The Story
Ovnish built Save Wise, a platform that helps people earn credit card points and airline miles for things they're already buying online. He grew it to $25K/month in just 15 months using Reddit and Facebook groups as his primary marketing channels.
As Ovnish explains: "I've always worked in the tech industry. I've worked at companies like Microsoft and Instagram, Foursquare, and Dropbox. But I eventually left because I always had this voice in the back of my head where I knew I wanted to build something from scratch."
The idea came from his own expertise: "I am really good at figuring out how to find deals and stack coupons and promo codes and earn credit card points online. And at some point it sort of hit me that this is such an incredibly manual process. There had to be a better way to do it."
Key Insights
The Failed Marketing Attempts
"I posted on Product Hunt. I posted on Hacker News. I posted on Indie Hackers and I actually got tons of traffic and then quickly realized that none of those people stuck. I think the bounce rate was like 95-96%."
"I probably sent 300, 400 different emails and messages to influencers. I got a single email back out of all of those. Nobody who has an audience or influence cares about a product that is not ready."
The Breakthrough
"I needed to take a very different approach, a very targeted approach, and to find the people that this product was specifically designed for."
"There were two main platforms that really worked for me. The first was Reddit and the other was Facebook groups specifically."
5-Step Reddit & Facebook Playbook
Step 1: Brainstorm Keywords
"Brainstorm 5, 10, 15 different keywords, interests, demographics that are the kind of people who would actually use your product online."
Tool recommendation: "The Map of Reddit - you basically enter a single subreddit, and it will search all of Reddit and visually map out all of the different subreddit communities that are related to that particular subreddit."
Step 2: Observe Before Posting
"When you join these Reddit and Facebook groups, do not initially post in those groups. What were the kinds of things people were talking about? How were they talking about them?"
Step 3: Identify Your Goal
"For each community, you want to identify the goal for posting in that community. It could be that you're trying to understand what other products people use or what other problems people have. You could just be trying to actually get people to try your product for the first time."
Step 4: Set Up Keyword Alerts
"Set up keyword alerts on a product like F5bot for anytime people are talking about your product or topic areas. I would get a real-time alert and I would go and read that entire post on Reddit and Facebook."
Step 5: Be Helpful First
"Just be as helpful as possible when you're posting online. Once I figured out a way to just organically and naturally be helpful by giving tips to people on how to earn credit card points online, that then earned me the right to also mention my product."
The Facebook Group Win
"I stumbled upon this group called Rakuten Stacks. How to double dip with Rakuten. And what I realized was there were thousands of people in this group manually looking for these offers that my product could do with a single query."
"I had over 1,500 people visit the website just from posting this spreadsheet in this Facebook group."
The Reddit Strategy
"Every week or so, I would join that weekly comment thread, post the website, and ask for feedback. And after about three and a half months, I had built out all of the core functionality that members of the community were just straight up telling me about."
"I messaged the moderator back and said, 'Hey, are you still okay with me doing a top-level post?' They said yes. And I went ahead and posted, and it blew up."
Business Numbers
- •$25K MRR
- •~1,500 paying customers
- •Tens of thousands of users
- •97% of revenue from lifetime plans (not subscriptions)
Pricing Insight
"I learned consumers hate subscriptions. The day that I launched a subscription product, I had several emails from members who wanted to buy the pro product asking for a lifetime membership where they were willing to pay for two plus years worth of the pro membership all upfront."
Tech Stack
- •Next.js (frontend)
- •Vercel (hosting)
- •Azure (data processing, database)
- •Retool (data management)
- •Clerk (authentication)
- •V0 (design) - "the biggest unlock for me in the last 6 months"
- •PostHog (analytics)
- •ChatGPT and Cursor (AI tools)
- •Google Analytics
Key Advice
"Understanding your target customer and everything about them is even more useful for the marketing part of it and going to market figuring out where do my target customers hang out on the internet. It has been way more impactful for that."
Resources
- •Save Wise: https://savewise.app/
- •Follow Ovnish on Twitter