Share content related to independent development and product monetization, released every Friday.
Table of contents
1、Supa Screenshots: 漂亮截图的浏览器插件2、【营销增长】Letterly各平台推广经验3、SocialStats： 获得 10 倍的关注度的动画视频/GIF 互动工具4、视频图片压缩工具月收入2.5K美金
Share content related to independent development and product monetization, published every Friday.
1. Supa Screenshots: A browser plugin for beautiful screenshots
A browser extension that can create, annotate and share beautiful screenshots in seconds
Feature Highlights
- Interactive demos and guides: Use AI to create beautiful interactive demos and guides to communicate product information more effectively.
- Chrome extension: Capture screenshots and videos by clicking on a product and automatically add text descriptions.
- Personalization: Supports custom domain names, obfuscation, autoplay and call-to-action buttons (CTA).
- Multiple ways to share: share as a link or embed in support documents, getting started guides, websites or Notion.
SupaScreenshots official website
2.[Marketing Growth]Letterly’s promotion experience on various platforms
The author used a variety of free marketing strategies in the process of promoting the AI product Letterly, a mobile app that converts speech to text. Here are some effective ways and their results:
- Online release
- On the day of launch, the number of downloads surged due to the App Store's new product promotion mechanism and social media dissemination, and then stabilized at 10-20 downloads per day.
- Hacker News
- Showing the product in the Show HN section only had 10 likes, but it brought 55 downloads.
- Reddit
- Posting in r/Entrepreneur and r/SideProject is not very effective because it requires active community participation to attract attention.
- On the peak day, it was downloaded 26 times.
- Product Hunt
- Become the hot product of the day through careful planning:
- Saturday: 203 downloads
- Sunday: 181 downloads
- Monday: 330 downloads (due to email promotion)
- One month later: 109 downloads
- Gain significant user conversion rates.
- Become the hot product of the day through careful planning:
- Newsletter
- Due to its outstanding performance in Product Hunt, it was mentioned in AI newsletters such as Superhuman, maintaining its popularity.
- The peak day saw 168 downloads.
- Betabound
- Release an app that is not fully ready early to collect early user feedback.
- Gained 300+ email addresses and increased some downloads.
- Directory Website
- Tried multiple “9999+ application directory” lists with little to no effect.
- Payist
- Similar to Product Hunt but with less influence, only 53 downloads, much less than Product Hunt.
By trying a variety of free promotion methods, I found that Product Hunt and newsletters delivered the best results. I hope these experiences will help you better invest time and energy in product promotion.
SocialStats is a tool that helps users increase engagement rates through animated videos/GIFs on social media. Users can generate eye-catching animated videos or GIFs in hours, gaining 10x the attention on social platforms.
Function:
- Generate animated content quickly: it can be generated in just a few hours.
- Increase engagement rates: Dramatically increase engagement rates on social media posts by adding animated backgrounds and ribbon effects.
- Ease of use: No video editing or design skills are required, and the operation is simple and convenient.
Steps for usage:
- Select Template: Choose a video from pre-made templates.
- Choose a background: Select an eye-catching animated background or a solid color wallpaper.
- Customize your content: Customize to your brand, choose your favorite ribbon effects and export to social media.
4. Video and image compression tool monthly income of 2.5K US dollars
Hi, my name is Hieu Dinh, and I'm the founder of CompressX, a video and image compression app for macOS. I provide a simple yet powerful offline solution that can reduce the file size of videos and images by up to 90%.
Since its launch, CompressX has helped over 2,770 customers compress 26,000 files, reduce over 7 TB of data, and earn $5,000 in sales.
How did you come up with this idea?
My first online product was Expense Buddy, an app I used to keep track of my daily expenses. I sold it in December 2022 after spending about a year and a half developing it as a side project. Since then, I have continued to develop several other side projects. I also collaborated with my brother Tony Dinh to develop Xnapper, a macOS app that can take screenshots instantly.
In addition to these side projects, I also maintain a full-time iOS engineer position. In my team, we have a practice of including screen recording demos in every pull/merge request, which helps code reviewers quickly understand the changes made. This is an excellent practice to improve the quality of our team's code.
However, due to GitLab's limitations, video files must be less than 10 MB to upload. Although my team usually uses FFmpeg to compress videos, which is indeed quite effective, I find it a bit cumbersome to adjust the command or run the script every time because I am not very fond of terminal operations. To simplify this process, I made CompressX, which helps simplify video compression.
CompressX is not the first. There are many similar video compression tools, including online and offline compression, but none of them fit my needs. First of all, I don't want to upload the video to random online sites because of privacy concerns. Secondly, existing applications are not simple enough.
