It's not a life-changing amount of money, but I think it's a more typical example of what you can expect when selling a bootstrapped side project. Hopefully it will inspire some of you who have been on the fence to start your own project.
Congratulations on your successful project!
Did you email them directly or did you pay someone to make a press release? I have had similar products but I never seem to know how to get the word out. Any insight into your first day and how you marketed it would be highly appreciated. Thank you and keep it up!
So yeah, those are definitely two unfair advantages that are hard to replicate.
I guess the underlying two lessons are:
1) build and own your own acquisition channels if you can (I initially built BetaList to promote my other startup at the time), and
2) leverage whatever advantages you have. For me that happens to be the fact that I can quite easily get some initial traffic, but if you're a great writer you could use that. If you have a great personality you could invite yourself to podcasts, if you have a certain technical skill perhaps you build what nobody else can.
FWIW, I don't think it's worth paying people to write a press release. If you're an indie maker it's much more compelling for a journalist to hear from the founder directly. Just make sure you have a story worth sharing with their audience. (in a way your "pitch" is just as much a product as your product itself. But in case of the pitch you're trying to convince a journalist you have an interesting story to tell their audience wants to hear).
A bit off-topic: what was the motivation behind you building WIP.chat ? I don’t see an about page on mobile.
To me at least, WIP looks like a cross between a todolist, Twitter and Product Hunt but targeted at indie hackers, no?
And while you can find many chat communities, they always seem like more of a distraction than something that really motivates me to do by best work.
So I created WIP[1]. Initially it was just a Telegram group chat, but with the added twist of being able to share what task you were working on. This oriented the discussion around the actual work people were doing, rather than just chit-chat.
Over time this evolved into more of a platform with a website, Desktop apps, etc. But the core remains the same: an online community of makers/bootstrappers/solopreneurs working in public.
[1] https://wip.chat
Did any customers reject the transfer of their data under GDPR?