Turning My Learnings Into an MVP

Introducing Post Paddle

If you read my previous metrics updates you would find I had 3 winning Pinterest accounts- and those accounts are continuing to grow, getting 100-250 outbound clicks per day. I started to set up Adsense but calculated these blogs would only bring in a around hundred bucks a month in total with my current traffic (assuming a range of half a cent to one cent of revenue per visitor).

To make more I either need to grow my traffic or push affiliate products through my blogs. I started testing the affiliate approach by putting an ad up on my Tattoo website but haven’t gotten any conversions yet. My hypothesis is that my blogs are too impersonal and not trustworthy.

A promising route to revenue could be putting more effort into the blogs and making them into more of a real experience. The problem, however, is that I don’t want to be a blogger! I want to build software! It became obvious to me that the best way to monetize what I have done since February would be to package up my tools and sell them to people that already have revenue making websites. I pair my strengths of software development and my understanding of Pinterest with their established websites. My target customers right now are bloggers and small ecommerce stores.

With my new direction I got to work and spent about a week putting a reasonable frontend on top of the tools I had built that were making all my pins. I packaged it all up and put it on postpaddle.com. It worked decently well on my first deploy but definitely had some bugs. My philosophy on bugs, though, is if there is no one complaining about them, why fix them?! So I knew I had to get users to tell me to fix the bugs (and also tell me what they really wanted).

So I took to Reddit and Facebook groups.

Those 2 posts netted me five paying users. Perfect! Just enough to find all the bugs and iterate rapidly based on their feedback. Once I make these 5 people happy, I will know it’s time to scale. For now I am keeping my user base small and providing excellent support while continuing to write on here and X.

I will continue to provide updates on my Pinterest accounts as those are still my proof of concept but will also have posts like these just talking about my solopreneur journey.

Hope you enjoyed!

Alex