Daniel Vassallo worked at Amazon for 8 years before leaving to focus on his own projects. At that point, he didn’t have a personal brand nor a business plan. He shared more about those early days at My First 100 Days Working For Myself. He wrote about how he prepared himself financially at From Employee to Bootstrapper.
He shares his most useful information on Twitter.
He posted a tweet about his developer path.
He created a Twitter thread about his favourite books.
The Essentials
- Main website: DVassallo.com
- Twitter: dvassallo
Daniel started using Twitter in Feb 2019. Within 14 months, it grew from from 150 to 24,000 followers. He has said that most of his product sales can be attributed to Twitter.
In December, 2020, he reported getting 700k Twitter impressions in 5 days.
Twitter Threads
- Building and demonstrating credibility.
- How Daniel built a following despite changing the topics he tweeted about.
- Important things Daniel realized in the year since he left full-time employment.
- How to get your first 1000 followers
- How almost everyone can make an information product and find customers.
- What he learned in his first 4 months selling infoproducts
Info Products
The Good Parts of AWS
The Good Parts of AWS is the first product Daniel released. It was coauthored by Josh Pschorr.
Check out the product on Gumroad
Stats:
- Daniel had $5,304 in pre-orders for his ebook between Oct-Dec ’19.
- Launch day resulted in $13k of sales, which he posted about on Hacker News. That post resulted in 52 direct sales.
- By day 2 he had $17k of sales; $20k of sales by the end of day 3.
- After the first week, he had 1,051 orders and $29,295 sales. Three weeks later, he had crossed $45K in sales. By week 4 he had passed $50k.
- In 7.5 weeks he had sold nearly 2K copies sold and earned almost $60K.
- In April, 2020, he stated that the book was getting 1 sale a day of $38 from search traffic alone.
- 140 days after the launch, he reported 4,000 sales.
Reddit Ads
Daniel experimented with Reddit ads to promote this product.
He first tested Reddit Ads at the beginning of January, 2020. He paused the ads because he wasn’t breaking even towards the end of the campaign.
He resumed his Reddit campaign on March 30, stating that the cost-per-click was less than half what it used to be. 3 days later, he reported that he made $444 from a $115.82 ad spend. On April 7, he shared the data from the current Reddit Ad campaign.
In late April, he tweeted that he had made $3,442 in profit from reddit ads that month. On May 8th, he shared that the ads were still profitable.
More Stats:
- April 7 – 14 2020
- April 22: Spent $2,290 on Reddit ads and sold $5,142. Last 5 days was $534 spent, sold $882, but it included some experiments with poor results:
- Turning $1 into $1.95 with the AWS ebook
Tips
He created a twitter thread about the lessons learned in his first 16 days. The product took 16hrs to create: 6hrs on slides, 6hrs recording and 4hrs on product & launch readiness.
The success story was featured at $40,000 in 16 Days from Daniel Vassallo’s First Book.
Everyone Can Build A Twitter Audience
Daniel launched his Twitter course on April 22 with 25’000 followers and 880 email subscribers.
He made 40 sales and and earned $2,576 within in the first hour. Within 4 hours he’d made $6,358, from 100 sales. The sales from the first 24 hours averaged $500/hr. He’d made $32,538 in sales 10 days later. He shared the details in this tweet.
Between then and June 11, He posted 5 tweets and 2 emails about it. The result was $82,768 in sales to 1,445 customers.
This tweet received 105K impressions and made $16,768 in direct sales from 6,312 link clicks. That’s $2.65 per click (source.)
He tweeted that a spreadsheet add-on he included with the course took only a few minutes to prepare, and generated an extra $7,500 in sales.
Profit And Loss
Profit and Loss is an all-access subscription into how Daniel makes a living on the internet. It is part paid newsletter, part community. He launched it at the end of 2020.
He got 127 subscribers within an hour of announcing the product. After four hours, he had $1k MRR. After 24 hours, he had 400 subscribers.
He shared more stats 2 weeks later. He had 650 subscribers and had earned in $14,606 revenue. His estimated MRR was $2,877.
Lessons Learned
Daniel has shared a lot about both product launches.
He did a Q&A on Twitter in April after hitting $100k in sales. He did a similar AMA Twitter thread after hitting 200k in sales.
He shared the sales and costs behind the first 7 months of his infoproduct business in early June. Within 10 months, he’d crossed ¼ of a million sales on Gumroad.
He tweeted about the products affiliate program in June 2020. Within 24 hours, he had 60 new affiliates who brought $1,360 in gross sales. Within 36 days, he had onboarded 94 affiliates who had sent $5,461 in sales.
In August 2020, he had a Pay What You Want promotion for both products. Within 60 mins, he had sold 970 copies and earned $3,014
In November, 2020, he tweeted that he earned 10,000 sales from 622 views per day on Gumroad.
Finance Updates
Features
Interviews
Mastering the Lifestyle-First Approach to Indie Hacking with Daniel Vassallo at Indie Hackers
Case Studies
Gumroad created a Twitter thread about how he made $200,000 in six months on the platform.
He did an experiment where he offered to answer emails on his hey.com email account. The tweet got 116K impressions, and he received 200+ emails.