On January 5, we launched our micro-side project saasaffiliateprograms.net and micro-exited it on Feb 6.
In 32 days, we earned 913$ and in this post, you will get an idea about:
Let's start then!
1. How we found the idea and published the website
We decided to focus on building "directory side projects" at the beginning of December 2022 and then made research about keywords, including saas, as my background is mostly related to that space. I tried to find keywords that search volume is close to medium and keyword difficulty is easy/possible according to the data of Semrush. And then I found saas affiliate programs:
As you see from the image, its stats are close to what I was looking for.
At that time, I checked other projects/directories in this space and to be honest, I found some similar websites, such as saasaffiliate.com. However, this site has some missing parts like full-page screenshots and e-mail addresses of the related people.
So, we decided to launch our own website including those.
2. How we built the website
We collected more than 300+ SaaS Affiliate Programs by visiting SaaS companies' websites and checking other directories around manually.
As a platform, we used Airtable and Softr to build our website.
We collected the data on Airtable and integrated it easily with Softr.
When we were collecting the data, we used some automation and also did some manual work.
Regarding screenshot automation, we used GoFullPage and UrlProfiler.
And for email capturing, we used Apollo.
We had two plans, including free and paid. On the free version, our users got an idea about what we were offering and they purchased our paid plan after they checked our free plan.
This took us 7-10 days to build. Actually, I was new at Softr and learned the platform as well. If I build a similar platform now, it will take less than seven days.
3. Launch day
Before the launch day, I made a list of subreddit and Facebook groups to announce our product. Also, we wanted to promote our product on Product Hunt to see the reactions of early adopters.
As you see from the image, during the launch week, we had more than 1.200 visitors.
At that time, I also got in touch with saas partnership and affiliate platforms like partnerstack, impact.com and refersion. I talked to related people to get their opinions about the product.
That week, we collected more than 100 emails and sold six paid plans.
4. What we did after the launch
Regarding distribution, I couldn't allocate time to spread this project because I focused on our main project, which is Saas Screenshots.
I made a promo campaign for our email audience and gave them a 50% discount. 1 or 2 transactions happened.
Our website visitors decreased to 10-20 users per day.
5. How we micro-exited the project
Actually, I didn't have the intention to sell the project in its first month. I was assuming to get traffic from other side projects which we will build related to saas space through backlinking.
One day, I saw Side Projectors and submitted our website to get traffic. When I submitted it, there was an option like interested in selling and I chose that one as well.
In two days, I received a DM from the potential buyer and he was asking for the price. Instead of price; I shared my conditions, like not accepting crypto payments, and choosing Escrow as a platform and he accepted.
My first message was sent on January 27th and I received the money through Escrow on Feb 6.
6. Our Stats and Key Insights
Earnings
Costs
When we reduced the costs, we earned 913$ in total.
And for this project, we spent between 50 to 60 hours because of the manual work and learning a new platform. Our hourly wage is relatively low compared to our skills but we shouldn't count it, I guess.
Key Insights
That's all from my side. Please share your comments and suggestions below.
Thanks man for sharing such an amazing post i got some idea now i will work on them...
I like your idea and result.
thanks a lot James.
I assume you'd not even registered a business entity or anything and were basically selling some code as a private transaction? Quite fun to flip something fast and move on if you don't see a future focus on it, and I can see how the transaction is still worthwhile for a buyer, even if it's just for a handful of leads and a bit of traffic.
We sold the data and email list mainly.
If he wants to focus on this space, he doesn't need to build it from scratch.
That's why those kind of directories are worth to look before starting a similar project.
Yeah for sure