Our First Micro-Exit Story

Last week, I shared the news about two devastating earthquakes that hit ten cities in Turkey with you. It's sad to say this, but millions were affected, cities collapsed, tens of thousands of people died, and hundreds of thousands were hurt physically and psychologically.

Nowadays, it's so tough to work on those situations, but we need to continue somehow.Last week, we micro-exited one of our side projects related to saas affiliate programs and on this issue, you will get an idea about:

• How we found the idea and published the website,

• How we built the website,

• Our launch day,

• What we did after the launch,

• How we micro-exited the project,

• Our stats and key insights.

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

• Sales: 295$

• Micro-Exit Amount: 675$

• In total, we received 925$ because of the commissions and disbursement fees that the 3rd platforms took.

• Collected Emails: 182

Costs

• Domain Fee: 12$

• Hosting through Softr.

• Gofullpage & urlprofiler free plan.

• Apollo free plan.

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

• After you launch your website, you should think about generating traffic through partnerships, content and backlinks. If you are not willing to spend time on those, it might be better for you to sell the project earlier.

• I really like Softr's UX and their support service. It's a new platform and they need to improve their performance score regarding the stats that Google Page Speed provided.

• On platforms like Flippa, SideProjectors etc., there are spammers around. Most of them want to make the payment through crypto platforms and address you to fake crypto trade platforms. When someone gets in touch with you, please share your requirements and continue the process if they accept it. Don't forget to protect yourself. Your time is crucial.

• When you launch side projects, try to offer a free plan to collect emails. You can use those collected emails to announce updates and your new product launches later.

• When you are selling directories, you can include an option to sell the exported CSV database with a higher fee.

Please share your comments and suggestions via replying this e-mail.Thanks for your time.