LaunchFast - From 0 to 60 paying customers in 8 months

Meet Rishi Raj Jain.

Rishi is and engineer from India who loves open source. And oh - he’s the founder of LaunchFast.

The story told by Rishi

What is LaunchFast?

LaunchFast Starter Kits helps you focus on your business with pre-built functionality and features, like:

• Compatibility with any Postgres and Redis

• Blogs (powered with Shiki) with in-built search

• Sign in and sign up flow with socials and credentials login

• Forgot password and email verification flow

• Checkout sessions and webhook processing for Stripe and Lemon Squeezy

• Landing and waitlist pages

Available in Astro, Next.js, and SvelteKit, each kit is customizable and extendable. LaunchFast includes integrations for analytics, storage, email, and more, saving you hours of work on each new project.

Building and launching

I built LaunchFast in two days! Ha ha yeah - I already had a bunch of repositories lying around that I was using for my other projects so I just combined them into a mega starter kit. To be precise, September 29th 2023 I started building it.

It went live on October 2nd 2023. See my launch on X below.

Traffic and customers

So far I’ve had about 30K visitors to the LaunchFast website. 60 of those turned into paying customers.

It’s been like 7 months since I launched. It’s not bad. A very good income stream for me.

Marketing initiatives with good results

I am still learning marketing to be honest. But here are the things I've done which have had fairly good results:

• Contributing to the Astro community with astro-font npm package that optimizes fonts from any origin/CDN/directory on the fly or statically.
  

• Creating a high quality developer blog. It’s currently attracting half of the total traffic to my website (around 4k/month) - and leading to external collaborations.
  

• Promoting the blogs as helpful products on reddit (since reddit results seem to rank on top of google) - example
  

• Focus on growing Astro as the boilerplate is based on it.
  

• Regularly posting on my X profile about the process of building and growing LaunchFast.
  

• Launching on X was a badass thing that brought on nice revenue from day 1. LinkedIn and Product Hunt also helped shape the initial journey well.
  

• Doing a YouTube video (kinda outdated now) that garnered 4K views also results in some positive outcome.
  

• Collaborating with Wide Angle Analytics to get a piece out for LaunchFast.

Things that didn’t go too well marketing wise

I have had quite some struggle marketing my SaaS. These initiatives didn’t really work for me:

• Running ads on reddit was a failure - example. I spent $5 on it but it brought in way less traffic than my organic posts on reddit. I’m now trying out Facebook ads as I’ve seen a lot of people (on X) having good results. To be continued …
  

• Starting the LaunchFast newsletter I wanted to. Just too many other things on the plate.
  

• Marketing to affiliates is not easy. I have around 15 affiliates but I do not even know them. Reflio (tool for creating a referral program) is not actively maintaining their website anymore and I was bummed when I got to know that. I switched to Lemon Squeezy for all things in one place: Tax, affiliates, etc. To compensate, I increased my affiliate's commission from 30% to 40%.
  

• Sending cold emails to YC founders failed. No one replied. See example below.

In general I’m yet to learn how funnels work. As mentioned I've had nearly 30K people land on LaunchFast and 60 purchases. That is a ~0.2% conversion rate. I would like it to go to 1%.

Wanna get in contact with Rishi Raj Jain. Find him on X.