Lessons from Launching 21 Products
21+ products across web, iOS, macOS, and desktop. Some make money. Some barely get visitors. Every single one taught us something. Here's the real stuff, no motivational fluff.
The Numbers (Honest)
Let's be upfront: most of our products don't make significant money. A few hundred dollars a month across the entire portfolio. The revenue split is wildly uneven. Two or three products carry everything. The rest are either growing slowly or sitting there.
This is normal. The hit rate for solo products is low. What matters is that each product costs almost nothing to maintain (thanks to modern hosting) and each one was a learning opportunity.
Lesson 1: Distribution Is Harder Than Building
This one took too long to learn. Building a product is the easy part. Getting people to know it exists is the hard part. And getting them to pay is even harder.
We spent months perfecting products before thinking about distribution. Wrong order. Now we think about distribution first: who wants this, where are they, how will they find it?
SEO is slow but compounds. Paid ads are fast but expensive. Twitter is free but unpredictable. Product Hunt gives a spike but no sustained traffic. The answer is all of them, weighted by your budget and patience.
Lesson 2: Subscriptions Beat One-Time Payments
We started with lifetime deals. $149, $249, $299. Big numbers, satisfying sales. Terrible for sustainability. You need a constant stream of new customers because nobody pays twice.
Switching ProvenTools to subscriptions ($20.99/mo, $104.99/yr) was one of the best decisions we made. Even with fewer customers, the revenue is more predictable and the lifetime value is higher.
If you're building a SaaS: start with subscriptions. Offer a lifetime tier as an upsell if you want, but make recurring revenue the default.
Lesson 3: Cold Traffic Won't Buy Expensive Products
We spent $207 on Google Ads for ProvenTools. 304 clicks. 33 email signups. Zero sales. The product was $149 at the time.
Cold traffic (people who've never heard of you) won't buy a $149 product from a Google ad. They might sign up for a free trial. They might join an email list. But they won't pull out their credit card for someone they just discovered.
The fix: lower the barrier. Free tier, free trial, cheap entry point. Let them experience the product before asking for money.
Lesson 4: Don't Build for Imaginary Users
Some of our products solve problems we have. Those do better. Some solve problems we think other people have. Those struggle.
ProvenTools works because we wanted a database of validated ideas. BacklinkRocket works because we needed backlinks for our own sites. Clyrify struggles because it was built for a user we assumed existed but didn't validate.
Build for yourself first. If you use it, others probably will too. If you're guessing what someone else wants, you're probably wrong.
Lesson 5: SEO Compounds (Slowly)
12 web properties, all with basic SEO. Some with extensive SEO. The ones we invested in early are now showing results. Organic traffic is growing month over month.
The key insight: SEO isn't about gaming Google. It's about having real pages with real content that answer real questions. Programmatic pages help (BacklinkRocket has 19 pages now, up from 3). But the content has to be genuine.
Dofollow backlinks matter. We built BacklinkRocket partly to solve this problem for ourselves. Cross-linking between our own properties helps too.
Lesson 6: Shipping Fast Beats Shipping Perfect
Our best launches happened when we shipped something rough and iterated. Our worst launches happened when we polished for weeks and then discovered nobody cared.
The minimum viable product isn't about cutting corners. It's about testing your core assumption as fast as possible. Does anyone want this? Ship it in a weekend and find out.
VibeCoders went from idea to Product Hunt launch in about two weeks. ProvenTools' subscription model shipped in a few days. PricePatch's v1 was built in a week.
Lesson 7: Maintenance Is Real
21 products means 21 things that can break. Dependencies get outdated. APIs change. SSL certificates expire. Apple changes their review guidelines.
Most of our products require minimal maintenance (static sites on Vercel). But the active ones need regular attention. Budget time for this. It's not glamorous but it's necessary.
What We'd Do Differently
If we started over:
- Fewer products, more distribution. Build 3-4 products max and spend 80% of the time on marketing and distribution.
- Subscriptions from day one. No lifetime deals until the product has proven recurring value.
- Validate before building. Landing page + waitlist before writing any code.
- Content marketing earlier. Blog posts, Twitter, YouTube. Start building an audience before you have something to sell.
The Takeaway
21 products taught us more than any course, book, or mentor could. The lessons are all earned through experience, some painful, some expensive.
If you're thinking about building a product: do it. Ship it fast, charge money for it, and learn from what happens next. The worst case is you learn something. The best case is you build something people love.
Either way, you win.