Congrats!!! First internet money for this guy 🎉🍾

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Edmilson Gomes (@TecEdSocial)

I was at McDonald's with my mom and sister when it happened. My first internet money(9 freaking dollars$$$)

Well, not exactly. I'd just left them to go home and work. It was around 9pm. I open my laptop and there's an email.

Someone paid for my product.

$9.10. My first ever paying customer. After 3 years of failing.

I genuinely thought it was a test notification at first. I test everything constantly so I get those all the time. But this one was different. It wasn't me. It didn't have [Sandbox] written in the title. It wasn't my email. It was real.

I couldn't believe it.

I started trying to indie hack in April 2023, right after I finished university. I'd just read about <a href="https://nitter.net/levelsio" title="@levelsio">@levelsio</a> a solo founder making $1M+ a year building software products. Something in my brain just switched. I looked at the job market waiting for me here in Portugal. 1,000€/month. And I thought: I don't want this. I want freedom. Geographic, financial, all of it. I want my mom to stop working as hard as she has her whole life.

So I started building.

And I failed. A lot. Built SaaS that went nowhere. Pivoted. Killed projects that didn't make sense. Eventually went into freelancing (SEO/CRO for local businesses and SaaS) just to make money and that's actually where I found the pain point that became vitelnk

vitelnk is a way to share videos with prospects so you can book more meetings and close more deals. I cold email businesses, send them a personalized video audit, and actually see when they watch it and for how long so I can follow up at the right moment. Private links, disable downloads, email-gating, pretty much everything you need. Stuff other platforms just didn't have.

A few months in, almost 2,000 visitors. 57 users(some were my test accounts) . 83% bounce rate. And $0.

Then I rebuilt my entire landing page!

Stopped talking about how great my app is and started talking about their actual problems. Focused on their pain (which I found with my own research and leadverse a tool by <a href="https://nitter.net/jakubmuzzik" title="Jakub Mužík">@jakubmuzzik</a> that allows me to get information on potential buyers pain points they face with other tools and features they need) and the benefits of using video to secure more meetings.

Days later, the email came in.

I don't even fully know how she or he idk… found me. I built an analytics tool and STILL hadn't wired up the revenue tracking properly. No idea where she/he came from.

Doesn't matter.

They saw the value even without fully trying the product and bought a sub.

Most indie hackers never get here. I've watched founders come and go on this app for years because they couldn't get a single one. And n…

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