The Story
Deven was a struggling entrepreneur from India with only a handful of users and no idea how to build distribution. As he admits: "I was always a struggling entrepreneur. I didn't know how to build distribution."
Then he discovered lifetime deals. Using this strategy, he generated $65,000 in just 3 days and jumpstarted SuperGrow - a SaaS that helps professionals build their personal brand on LinkedIn.
The idea came from studying competitors: "I actually tried their tool out and I actually was not happy with the content creation piece. Around the same time, GPT-3 was launched and it actually changed the whole content creation game because it was really good at mimicking the writing style of the user."
As Deven puts it: "Lifetime deals are a cheat code because it gives you cash infusion, validation, and early feedback."
Key Insights
The Validation Strategy
"One thing which I always tell indie hackers is don't try to create new market, just work on the validated market."
- •Study competitors deeply (Taplio, ContentIn, AuthorUp)
- •"Deeply understand your competitors, use their product day in day out and try to understand what are their core flows"
- •Find what their core flows are missing
- •"Once you are able to come up with a sort of a 1% increment in the quality of the product, you can just go ahead and build an MVP"
The $65K Launch
- •Had only 2-3 customers and ~600 Twitter followers
- •RocketHub co-founder Charlie reached out after seeing their journey on LinkedIn
- •"We would love to help you launch Supergrow on RocketHub"
- •Generated $65K in 3 days ($40K after 40% platform cut)
"Initially to be honest with you I was really skeptical, but after talking to Charlie I kind of get it like why people do LTDs."
Lifetime Deal Pricing Structure
- •Tier 1: $79 (basic plan)
- •Tier 2: $199 (pro plan)
- •Tier 3: $299 (agency plan)
- •"Whoever bought the product back then, they were getting like 4 to 5 years of value just by paying $299, $199"
What RocketHub Did
"They actually do everything for you apart from the product."
- •Emailed hundreds of thousands of LTD buyers
- •Created Instagram and Facebook ads
- •Built all marketing assets (screenshots, videos they still use today)
- •"Essentially our role was build the product and support"
- •Took 40% cut
"Obviously, it's a big cut. 40% is a huge cut. But if you think about it, at that moment, we had only like one or two customers. We had almost close to $0, but just by launching our product through them, we were able to generate $40,000."
Pros and Cons of Lifetime Deals
Pros:
- •"The biggest benefit of LTD is cash infusion, validation and early feedback"
- •Creates ambassadors who evangelize your product
- •"We had like 10 to 15 really happy LTD customers who actually talked about us on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Product Hunt"
Cons:
- •High platform cut (40%)
- •"We got a lot of angry customers reaching out to you for feature requests, for missing features, for bugs"
- •"When you launch LTD, you attract a lot of cheap customers also"
- •Only ~10% of LTD customers actively use product long-term
LTD Objections Answered
"LTDs are cope for bad products"
"Actually LTD exposes bad products really faster because these LTD customers are going to give very brutal feedback to you."
"Why not just offer it for free?"
"Free users don't actually validate your product. They will just consume it and if something doesn't work, they will just ghost you. But paying customers, because they have put real money into your business, they are going to give you good feedback."
"Won't it kill long-term growth?"
"You don't want to launch LTD for a long period of time. We launched LTD only for 3 days... limit the time frame and also limit the number of users. We limited that to 300 users."
The Product Hunt Strategy
"One of the key things - these LTD customers actually helped us make our Product Hunt launch better because they actually evangelized our product everywhere. I was not the only person talking about my product that day."
Result: Became Product of the Week and got 50 new customers.
Business Numbers
- •$230K/year total revenue
- •$19K/month recurring
- •800+ recurring customers
- •15,000+ monthly landing page visits
- •60-70% profit margins
Tech Stack
- •Rails, React, Tailwind (app)
- •Postgres (database)
- •Supabase (auth, assets)
- •Railway (hosting)
- •Framer (landing page)
- •Intercom (live chat)
- •Mixpanel (analytics)
- •Stripe (payments)
- •Microsoft Clarity (session recordings)
Costs
- •Marketing/affiliates: ~$3K/month
- •Freelancers (design/product): ~$1K/month
Key Advice
"My one piece of advice would be don't work in an unvalidated market and don't think of creating a very unique solution in a unique market. I think it's okay to build a better version of an existing product that's getting traction. As an indie hacker, it's very hard for us to educate users on the problem. Focus on validated markets."
Resources
- •Follow Deven: https://x.com/devenbhooshan
- •SuperGrow: https://www.supergrow.ai/