I’m Sveta Bay, Co-Founder of MakerBox. And this is the first issue of my newsletter. Both MakerBox and Newsletter have one huge mission — help Solopreneurs with marketing.
MakerBox is a collection of templates, databases, videos, checklists, and guides. We create resources that help solopreneurs without a marketing degree to get profitable.
Who’s your ideal customer, and how do you acquire them?
Say hi to Tim - our Persona 👋
Tim is a Solopreneur. His problem is that revenue doesn’t grow as fast as needed. So, he wants to improve marketing to be profitable.
His motivation is to stop working 9-5 and start spending more time doing what he loves. For sure, he wants to build a product that sells itself and markets by word of mouth. Overall, Tim considers marketing as an enemy - it’s spammy and salesy.
Tim likes spending time on Twitter, Indie Hackers, and Product Hunt. There’re a lot of like-minded people who can give advice and support.
It’s interesting how many Tims are reading this 😄
Share your core metrics
MakerBox is 10 months old. Since then, we have:
$50 703 revenue ($5-$6K monthly)
773 paid users (3000 free users)
We have only one-time payments. The revenue dynamic and the key lunches are the following:
MakerBox revenue dynamic and the key lunches
How did you get your first 10 customers?
Our first marketing resource was MakerBox Tools - a collection of 600 products with generous Free plans for Solopreneurs. In the beginning, we had no product, no Twitter audience, and no email list.
The solution: connect with our target audience and ask for feedback literally everywhere. And the most important part - have a waitlist. If we’re already connecting with our target audience, why not show them an opportunity?
Post on Polywork - the best platform to find beta testers
So, we connected with people on Twitter and Polywork, and started discussions on Product Hunt and Indie Hackers. We asked for beta testing part of the product and for feedback on our landing page. That’s how our waitlist grew.
What’s your Best marketing decision and why?
Launching the marketing bundle - a collection of our products.
In January, MakerBox had 5 marketing resources (WorkBook, Frameworks, Tools, Positioning course, and Newsletters list). And it became a problem. Who wants to click the buy button 5 times? Nobody. And how to generate traffic for the 5 landing pages..?
MakerBox Bundle with 3 products
So, we introduced the first bundle version as an upsell option. At that time, every product had 2 pricing options: get one product for $49 or 3 products for $99. Surprisingly, around 80% of purchases were bundles.
Now bundle is our main offer. The result of this decision is growing the average order from $40 to $110. Not going to lie, 3 figures payment notifications hit differently.
What’s your unpopular marketing opinion and why?
Cringe marketing tactics are worth trying.
Please, don’t unsubscribe 😅
There’s a high chance you don’t want to have popups or make giveaways on Twitter. I also thought I’d never do them. But then I tried and found a way to make it non-cringe for me.
Popup example: We still have landing pages for our non-bundle products. But the bundle deal is way more beneficial. We genuinely want to give more value, so we show bundle popups on these pages.
Giveaway example: I don’t include “must be following” to get the freebie cause I don’t want to force people to follow me. Do I need an audience that doesn’t engage with my content? No.
Freebie for the email
If you could do 1 thing differently, what would it be?
I wish I had collected more emails from freebies & viral tweets. The email list is a real superpower. 1 000 email list >> 10 000 Twitter followers. You create a better connection with your audience, the conversions are better, and the result is more predictable.
Dan always plugins his newsletter to his viral tweets. Here's an example: a tweet with 100K impressions resulted in 100 new emails. With a 5% conversion, you get 5 sales. Good!
Finally, I have this newsletter to plugin. It’s time to make viral tweets 👀
What top-2 marketing challenges do you have, and how do you plan to solve them?
MakerBox has only one-time payments and 0 MRR. This is nervous cause every month is a race to be profitable. We plan to fix it by launching SaaS around marketing. Thanks to all the launches, we already know the pains to solve.
The second problem is that product is only affordable to some. $110 average price is quite high. Not everyone is ready to give this amount of money right away. So, we want to gain trust with a low-ticket offer ($9-$19).