Finally, video quality often drops significantly after compression using these tools. I want an app that can drastically reduce file size while maintaining good quality and working completely offline. That's why I built CompressX.
This is what it looked like when I wrote the first line of code for CompressX.
Walk us through the process of building the first version of your product
To validate my idea, I focused on building the most basic version of the product. Therefore, I implemented only one function: select a video and then compress it.
As an iOS software engineer, I am familiar with the Apple ecosystem, so I can quickly learn to develop macOS apps. Moreover, this is not my first macOS app, I have developed some macOS apps before.
It took me almost 2 weeks to get the first working version. I shared the demo on Twitter and the response was amazing. People loved it and said I brought Pied Piper to life.
At that stage, the app was free. Users could download and use it for free. However, some customers chose to pay, which showed that my idea was validated. I continued to polish the product by adding new features, fixing bugs, and improving the performance of the app in preparation for the official launch on Product Hunt.
I didn't even have an official landing page at the time, just a link to purchase the app directly from Lemon Squeezy. I think to quickly validate your idea, you need to focus on the MVP first, everything else can be done later.
Describe your business startup process
In January of this year, I launched CompressX on Product Hunt. I prepared a lot of marketing materials and resources to help me rank high on launch day.
Thanks to my Twitter audience, my product shot to the top within a few hours. By the end of the launch day, CompressX was the second-place product of the day, with 592 likes.
My sales notification blew up that day.
Publishing on Product Hunt isn't easy, because Product Hunt isn't just for independent developers and small teams anymore. Product Hunt’s algorithm is biased towards likes, so more likes means more views and traffic.
If I were to sum up my publishing strategy, it would be:
- Engage an audience by sharing publicly what I'm doing
- Introduce your app early to start attracting users and building connections with them
- Spread the word about my release in advance to gain support
What methods attract and retain customers?
The day after the release on Product Hunt, there were more feedback and feature requests, and I couldn’t wait to work on them. About a week after the release, I introduced image compression and gif conversion features. Two weeks later, batch processing and real-time progress features were released to all users. If you love something, you will never feel tired of working.
Building an app might help retain customers, but to attract new ones, I had to focus on building a proper landing page. Luckily, one of my followers on Twitter, Kacper, shared a landing page he designed. I was impressed by the professional look and feel of his design and decided to implement it.
One of my favorite things about building landing pages is the ability to display user testimonials as public testimonials. Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch shared that he loves the app. Tony Dinh was also impressed with the compression. CompressX has quickly become an essential tool in Mark Moeykens' toolbox at BIG MOUNTAIN Studio.
Real-time statistics on the homepage also help gain customer trust. It shows how many users I have, how many files I compressed, and how much the size was reduced. Whenever a new user visits the site, these statistics will impress them.
How are you doing now? What does the future hold?
CompressX makes good money, earning $3,300 in the first month and about $1,500 last month. Maintenance costs are about $80 per month and I'm confident in its future.
compressx had approximately 2,600 visitors and 4,800 page views last month. The “Buy” button was clicked 900 times by 800 users, which translated into approximately 80 sales.
In the next few weeks I will release a feature that will automatically compress files in watched folders. This will help CompressX become more competitive.
If you have an idea, go for it. Try building it over a weekend or two, then share the MVP publicly to get early feedback. If you're out of ideas, look at other people's pain points and see if you can solve them.
What have you learned that was particularly useful in launching this business?
Balancing a side hustle outside of work isn't easy. I often find myself working 10+ hours a day. Some nights I stayed up until 2 a.m. thinking it would only take 5 minutes to complete a feature that ended up taking an hour. I wish I had more time to improve the product and explore other ideas.
As an independent developer, I need to learn other things besides coding. compressx only has the home page, I put everything else (help center, FAQ, change log) in a separate Notion space, which is not good for SEO because I need to publish quickly.
Sharing progress publicly also helps me get early feedback on what users want in a product, which may be very different from my initial ideas.
What platforms/tools do you use in your business?
- Lemon Squeezy for payments, license management and email
- Vercel for hosting
- Telemetry Deck for anonymous analysis
- Supabase is used for backend
What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs who are looking to start or have just started?
I've been building publicly these past few months, sharing everything I build and learn, and have achieved most of my goals.
If you have an idea, go for it. Try building it over a weekend or two, then share the MVP publicly to get early feedback.
If you don’t have ideas, look at other people’s pain points and see if you can solve them.
Your initial product may fail, but the journey will provide you with valuable lessons learned for your next product. Make sure your product solves a problem and has a market need, and avoid getting too greedy and self-doubting.
“If you have an idea, build it. Try to build it in a weekend or two, then share the MVP publicly to get early feedback.”
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