Well, I do crib about the payback period and customer acquisition costs of software as a service. I hate how long a customer takes to become profitable and how much temporal risk there is.

But I do love SaaS because it is high leverage. It is something you can sell directly to international customers. Really good stuff. A lot of things that you can just bypass which you can’t in physical goods.

Then I realized, “Hey, video games exist!”

They don’t charge subscription fees. They have almost all the time a one-time fee. Modern games kind of have a system where the game might be free, and a few players are spending a lot of money. But a lot of Steam games just charge you money and they’re done nothing else. So, how do the economics of them work? I suspect there is instant payback there, and they unit economics will be cool, too. What is the go-to-market strategy of this video game, especially indie video games?

Is it just ranking on Steam and creating some word of mouth that is enough for them? Plus these things are inherently B2C. So yeah, subscription model doesn’t even make sense because churn would be too much. It is better to just get the money right up front and then fuck off. Of course, some softwares have recurring fix costs, which need subscription. But hey, you can pick it up right into your one-time payment if the variance risk is not too much.

From claude

Go-to-market for indies is shockingly simple:
It's like 90% Steam algorithm + wishlist velocity. Here's the actual playbook:

Put up Steam page early (6-12 months before launch) with a trailer and screenshots

Farm wishlists - post dev updates on Twitter/Reddit with gifs of cool mechanics, drive people to wishlist

Wishlist velocity matters - Steam's algorithm promotes games that are gaining wishlists fast, not just total count

Launch with momentum - when you finally release, Steam emails everyone who wishlisted. If a bunch buy in the first few days, you hit "Popular Upcoming" or "Trending" which surfaces you to millions

Streamers amplify - if your game is fun to watch, streamers pick it up organically (you can't really force this), creates a multiplier effect

A $20 game gives you maybe 20-100 hours of entertainment. If you charged $5/month instead, most players would finish in month one and cancel. You’d make less money and piss everyone off. The biggest complaint I have about Sass is that it is a fucking waste of time. It slowly bleeds you out, and you won’t know if things are working or not until like investment of like 6-7 months. But video games are better because they’re binary. I read somewhere that 50% of their revenue just comes in the first month. You either know that, “Hey, I made something good,” or, “Hey, I done goofed up.”

I need to do something about it. Basically, the finding here is that consumer software is actually profitable and can have instant payback also. You are not at the behest of the subscription model only. And just the same way video games are propelled by Steam recommendations and rankings as well as streamer push. I believe other types of software can also benefit from YouTube, Instagram, and Google rankings for keywords as well as recommendations and if some influencer is pushing it.

Consumer software doesn’t need to be SaaS. One-time purchase can work if distribution is strong enough. If you are bootstrapping and need to try a lot of things before one sticks, you have to go for instant payback models. Once you have capital and can beat around the bush for a few months, then you can maybe try SaaS models. Because they say you need to have product-market fit, that you need to validate demand. If you have a SaaS product, it is going to take a lot of time to know the financial viability of a product since you have such subscription amounts that payback is going to take a lot of months. You cannot determine the financial viability of it. On the other hand, the characteristics I described about the model video games use is like the commercial fate of the project in just one month, so that you can move on to the next thing.

Basically bootstrapping goes for one-time payment. When you have capital to burn and can stomach the temporal risk in exchange for stability, go for Subscriptions.

That means whatever software you create (be it some automation tool, some video game, or whatever), if you are bootstrapping, make it a one-time payment thing and rely heavily on organic things such as SEO, organic content, and influences. That’s the playbook video games for you, and that’s what you shall also do.

That also means you should be basing your ideas around the keywords that are currently doing well and are expected to do well. Essentially, not only SEO-optimized webpages but also products.

What keywords have demand → build the product that ranks for them

This is exactly what savvy indie game devs do:

They see "cozy farming sim" is trending on Steam
They build a cozy farming sim
Instant category fit + searchability

Applied to other software:

"PDF editor online" gets 100K searches/month → build a lightweight PDF tool
"Instagram story templates" is trending → create a template pack
"meeting notes AI" is hot → build a focused meeting recorder

Basically, we will end up creating something that is demand-derived. So, marketing downstream would be easier. Because if the search intent is surfacing in one platform, then there is a good chance that it is going to surface in other platforms. If it is coming up on Google, good chance it will pop up on YouTube and App Store also.

If "AI voice changer" is trending on Google, it's probably also:

-Getting searched on YouTube (tutorials, demos)
-Being discussed on Reddit/Twitter
-Showing up in app store searches
-Getting TikTok/Instagram content made about it

The insight: Search intent doesn't live in silos. When people want something, they look everywhere.

Practical example:
"Screen recorder for Mac" has demand signals:

Google: 50K searches/month
YouTube: Tons of "best screen recorder" videos
Reddit: r/macapps constantly asks about this
Product Hunt: Screen recorders regularly trend

Build a clean, one-time purchase screen recorder → It naturally slots into all these existing content ecosystems → You didn't create demand, you captured it.