https://blog.inkdrop.app/how-ive-attracted-the-first-500-paid-users-for-my-saas-that-costs-5-mo-7a5b94b8e820

Hello, it’s Takuya here. This is a story about my experience on my solo product called Inkdrop — a Markdown note-taking app with built-in cloud sync. It is a SaaS that earns $3,200 per month from 600 customers now, with pricing $4.99/mo or $49.9/yr. Thanks to its profit, I have had no freelance works this year. Cool. I really appreciate all your support!

¥370K ≒ $3,277

Okay, I promised to share my experience how I accomplished that. I hope it’s helpful for fostering your products. If you are interested in how I successfully launched it, please read this article:

Inkdrop

TL;DR

You Don’t Have To Get Covered on Large Blogs
Why Churn Rate is Surprisingly Low
Spend a Lot of Time At User Forum
Publish Roadmaps
Treat Paid Users as Special
Tell Your Strategy
Ignore All Competitors
Accept Your Incompleteness

You Don’t Have To Get Covered on Large Blogs

Inkdrop was officially released two years ago with initial users gathered while it’s in beta. Since it’s a niche product and there are already a lot of similar apps like Evernote out there, Inkdrop has not ever got covered on any major news media or blogs so far. I have even not ever used any ads. Instead, I solely focused on making existing users happier and I wrote some blogposts about my ‘successful’ strategies on my product and my freelance career. Those gradually made growth through word of mouth.

So I made engagements almost from myself. The growth was always calm and stable — It’s better than making a buzz from large media because traffic they will generate would be a big spike making your servers too busy and a lot of inquiries you can’t handle at once, resulting in providing poor user support.