Launching a next-level platform for digital creators

You never really know what launch day is going to look like until you click the “Ship it” button and wait for the responses to start rolling in. You can plan marketing, coordinate with influencers, write guest posts, and fire off dozens of email campaigns, but at the end of the day, the work you put into your product is ultimately going to decide if people resonate with it or not.

From the start, we decided to build Lemon Squeezy largely out in the open with behind-the-scenes design and dev updates, feature previews via Lemon Drop updates, and a beta program to get early feedback. We could tell early on that it was resonating with the right crowd.

As Adam Wathan of TailwindCSS wisely points out, “You need to start marketing at the very beginning, when all of the exciting development is happening and you have lots of interesting things to share.”

This turned out to be a swell idea (Adam seems to have a lot of those). Creators were already getting familiar with Lemon Squeezy before we even launched it and were literally begging to be let in! The excitement was building the entire time we were building the app, and by launch day, it was just a matter of flipping the switch.

Another part of the early success of Lemon Squeezy seems to be in the inherent energy and personality that the brand emotes. We were very conscious about building something fun, energetic, and engaging. If you’re a creator like me, you know the hurdles of selling digital products and the lack of truly innovative progress in this space. It seems as though the introduction of Lemon Squeezy was a breath of fresh air for many creators out there.

All systems go

I’ll be honest, we didn’t have months of launch planning or a ton of marketing queued up for launch day. It just didn’t feel all that necessary.

We had confidence that the work we were doing had an audience because we were curating and growing it along the way. We felt good about the momentum we’d built up and hoped that it would help carry us through launch day.

Thankfully, we weren’t wrong! Our initial launch tweet picked up steam quickly, garnering hundreds of likes, retweets, comments, and new followers from individuals and influential industry folks.

Likes and retweets are one thing, but actually getting people into the app is what really matters. So, how’d we do there? Well, since launch, we’ve added ~1000 new stores to Lemon Squeezy, and hundreds of new stores per day. Now that’s juicy! We are thrilled to see so many people signing up and experiencing this new way of selling digital goods and making money online.

Currently, all new users are onboarded into the Fresh plan, which is our free offering (+ 8% + 30c per transaction), so they can explore the app risk-free. As users become familiar with Lemon Squeezy’s features and incredible value, we expect to start seeing healthy conversions into the Sweet plan, which is $29/mo (+ 3.5% + 30c per transaction).

Hunting for product validation

You can’t launch a product these days without listing it on Product Hunt. Product Hunt is a website that curates the best new apps, websites, and technology products every day. The site has a very wide reach, and has featured some of the most popular products we use today.

Gilbert, the lead developer and one of the co-founders, listed Lemon Squeezy on Product Hunt Wednesday morning, and it started to gain momentum and positive feedback pretty quickly. By mid-day, we were bouncing around between being the #1 and #2 Product of the Day.

At the end of the day, we ended up snagging the #2 spot, which is an incredible feat that any product creator would be ecstatic about. I know our team definitely was!

What’s next?

Now that we’ve finally put this spaceship into orbit, we plan to keep delivering on our growing list of features and continue working with creators to really make this app sing for them.

These features will help us further differentiate Lemon Squeezy from the competition and give creators unique value they can’t find anywhere else.

• Email marketing
• Drip campaigns
• Website builder
• Affiliates
• Sales + analytics reports
• API
• WordPress plugin

If the launch was any indication, Lemon Squeezy has a long and exciting future ahead of it, and we’re ready to charge full steam ahead to make it happen.

Still haven’t signed up and kicked the tires yet? Why not?! It’s free to create an account and start selling your digital products with Lemon Squeezy! Give it a spin and let us know what you think.