Lists Kit 1st year anniversary

I shipped Lists Kit one year ago.

Progress report (or lack thereof):

• Sold 8 Premium ($97) and 1 Starter ($47). Total revenue – US$144.
• Hit DR 35, with 1.7k backlinks. Above average DR, but not exceptional. Apparently on par with a medium-sized blog with some authority in its niche.
  
  
  
  
  
• Got a good handful of social proof, despite low volume.
• Built 4 directories myself using the template
  • Keto List SG,
  • SaaS Starters,
  • Commit365, and
  • Directory Starters.
• This project started off as something for myself, to rebuild Keto List with, and to make it cheaper and faster to build my own directories. So it achieved the initial objective at the least.
• The other directories are for free tools marketing, gets some traffic but not great.
• Launched it on X in Jan this year but it fell flat.
• Only just recently completed 100 listings on both SaaS Starters and Directory Starters. After one year! Launching a directory is easy, collecting information is hard!
• Started affiliate program for Lists Kit at a generous 40% commission, gets some traffic but no revenue from that.
• Joined affiliate programs to shill the products on the SaaS Starters and Directory Starters directories, but no revenue from them either.

What’s next?

• I gave it a good attempt. Despite being super discouraged after launch, I kept building and iterating on it. Got some sales.
• I never quite found a repeatable distribution channel for this. Occasionally tweeting about it seems to bring some traffic, but my followers on X are other indie hackers who code, so probably not the ideal customer profile.
• Just keep it running since zero cost to run (other than time/bandwidth), but unsure the business viability of this so will just limit time spent on this. Maybe this can be sometime to keep around for the long game…
• Possible things to try over long term:
  • Start with SEO/pSEO. Target high volume, easy keywords, add long tail pages
  • Build more directories as free tools.
  • Build a Tailwind version.
  • Build a Google Sheets/Airtable version.
  • Try freemium?
  • Add blog?
  • Maybe pivot to a full stack, self-hosted site template.
  • Or a course on Gumroad/Udemy?
  • Or even a directory builder SaaS?!

I can’t put all my eggs in this, so time to move on!