$500 from 12 customers in 24 hours - a LTD Launch Story

Recently launched my first LTD (lifetime deal) promotion for my bootstrapped AppSumo Marketplace research intelligence tool. For the past 2 months, I went from trying to understand why my product was not being shown on AppSumo for keywords it should be, building a solution for myself, sharing it, getting interest, making it more SaaS-like, launching a pre-sale, releasing the first updates based. As I wanted to get more users to gather more feedback, and stress-test the platform to fix some bugs, few days ago, I launched my first lifetime deal for my first official SaaS in only a few Facebook groups. (Details at the end)  Knowing the LTD community well, and not having that much track record, I expected to make just a few sales, but I was extremely pleased to see that people had enough interest to generate $500 in only 24 hours. More was done later on, but the biggest "boom" was on the launch day.  --- CREATING A TOOL FOR AN EXTREMELY NICHED MARKET It all started after I listed my product on Etsy, and got no sales for many weeks. I researched how to improve my listing, and found out about Etsy SEO, as well as tools to get competitive analysis and listing optimizations. Since my listing on AppSumo was having very few sales in its early days, I tried finding similar tools for AppSumo, and I found... nothing. That's when I decided to build a simple version of SumoWatch - to understand how my product rank for specific keywords, why it's ranking this low/high by looking at competitors' strategies, and figuring out the sales performance of some of these products.  Once my first version/prototype was ready, in only one search, taking me seconds, I ended up with lots of valuable data about my competitors. AN OPPORTUNITY TO SHARE WHAT I HAD BUILT FOR MYSELF With all that data, I saw a bigger potential to my initial purpose of building something to keep for myself. I was proud of my creation and shared it with some members of the LTD community. They tried it, and they quite liked it. (Hooray, we're up for a good start! 🙌) They liked the way data was presented, making it easier to digest, compare and reverse engineer the strategies and sales performance for each listing. Some got interested to access it, so I sold them a one time fee to access it. I am truly grateful to these early buyers as they gave tremendously valuable feedback, on top of stress testing the platform. 🤗 (Quick parenthesis: I had to create from scratch a rough draft version of a membership area for them to access it. It's built with a bit of coding, automations, spreadsheets, and API requests... 😬 Can't deny I had to put aside my perfectionism, but hey, it works! 🤘) FUTURE GOALS UP TO NOW The end goal is to make something as helpful as SellerApp, AMZScout, eRank or MBS Retriever, and we have a lot of ideas for features, but I want our users' feedback and genius to be part of the journey. That's why the 2 first updates were based on feedback that we received from our users. Now, here we are! 🥁 LAUNCH & EXCITEMENTS SumoWatch is having its first official lifetime deal! 🎉 (See details at the end) After building multiple products that I always kept for myself, I'm very excited to be building this product alongside an amazing community. I am looking forward to hearing all the feedback and ideas to make this product better than I could ever imagine. 24 HOURS LATER Over the following 24 hours of the launch, I was happy to see that it generated a decent amount of interest from the community, and that the community was willing to not only invest financially, but share their valuable feedback, while also hunting some bugs in the platform. I feel blessed to have received a total of $500 in the first 24 hours. It might not seem like a lot to some people, but considering that it was my first lifetime deal launch, and that I've been too hard on myself in the past, I'll consider this as a win. 48 HOURS LATER After the big day, and getting a few more customers, I worked an entire day to fix bugs, and release new updates on the platform. It was really tiresome, but I am extremely happy to see the tool progress and evolve at a fast pace. This was the realization I needed to see that I was capable to do it, to ship fast, instead of being extremely critical of myself and think that I was slow in my progress. 72 HOURS LATER Since I had spent most of my previous days preparing for the launch, answering questions, fixing bugs, and release features, I had completely forgotten to keep the promotion going, and the sales slowed down. That was a learning for me, to not only prepare for the launch, but for during, and for after, otherwise, the product gets lost in the noise of social media. FORWARD WE GO! Moving forward, I have created a checklist to go through in all my future launches, and make sure that I am overly ready. As the saying goes: "Better be safe than sorry." Then, as a long-time member of the LTD community, one of the biggest worries people have now, is about the product longevity. So, I made sure that the domain name is paid until 2028. This way, I can ensure to treat early users' investment fairly rather than shutting the product down. Customer experience, as well as product experience, is really important for me. So, as long as it'll be possible to access the data, and it makes sense financially to keep the product running, I'll want to keep offering a good experience to all users. That's all folks! 👯 You made it through the entire journey! 🍻 If you want to follow along, I share my journey here and on Twitter @hugohamelcom Still have questions? AMA! --- Lifetime deal details (ends Sept. 18 @ 11:59PM PST): https://lifetime.sumowatch.com/ The lowest tier is $39, which gives you up to 750 searches per month. The highest tier is $390 has 7,500 searches per month. --- Originally posted on Indie Hackers.