Made $1000/mo selling $1 subscriptions. Learned a lot.

Hey yall. I read stuff here every now and then and figured I should share my story. I’m a software developer that was into it because I saw a future with education technology specifically. I ended up growing a 125,000 person following on TikTok between 2021-2023 mostly around DEI and tech, while being focused on genuinely teaching people about coding and tech and doing outreach to folks in my culture. I ended up learning a lot of stuff the hard way. By the time I built my following was around the time I accessed GPT-3 and more or less went all in on edtech entrepreneurship. It was honestly super messy at first because GPT user experiences were so new. Around this time was when DEI became less popular, tech layoffs were around the corner and Latino audiences more or less shifted toward outrage politics unfortunately. I mostly grinded out making fairly unpopular videos. I actually learned that going semi-viral (10k-500k views) didn’t really produce too many conversions, even with followings. That’s when I started to realize more and more what sales was - personal, targeted and volume. So about of my conversions came from 200-1k view videos actually. So far my biggest struggle was that I genuinely care about this stuff, so the disinterest with my following kinda tilts me often. I guess if it matters, I created a system where you can essentially create scholarships with learning. I’m kinda jaded about talking about how I accomplished that but I’m proud that I did. Anyway, I sold $1 subscriptions for a while and folks that cared suggested that I open up $3 and $8 subscriptions too which honestly kept things afloat. So it was cool to learn that people are just there to support too when you’re being genuine and hard working. After a while, working against the current, I started to explore more with pricing and learned people were willing to pay $10, $2, $25 and even $50/mo subscriptions which was very validating. It meant that I was getting better at creating products worth paying for. Basically it was the same amount of work selling something for $1 as it was $20, and I learned a lot about how edtech pricing influences outcomes and consumer psychology. These days I more or less “finished” developing and putting passion into that project so I’ve made it free as a value-add and moved onto another product after learning about consumer psychology and edtech resistance, which is language learning. I haven’t executed on marketing and sales on it yet but I figure that after everything I’ve learned, it’ll generally be easier to convert folks because it’s more aligned with where my consumer base currently is. I’m hoping to eventually reach $10k/mo sometime in the next year or two. Well. Thanks for coming to my ted talk. If you haven’t any questions I’m happy to check in and answer them even though I don’t really use Reddit too often anymore.