money, you need recurring revenue. 

2. Platforms like iOS have no upgrade model. On the Apple App Store there's no system for releasing a v1 of your app, then have a separate tier for a v2 of your app. It's all just one app.  Perhaps it shouldn't be this way, but it is. 

3. It's a mistake to take complaining too seriously. Some people would rather pay $499 once than $20 / month. However, some people are just cheap, and what they want is $20 once. In this case, they don’t hate subscriptions, they just hate the price. Rob Walling states in his recent book that if nobody complains about your prices on social media, it’s too low.

I don't think there's a right answer here. It something I'm going to experiment and learn on.  I think short term, the right move is to raise my lifetime price to $199 and see how that goes. 

One huge consideration is whether you can offer lifetime but leave room to upsell later. For example, Daniel Vassallo offers his Small Bets membership for $375, but then upsells more courses for $1k+ later. This way you get the best of all worlds, a customer now, revenue now, but the opportunity for more revenue in the future. I have to be more thoughtful about how to "define" my products to do this correctly.

Starting On Youtube 

I started a YouTube channel for Live Poker Theory. One recent point I heard in the SmallBets community is that a Youtube channel is one of the best possible assets you can have as a bootstrapper, because instead of paying to advertise your product, you can get paid to advertise your product.

Given that I'm targeting a niche, I don't expect to make significant revenue from YouTube ads. However, if I grow the channel, it can be a source of small income and, more importantly, a free opportunity to explain the benefits of the software I'm building. I've also already had online poker sites reach out to me asking me to share affiliate links where I get a kickback of their deposit, which can be another source of revenue, though does veer into possibly shady territory.

Of course, I'm starting by focusing on just giving value, by offering in-depth strategic breakdowns of poker hands using solver software, which is the type of content that's performed best for me so far. 

One advice I've read recently is bootstrappers should "ride someone else's wave", and my Youtube channel certainly is, as there's been a rise of casinos and cardrooms running live streams of their high stakes games, and YouTube poker influencers playing in those games. So my strategy is to pick famous players and break down their hands, so when people search YouTube for their names, my videos pop up.

While I love the possible benefits of YouTube, the production value is challenging. I started using Davinci Resolve and have already received a lot of criticism about my audio quality, video editing, speaking, and script-writing - so basically every aspect of my videos! It amazes me how well produced even "amateur" Youtube channels seem to be. I understand many people hire video editors, but figuring out how to do that is its own challenge, and I was hoping to get a little more competent myself. 

Why I Live A Double Life

I'm not going to link to my YouTube here because I don't want you to click on it! It's important for me to reach my ideal customer profile, and I want to reach people interested in poker strategy content. I want to make sure the YouTube algorithm knows that the video is made for those people, and a bunch of people not interested in watching poker strategy content would just confuse it. 

This ties into one of the biggest challenges: I feel like I'm living a parallel life on the internet. One is Bill Prin, the "tech guy," and one is Live Poker Theory, the poker brand. I've been discouraged from doing multiple "brands," and understandably so, because it's extremely time-consuming to build software and manage one online brand, much less two.

But it's crystal clear to me that the audiences for tech, software, indie hacker, and poker strategy content, are mostly disjoint. My experience is that tech people may have a passing interest in poker, they may find some intrigue in the life of a professional poker player, but they're typically not about to fork over $199 for a poker training product. Of course, this is part of the reason I'm building for this market - I have insights into it that many other software people don't. 

So it makes sense to me to have a different Twitter, different Youtube, etc, even though those brands still have aspects of being a personal brand. On Live Poker Theory Twitter, my profile picture is a picture of myself since I notice people follow people more often than brand.

But of course, I'm overwhelmed trying to do customer development, coding a web app, coding a mobile app, doing advanced poker content (often deep diving using complex software), learning video editing, etc. And then on top of all that, managing one set of social brands feels overwhelming, two feels impossible.

Perhaps I should hire someone to help here, or use more automated tooling? I’m not sure.

One Step Backwards, Two Steps Forward with React Native

I'm going with my gut on something. Even though I'm just starting to get momentum with monetizing my web project, I've been spending a ton of time basically rewriting my entire app to be native mobile app even though the current web app is responsively designed to work on mobile, where it works fine. 

Is this a huge distraction when I should just focus on the web app and grow revenue? Maybe. But my gut just says - I should have a native version of the app. It just feels nicer even if it's 95% the same. I add my web app to my iPhone home screen - which I know most people don't even know how to do - and sometimes it opens in an incognito tab and I lose all my state and it just feels janky.

A friend who liked my app also told me he'd be way easier to convert to a paid user on iOS because not only is signing up for a subscription a click away, but he's comfortable that he knows how to cancel. In contrast, he's nervous about canceling with random web apps. I also care a lot about showing up in the App Store search results, and I could possibly run Apple ads there as well. 

One last huge thing—the market leader in my product category is ahead of me on 1,000 features. I consistently question whether it's even possible to challenge them, except one massive glaring weakness they have is that they lack a native app. So, to me, it's a clear opportunity to differentiate. 

I'm using React Native, and the web app is React, so there's a ton of code reuse, although not as much as I had hoped since all the UI components are different. But overall, my experience is solid. In 2022, I spent a ton of time learning Swift and SwiftUI, which I enjoyed, but it's a different ecosystem. Sticking with Typescript for the whole project is a huge productivity boost, and even though React and React Native are different, they are conceptually extremely similar.  And having to start from scratch to deploy on Android seems untenable, even if most US users are on iPhones.

It also amazes me that anyone even seriously considers Flutter, given that it's a new language and backed by Google, which is notorious for abandoning projects.

So, I'm pleased with my React Native app. Unfortunately, it's just taken me too long. I was hoping to be done by February, and now March is almost over, and a native MVP is almost, not quite, ready. If it ends up bombing, it was a huge waste of my time, but my gut says it's in the right direction. 

Recommendations

Kenny Alami

  has been covering the topics of making money selling freelance services on Upwork, hiring on Upwork, balancing working on your own products vs. selling freelance services to others, and more. In his recent post, he argues one of the best ways to get better at selling freelance services is to buy freelance services:

Hiring people.

Nothing has helped me more in the past year than to hire other people.

It’s especially valuable when hiring people asking for $50+ per hour. If you get to hire a bunch of people at that rate or higher, you start getting a sense of the kind of service people provide. You get to understand the quality, how they communicate at that rate and resolve issues.

This Newsletter Got Too Long

This newsletter edition got way too long, partially because it's late March and it's my first post of the year. I'm still learning routines to write and publish this consistently. I also think I overthought the writing a process and wanted to write "thought pieces" when just writing about my experiences is easier and probably more interesting to people.

Going forward, you'll hear from me more frequently, but with shorter updates.

Thanks for reading ! Feel free to reply to this email to get in touch with any thoughts.