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My first paying customer, 6 days after launch

On October 20, six days after Textfold 1.0 came out, someone I've never met paid $19 for it. It's a small number. It's also the first real proof that the app solves a problem for someone other than me.

By Jeyanth, the developer of Textfold ·

Textfold is a text expander for Mac: you type ;sigand get your signature, in any app. It's free for 10 snippets with every feature, and Pro is a one-time purchase. I launched it on October 14 with no audience, no mailing list and 2 followers on X. Here's what the first week looked like, honestly.

The payment notification for Textfold's first $19 sale, with the customer's name, email and payment ID hidden
The notification, with the customer's details hidden.

The numbers

  • About 325 visitors to the site in the first week. Roughly 45% were on a Mac, which matters for a Mac-only app.
  • About 40 people downloaded it. GitHub counts 54 downloads, but that includes my own tests and people downloading updates.
  • Six releases in four days, 1.0.0 to 1.0.5, mostly fixing things strangers pointed out.
  • One paying customer, at the $19 launch price.

The sale came in silently. No email, no question beforehand, just a notification from the payment provider. I wrote to say thank you and asked what made them buy. If they answer, I'll add it here, because that's the most useful thing I could learn right now.

Where people came from

Hacker News brought most of the visitors. One Show HN post sent more people than any other place.

Indie Hackers brought fewer people, but the best feedback. People there actually opened the app and told me what confused them.

Reddit was mixed. Answering existing “which text expander should I use” threads, and saying I'm the developer, brought a few curious people. My launch post in r/macapps was removed by Reddit's spam filters before anyone saw it, which is a good reminder that new accounts get no benefit of the doubt.

X, with 2 followers, brought almost nothing. Posting into the void doesn't work. Replying to other people's posts and joining communities slowly does: I'm at 6 followers now.

The lesson I'd give anyone launching without an audience: borrow one first, then build your own.

What strangers made me fix

Friends test your product politely. Strangers test it honestly. In the first week, people I'd never met found problems I had looked past a hundred times:

  • My pricing didn't match. One page showed the $19 launch price, another showed $29. A tiny thing, but it's exactly the kind of mismatch that makes someone hesitate at checkout. Now every page shows both: $19 until November 8, then $29.
  • The demo didn't play for some Macs. With “Reduce Motion” turned on, my homepage animation skipped straight to the finished email, so those visitors never saw ;sig turn into a signature, the one moment that explains the app. Now it plays once, pauses on ;sig, then shows the signature.
  • More than half the visitors weren't on a Mac. They were reading on phones or work PCs and hitting a download they couldn't use. The site now says plainly that Textfold is a Mac app and lets them send the link to their Mac for later.

I can't prove which fix made the difference. But the sale came after them, not before.

The problem with a generous free plan

Textfold's free plan has every feature, for up to 10 snippets, forever. I like that. People can try it on their real work before paying anything.

The catch is that most people start with three or four snippets, so almost nobody reaches the limit in the first week, and nobody is ever asked to decide. Several people on Indie Hackers and X pointed this out. One suggested a 7-day trial instead, another suggested putting the decision at the moment someone has set up their real workflow.

I'm keeping the snippet limit, because free users should never lose access to their own snippets. But the next update adds a gentle note from the eighth snippet on: how many free snippets are left, and what Pro costs while the launch price lasts. The decision should arrive when Textfold has already proven useful, not as a surprise.

What's next

  • The free-plan reminder above, in the next update.
  • A Product Hunt launch on October 27.
  • Short tutorials on a new YouTube channel, and reaching out to small Mac YouTubers and writers. There's a press kit now too.
  • More posts like this one, with the real numbers, good or bad.

If you bought Textfold, thank you. If you tried it and didn't, I'd love to know what stopped you: hello@textfold.app. I read every email.