Show HN: An Experiment with One-Feature Tool Made $7164/Mo

My Raw Story on coming up with an idea, building and growing it. It's very detailed, with the purpose of giving another founder an insider look at one way of doing it.

In January I launched an indexing tool called Index Rusher, that forces google to index your pages quicker, to get ranked for SEO faster. This whole project was something I needed myself since I got over 20 products and paying for an external one would simply cost too much.

My initial idea was that I would just build an internal tool for my use, that has only 1 feature. No UI really, just 1 button.

In the middle of the process, I realized that I could actually run an experiment and launch this tool publically with just one feature. Super simple.

I hired a dev who spent a month building it. It looked super easy at first, but it turned out there were so many hidden snakes on the way. Troubles with sitemaps, google APIs, and more.

1 month later I launched it (In Jan). The launch didn't go so great, but I didn't really have high hopes. Because nobody knew about this tool, I had no traffic on the site. I still sold several licenses, which made me pretty happy, it felt like validation, people needed it, even if it solved such a narrow problem.

At that point, I declared my next stage of the experiment: Growing the traffic and revenue.

I've done a number of growth hacks in the next 30 days, resulting in over $7k in revenue, but what's more important, the traffic on the site has grown a lot and stays high and growing. This means I've done a pretty good job on organic growth too, which will just accelerate over time.

Here is what I've done:

Cross-linking. I added links in the footer on my other products. This is one hidden effect of having multiple products. Each may serve as a lead magnet for the other one. In my case, I have the same audience for all my tools, people who love one of my tools often check out the rest.

Being visible on social media. I monitor discussions around the Google Indexing topics and add my replies there. I don't just spam in replies with my tools, in most cases, I genuinely answer and bring value. If my reply gets a reply, I may include my URL in the next reply.

Social Media and Blog posts. I've posted several posts about Growth, where I mentioned Indexrusher since I actually use it for me Growth.

Traffic from Directories. This one was the top channel of growth. Over 50% of the paying users arrive from web directories. I used a tool that listed Index Rusher on 100 directories & websites.

Sponsored listings. I "sponsored" directories to place a banner for my tool on the top of their page/list. Seeing the effect of "boosted" listings. The ROI was good. About $2.5k of revenue came in from these boosts.

Affiliate partners Made a deal with a few affiliate partners who reached out to me on X and he drove a decent amount of traffic and paid users to me since he was launching on PH the same week,

The total economy of the project now Dev costs: $1500*3=$4500

- Godaddy domain: $9

- hetzner Hosting: $10/mo

- landing page on Unicorn Platform: $9/mo

- cost of sponsorships: $800

- Affiliate payouts: $150

- listingbott for backlinks: $499

- seobot ai for blog: $99

- Stripe fees: $654

Total cost: $6711

Revenue: $7164

Profit: $453.

So, it's profitable!

My next steps will be 1) Promote it to 100,000+ users of my Website Builder and reach out to more website builders and pitch them the integration

2) Increase Word-of-mouth effect

3) Perhaps try some paid ads

4) Add automated emails to remind about Index Rusher users who signed up but didn't buy

5) Launch a directory as a lead magnet

6) Launch little free tools as lead magnets

7) Product Hunt launch

8) AppSumo launch

I will make a new post in a month describing how it went.

have you built the seobotai as well?

Great write-up!

Does your pricing plan (“Lifetime Deal”) mean that you will make more money up front, but potentially have to spend more years later to maintain the service even after new signups have declined?

yeah. I ended up building most of the tools I needed to get more productive on doing the growth and marketing for my products. I'm a solo bootstrapped marketer. So I had no choice.

what you say makes sense for corporate software, where LTV is high and customers stay with you for years or even decades.

In microsaas b2b that targets other startups, the average customer churns in about 4 to 18 months.

So let's say I priced my tool at $15/mo, as many of the competitors. This would mean that an average user LifeTimeValue would be somewhere around $199. Which means that selling it for $199 upfront actually is a better option for me, because I get money upfront and it's exact same LTV.

Some users will pay 199 and stay with for 10 years. But some will close down their site in 3 months. So in average, I will get same outcome.

When it comes to sign ups, if the startup is healty, its signup must be growing Month over MOnth. Not just as cumulative value, but in general, if I had 10 sign ups this month, I must get at least 11 next month, to maintain 10% MoM growth and double every year. In this case, my revenue is not recurring, but if you zoom out and look at the numbers, then it's like a floating window, I get growing monthly revenues, even from LTDs.

So long story short: revenuewise, there is no difference between $199 LTD or $19/mo. But marketing-wise, LTDs are far better, I stand out from all the competitors now and my growth rate is pretty high.