About two months ago, I launched Modern Serial, a tool for reading classic books as Substack-style email newsletters.
The initial reception was warm and I sold a handful of books. I chalked this up as a success! I did this project to learn Python, read more myself, and get experience building an entire SaaS product end-to-end, so the fact that anyone wanted to pay me for it at all was exciting!
Besides posting on Twitter a couple of times, the only "marketing" I did was a single post on Hacker News, which made it to the second page of HN and drove a good number of people to the site.
Since the HN post, there's been a steady trickle of sales—between 0 and 5 per day. Encouraging, but nothing to write home about.
Fast forward to yesterday. I wake up, check my phone, and see that I've sold 73 books since falling asleep. Overnight, my lifetime sales have tripled.
That's when I learn I've been featured in the Morning Brew, a daily newsletter with over 4 million subscribers.
This was a wild black swan event, so I figured I'd give y'all a look behind the scenes, sharing a few of my numbers and lessons learned.
Stats from the day
Altogether, being featured in the Morning Brew led to 125 sales, for a total of $994.52 in revenue.
I got 50k total pageviews from 21k unique visitors. About 2/3 of those visitors looked at the landing page and then immediately left the site.
I received 25 support emails, mostly folks asking for help with their passwords, requesting features, or providing feedback about the site.
Of the 206 people who clicked "Sign up" and made it to my checkout screen, only 125 completed their purchase. I'm very curious why 40% of people are abandoning their carts, and hope I can find ways to improve this stat in particular.
Lessons learned
-
There's value in launching a project, even if you're lazy about marketing. Because once you've released your project, there's always the possibility that someone will discover it, share it with millions of people, and then drive a bunch of traffic to your site out of nowhere.
-
People actually want to buy this thing I made. Maybe foolish, but I thought this project was so esoteric that it could never make much money. However, about 0.5% of the people who visited my site ended up buying a book. If I can improve that conversion rate and drive more people to the site...maybe this could be an actual business?
-
There are some consistent pain points that I need to iron out. I got so many emails asking, "How do I sign up?" because people didn't realize that you create an account by purchasing a book. Several people also told me they were frozen with decision fatigue when trying to pick what book to buy. Takeaway: I need to improve my sign-up flow and make a better UI for book discovery.
I have no idea how the folks at Morning Brew discovered my site, but I'm happy they did, and I'm determined to make the best out of this random stroke of luck.
Oh and by the way, if Modern Serial sounds like something you'd like, I encourage you to take a look. And if you have any feedback, feel free to leave it in the comments!