This Simple Software Has Earned Him $400,000+

Keith Brink is the founder of AZLabels 🖨️

Which he describes as…

A product to take the frustration out of printing labels on thermal printers, primarily targeted at Amazon Sellers.

AZLabels was launched in 2017.

According to Indie Hackers, the business currently earns ~$5,200/month, though it has had a few $9000+ months in the past 🤑

Keith shares the origin story…

I was an Amazon seller myself and was spending up to an hour every day just getting labels to print properly. Super inefficient. Every Amazon FBA seller has to label each product and then label each box that gets shipped to Amazon.

I had to choose between a long manual process that took 20-30 minutes per shipment, or some ancient software that was expensive, slow, didn’t work half the time

That’s when he…

Took a couple of months building out an automated solution, I realized that there were likely other sellers experiencing the same issue. So I put up a basic landing page… it wasn’t a wild success. I think I got 20 sign-ups in a month… but I figured I should just release it.

So he did…

After I put out the first version of AZLabels I emailed a couple of people to ask them to start using it, just to work out all the bugs… I think it’s important to release an MVP quickly, but it’s also important to make sure your product is worth paying for.

After that, I launched to the 20 people on my sign-up list and asked them to pay $5 a month to print as many labels as they wanted. Half of them signed up which I took to be a good sign, and it was nice to see $50 per month in the Stripe account.

Keith goes on to list a bunch of things he did to spread the word 📢

The most impactful…

I reached out to influencers in the Amazon Seller space and asked if they would be interested in an affiliate program. This has been the most consistently successful channel for me. I would say a third of our sales are driven this way.

Also…

A post on Reddit was pretty successful and brought in 10-20 new customers. It’s important on Reddit to stick around and engage with anyone who comments because it will increase the activity and therefore the longevity of your post. Even if they are critical, it’s actually helping your post stay at the top and be interesting for people. I’ve had other successes on Reddit since then by sharing new blog posts.

Looks like this is the Reddit post.

But again, those are just the things that worked 👍

Keith also tried a lot of things that proved to be a waste of time, but the only way to know that was to give them a shot.

Ultimately, all that work by Keith has resulted in $400,000+ total revenue to date 💰

His tip for other entrepreneurs…

My first tip is that you have to be doing something — anything at all — if you want to find opportunities… The key is to put in the hard work of lots of small successes that add up to one big success.

Another takeaway here is to keep an eye out 👀 for tedious manual processes or outdated software in your own work.

If you find it frustrating, other people likely do too and would be happy to pay for a solution.

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