My App Had Paying Customers Without A Landing Page

Hieu Dinh

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Published: March 14th, 2024

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About
Business

Hieu Dinh

Founder, CompressX

$2.5K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

CompressX

compressx.app

from Singapore

started January 2024

$2,500

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

Hello, my name is Hieu Dinh and I am the maker of CompressX, a video and image compression app for macOS. I provide a simple yet powerful offline solution to compress videos and images with up to 90% file size reduction.

Since the launch, CompressX has helped over 2,770 customers to compress 26,000 files which reduced more than 7 terabytes and earned $5,000 in sales.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

My first online product was Expense Buddy. It's an expense-tracking app I made for myself to track my daily spending. After spending about one and a half years working on it as a side project, I sold the app in December 2022. Since then, I have continued working on a few other side projects. I also teamed up with my brother Tony Dinh to develop Xnapper, a macOS app that takes beautiful screenshots instantly.

I didn't even have a proper landing page back then. It was just a link to purchase the app directly from Lemon Squeezy. I think that to get your idea validated fast, you need to focus on the MVP first, everything else can be done at a later phase.

In addition to all the side projects, I also maintain my full-time position as a lead iOS engineer. In my team, we have a practice of including a screen record demo with each pull/merge request, which helps code reviewers quickly understand the changes being made. This is an excellent practice to improve code quality in our team.

However, due to GitLab limitations, the video file must be under 10 MB for upload. While my team typically uses FFmpeg to compress videos, which is quite effective, I find the workflow – adjusting commands for each video or running scripts – a bit cumbersome, as I'm not particularly inclined towards terminal-based tasks. To streamline this process, I made CompressX which helped simplify video compression

CompressX was not the first of its kind. There are many video compression tools out there, including online and offline compression, but they just didn't fit my needs. Firstly, I don't want to upload my video to random online websites because of privacy concerns. Secondly, existing apps need to be simpler to use.

Finally, the video quality is usually heavily affected after compressing when using those tools. I want an app that can heavily reduce file size while maintaining good quality and working 100% offline. That's why I built CompressX.

This is me writing the very first lines of code of CompressX

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.

To get my idea validated, I focused on building the most basic version of the product. As such, I implemented only one feature: select a video then compress it.

As an iOS software engineer, I'm familiar with the Apple ecosystem, so I can learn to develop macOS apps quickly. Also, this is not my first macOS app, I worked on a few macOS apps before.

It took me nearly 2 weeks to make the first working version. I shared the demo on Twitter and the reaction was extraordinary. People loved it, they said that I was bringing the Pied Piper to life.

At that stage, the app was available for free. Users can download and use it without any charge. Yet, some customers decided to pay for it, showing that my idea was validated. I continued to refine the product by adding new features, addressing bugs, and enhancing the app's performance to prepare for the official launch of Product Hunt.

I didn't even have a proper landing page back then. It was just a link to purchase the app directly from Lemon Squeezy. I think that to get your idea validated fast, you need to focus on the MVP first, everything else can be done at a later phase.

Describe the process of launching the business.

In January, I launched CompressX on Product Hunt. I prepared a lot of marketing material and resources to help me get top rank on the launch day.

Thanks to my Twitter audience, my product claimed to #1 spot within a few hours. At the end of the launch day, CompressX achieved the #2 product of the day with 592 upvotes.

My sale notifications blew up that day.

Launching a product on Product Hunt is not easy, because Product Hunt is not only for indie developers and small teams anymore. Product Hunt's algorithm favors upvotes, so more upvotes mean more views and traffic.

If I had to summarize my launch strategy, it would be this:

Grow an audience by openly sharing what I'm working on
Introduce the app early to start bringing in users and form connections with them
Spread awareness about my launch early to get support

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

The day after the Product Hunt launch, I got back to work immediately. More users meant more feedback and feature requests so I couldn't wait to work on them. About a week after launch, I introduced the image compression and gif conversion feature. 2 weeks later, batch processing and real-time progress were released to all users. When you love something, you will never feel tired working on it.

Working on the app may help to retain customers, but to attract new customers I had to focus on building a proper landing page. Luckily, one of my followers on Twitter, Kacper, shared his design of the landing page. I was so impressed by the professional look and feel of his design that I decided to bring it to life.

One thing I love when building a landing page is you can show testimonials as the social proof. Guillermo Rauch, Vercel CEO, shared that he enjoyed the app. Tony Dinh was also impressed by the compression result. CompressX quickly becomes a must-have tool in the toolbox of Mark Moeykens from BIG MOUNTAIN Studio.

The live stats on the front page also helped a lot to gain customer trust. It shows how many users I have, how many files have been compressed, and how much size has been reduced. This helps to impress new users as long as they visit the website.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

CompressX is profitable with $3300 in revenue in the first month and about $1500 in revenue last month. With the maintenance cost of about $80/month, I'm confident about its future.

compressx.app had about 2,600 visitors last month with about 4,800 page views. The "Buy" button was clicked 900 times by 800 users, converting to about 80 sales.

In the upcoming weeks, I will release a feature that automatically compresses files in a monitored folder. This will help CompressX compete with other competitors. With this release, I hope my product will be re-reviewed and accepted to be on Setapp.

If you have an idea, go for it. Try to build it in a weekend or two, then share the MVP in public for early feedback. If you don't have an idea, go check other people's pain points and see if you can solve them.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Balancing a side business besides a 9-5 job is not easy. I often find myself working 10+ hours a day. There were nights I slept at 2 AM, thinking I only needed 5 minutes to finish a feature, to spend an hour on it instead. I wish I had more time to improve the product and explore other ideas.

As an indie hacker, I need to learn other things rather than just coding. compressx.app had only the front page, I put everything else (help center, faqs, changelog) in a separate Notion space which wasn't good for SEO because I needed to ship fast.

Sharing progress in public also helped me to get early feedback on what people want in the product, which can be pretty different from what I initially thought.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

Lemon Squeezy for payments, license management, and mailing

Vercel for hosting

Telemetry Deck for anonymous analytics

Supabase for backend

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

I have many startup books at home (mostly from my brother) but I haven't read any. I also rarely listen to podcasts.

I learned everything directly from other startup founders on Twitter. The #buildinpublic community on Twitter is the most valuable resource you can find.

Everyone shares their mistakes, learnings, achievements, and 1001 stories on which works and which doesn't.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

I have been back to build in public for a few months, and I achieved most of my goals by sharing everything I built and learned. If you want to start, you can join me on Twitter.

If you have an idea, go for it. Try to build it in a weekend or two, then share the MVP in public for early feedback. If you don't have an idea, go check other people's pain points and see if you can solve them.

Your initial product(s) will likely fail, but the journey will offer you valuable lessons and experience for the next one. Ensure your product addresses problems and that there is a market for it, avoid being overly greedy and excessively self-doubting.

Where can we go to learn more?

I shared everything I learned and built in my newsletter. I write only once a month. I also share everything publicly on Twitter.

If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!