From idea to $5,400 in presales in 2 months

From idea to $5,400 in presales in 2 months

Today I want to share a little bit about my experience with productivity and how I went from idea to generating over $5,400 in presales in 1 week for my productivity app, Last Plannr (I'll link to it at the end, just want to focus on the post for now), all in less than 2 months.

Where it all began

First, I’ve been building productivity products for several years now from experience. Many years ago I was $40k in credit card debt with a business making only $1,200 a month with only enough savings for 1 more month of bills.

I decided to make a change in my work habits which lead me to completely pay off my debt and build my business up to $30k a month in profit in only 8 short months.

The current business that led to this

I did this by creating a system for setting clear goals and tasks to accomplish those goals. So let’s jump ahead a bit. I ended up creating planners using this system. I’ve sold millions of dollars of planners and dealt with tens of thousands of customers.

While lots love our products, some expressed a desire for something different, they wanted an app or software. Initially, I had a robust app planned that would have cost $30-$50k so I held off.

Creating an MVP

I put off the app for a long time for this reason or that, but I finally decided to just build it at the end of 2021. I spent about 2 months actually building the MVP. At the same time as actually building the software, I was building the landing page and email setup. I knew that to launch, I needed to collect a lot of emails specifically for this.

Something to note with the app, I went on the skimpy side of things. It literally is the bare minimum, barely functioning minimum. What this tells me, is if people are happy with it now, I will have a 100% winner when it’s “done”. (It’ll never be done but when it’s out of that “MVP” stage so to speak)

Initial Marketing

My secret sauce? Tens of thousands of potential customers from my current planner business. Also, I’ve conducted several research surveys to ask what they would want, what they struggle with, etc.

While I built the software, I started funneling people to the new email signup and giving them information and details about the software. I was honest with what I was building, how it would work, what the future would be, etc.

Preorders

Then, when I was getting close to being done, I created a demo video and did preorders for 1 week, and told them when it would be available. Honesty and transparency are important, I showed them exactly what it was, I told them my plans and what they would get out of it.

Then, I offered a huge discount at $30 per year and made the price for life (in that their rate would never increase as long as they are a customer, this wasn't a lifetime deal). The price was also only available for 1 week, after that, this offer would never be available again (and it truly won’t, not just a FOMO gimmick)

With all of that, in 1 week, I did about $5,400 in presales.

What’s next?

Now, I continue to build the app, improve it, and market. I have a lot of features to add that have been requested so I will slowly add them one by one. At the same time, I plan to spend time marketing to continue to get new signups.

There is a long list of features and things I have planned, this is definitely a 3-5 year project before I look to get out.

Final thoughts

One of the biggest takeaways I get from my own journey is that if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, you have to be persistent. You’ll fail, which I did many times, but every experience is added to your war chest and it helps in the future. I can easily see how each experience, good or bad, was involved in this business.

For each business, I think I know what is best, but looking back, I can almost always see new or better ways it could have been done. So you’re never done learning, there are always better ways to do things, and you have to stay open-minded to try new things or methods.

If there is anything you have questions about, feel free to ask. I plan to make other posts about my experience building businesses including many lessons from failure (I've got a long list there).

You can check out the app discussed here: Last Plannr