It's been a few weeks since I launched my landing page and started posting about my Excell add-in, Minty Tools for Excel. And so far, sales have been unbelievable. That is, in a bad way.
I developed an Excel add-in aimed at people doing financial modeling and analysis. Most add-ins in this area offer specialized features, while I decided to take a more catch-all approach for my add-in. The idea was to pack it full of time-saving features instead of niche use cases, and I believe it delivers on the time-saving promise.
I've already talked about how it was born as a passion project and graduated to a digital product I wanted to release.
And this is where the first problem stems from. The add-in was something I was developing for myself and for fun, so I never attempted to get any early validation for the idea. I loved working on it in my spare time and I had more than 10 colleagues using it religiously, so I enjoyed adding new features and improving it overall regularly.
When Magnimetrics, the startup I co-founded, started to go downhill, I rebranded Minty Tools as Magnimetrics Tools and launched it as a Hail Mary to keep us afloat while we worked on our FP&A cloud platform.
Here was another problem. At this time, we had spent the last 2 years raising money and building our platform on the belief Excel is not the right tool for FP&A. Imagine a company pushing you to leave Excel and use their cloud platform that then starts selling an Excel add-in. That was us.
On top of that, we launched it as a subscription, and it completely flopped. We got 5 customers in the first month. So, we switched to a life-time deal and relaunched it on AppSumo, where it did much better. We offered it for $30 and generated around $2k in a month, which was pretty good for us.
Keep in mind, we did zero paid marketing (had no money to spare). I wrote articles on Medium and the Magnimetrics blog (which is still live here and doing pretty good in terms of organic traffic). I also created a lot of videos, but content marketing simply takes a lot of time and effort.
Unfortunately, we had to cancel the AppSumo lifetime deal because we decided to close the company and were breaching their terms if we didn't refund everyone.
However, for me, this was some form of validation for the add-in. So, I spent another 6 months adding new features, reworking the larger features from before, and overall polishing everything.
Here's another problem. I still treated it as a passion project, a hobby to take my mind off regular work. So, I didn’t do any validating, only had a few people beta test it and report bugs, so I can fix them before launch.
I fully believe (and this may be another problem) that it's not a bad product. After all, I use it all the time and I work in finance. My plan was to take it slow and generate a ton of content to potentially slowly rank high and get a ton of traffic.
I am launching it with my own landing page, so I had zero expectations for any sales at the beginning. However, my launch a few weeks ago went even worse than I anticipated.
The way I see it, there are two ways for me to generate traffic - create content or pay for ads.
The problem here is that I am clueless when it comes to running ad campaigns, and I don't like throwing money away. So, my plan was to create a ton of content. Way more than I am managing to create now. I recently started a new job, so I don't have all this time anymore.
I've been sharing a lot of problems with the whole thing (and there are more, trust me). Now, let me share what I plan to do. And I believe there's at least a 40% chance it will save my project.
I've had some success with cold email outreach when working on the startup I mentioned. So, I plan to craft a few email sequences and start blasting cold emails. Since my product is oriented towards consultants, freelancers, and small businesses, it's a perfect fit for cold emailing (I don't need personal emails, where things are way more complicated and ethically charged).
So, that's the plan. I am doubling down on cold emails. I am currently warming up 18 mailboxes from 9 domains in Instantly.ai and will start blasting in a week or so. Wish me luck!
Oh, and if you work a lot in Excel, you might find the add-in useful, so here's a 50% discount code as a thank you for reading (shameless plug, I know). Just use MINTY50E during checkout and you'll get it. You can check it out here.
In retrospect, if I had approached this as a product from the beginning and not a hobby project, I think I would have done a lot of things differently. But I didn't, so we'll never know if it would've been more successful or not.
The biggest problem I see is being very unrealistic in my planning. I should've thought much more about the whole content marketing strategy. I also should've accounted better for the huge time delays and amounts of additional work organic growth requires. Lessons learned.
I will give my cold outreach strategy a couple of months and see how it goes. Then, I'll report back. Fingers crossed.
That's all for now, see you next week.
Best,
Dobri 🍃