Project URL: http://www.yourkindlecover.co
Idea: A website where you tell me what your book is about and I send you a free, custom kindle ebook cover, within 24 hours.
Problem I think it solves: Some people are marketers, some are writers and some are designers. Rarely are they all three – and nor should they be. They should stick to writing and let others do what they do best – designing covers.
Status: 9 days left on the free trial from pop.co
Emails: 7 real ones plus a weird one, about the device itself
Revenue: 0 (but could change soon)
Total Traffic (stats after about 2 days):
Traffic Sources:
Coming soon
Locations:
Coming soon
Devices used:
Coming soon
Tactics for marketing:
- Posted on facebook and twitter.
- Joined 20+ facebook groups about Kindle eBooks and asked them whether they’re interested in a free cover (they were).
Lessons learned:
1. Talk to your users.
Some asked questions, some wanted to give me money, others were just cheering me on. Even if it doesn’t scale (especially when it doesn’t scale), it’s always useful to talk and listen to your users.
2. Do a great job, money will follow.
I was very surprised to see an email from someone asking me about a donation button/account. A great job goes a long way.
3. Be a team.
It’s one thing to say “I’ll do this for you” and another to say “Our expert team will work tirelessly for you and provide multiple variations for you to choose”. It seems like it’s more of a sure thing, thinking there must be a manager in the team, so the task should be taken care of.
4. “Cute” beats “serious”, sometimes.
When I was looking around for similar services, all of them had a very serious tone about them. They talked about things like “professional”, “exceptional”, “world-class”. I decided to differentiate on the basis of cuteness. That way (I thought) people felt more at ease approaching and using the service.
5. Focus on a niche.
The website’s name isn’t “General Book Covers” or “Book Covers for Everyone”. I knew how popular Amazon Kindle eBooks had gotten, especially since I am a published author there. In hindsight, as there are multiple eBook stores, I could potentially launch other sites like KoboCovers, BarnesAndNobleCovers and so on. As you’ve seen from the traffic stats above, I had a conversion rate of about 50%! 15 users in 2 days and 7 emails.
Technical details:
As some of you might have additional questions, I decided to add this section for those of you courageous enough to try something similar.
The website is hosted using the Startup Bundle package from pop.co. You don’t to pay anything upfront and you get a .co domain, a starter page and an email account @yourdomain.co. All that for 2 weeks. After that the whole package is just $2.50/month.
The logo was generated by one of these tools in this list from Product Hunt. This time it was Squarespace.com/Logo, cleaned up a bit in Photoshop afterwards.
Thanks for reading this far. Now you can:
A. Read about my other projects – still 28 to go!
B. Email me about questions and/or projects you’d like help on.
C. All of the above.
30 Tiny Projects In 30 Days 