CSS Scan's $100,000 was lifetime sales, not recurring revenue

The story

On 9 March 2021, Guilherme Rizzo opened an Indie Hackers AMA with a self-introduction that was still small on purpose. He was 22, from Brazil, living in Taiwan. CSS Scan existed because he kept wanting to know the border-radius, box-shadow, or font-family of whatever was under the cursor. Inspired by WhatFont, he built a pointer that showed computed CSS and let you copy the rules in one click. He called it a goodbye to Inspect Element. The first version, he said, took 50 hours, recorded as a sped-up YouTube clip in the style of Pieter Levels. He tried to "validate" it in Brazilian developer Facebook groups by asking whether people would pay $1. The answers were good enough that he started coding. The 50 hours stretched across about a month. Then he launched on Product Hunt, a success compared with his earlier launches.

Pricing did not begin as an $80 lifetime SKU. The first model was pay what you want, with a minimum of $1.99. After seeing people pay $5, $10, and $25, he raised the price slowly. When it was already $10, he made it fixed. His wife suggested license packs of two, five, and ten seats, and they kept raising the price. By the AMA, a lifetime license was $80. That is a one-time sale. In the same paragraph he said he was also trying subscriptions on extensions: CSS Scan Pro at $20 a month or $120 a year. He had shipped another development extension, toast.log, and a crowdsourced beach directory, beachguide.co. Those products sit beside CSS Scan. They are not the $100,000 line.

The usage figure he put next to the money was not a paying-customer count dressed as ARR. "Today, more than 7,000 people from 116 different countries use it, and it has made more than USD $100,000 in revenue." Use is not seats. Revenue, in that sentence, is the cumulative claim he was willing to attach to the extension in March 2021. He did not call it monthly recurring revenue. He did not call it annual recurring revenue. He invited questions about bootstrapped extensions, launch, and pricing. In comments he named Product Hunt (two launches), lifetime-deal Facebook groups, YouTube videos including one from WpTuts, Twitter, word of mouth, and SEO as the best channels so far.

Five months earlier he had already treated $100,000 as a sales milestone, not a run-rate. On 25 August 2020 he wrote that CSS Scan had reached $100,000 in sales, that it was crazy to remember celebrating $10,000 the year before, and that the next checkbox was $1,000,000. He posted a Gumroad screenshot. Then he added the sentence this record has to keep: the $100,000 did not include CSS Scan Pro revenue. It was only CSS Scan sales. Lifetime licenses and a subscription experiment were already two columns. Collapsing them into one "$100K ARR" headline would be the catalog's move, not his.

An earlier milestone on the same Indie Hackers product page is even more careful about clocks. On 20 January 2020 he wrote that the extension had reached $70,000-plus in sales. "It took me 9 months to get the first $10,000 and just more 9 months to get more $60,000." Those are cumulative sales intervals, not a subscription compounding chart. He then said it currently had an average monthly revenue of $4,000, and that January was already near $10,000. Average monthly revenue from lifetime licenses is not MRR. January being near $10,000 is a month of sales, not a rewritten ARR. He was also trying a subscription on the newer premium product. In a comment on that thread he said Pro licenses, if they expire, stop working, and that Pro was at $646 MRR after two months. That $646 is the first figure in this file that he labeled as MRR.

He dated the basic product in the same thread. CSS Scan launched at the end of July 2018. The 50-hour first version and the YouTube speedrun belong to that beginning. Promotion, he said, was Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, Hacker News, press, Twitter, blogs, Quora, discounts, and discount links. Payments ran through Gumroad. License keys came from Gumroad's API; a backend he built himself tracked activations by browser. In the 2021 AMA he told another maker that for something that helps people make money and save time he would try subscription, and that if he was unsure he would start with lifetime pricing. That is advice, not a conversion of the $100,000 into recurring revenue.

CSS Scan was the third product in a three-products-in-three-months challenge, not a first swing that happened to work. In the AMA he said school-era education and fashion attempts had failed. Then two indie projects: mprove at $129 in revenue, Moniesto at maybe $60. He learned to launch fast, build an audience, charge, and charge more than he thought, and that sometimes simple sold better: mprove outsold Moniesto. A May 2018 Medium post about the mprove Product Hunt launch sits earlier still. He was 19, needed $500 for a trip to Salvador, priced the Mac menu-bar app at $4.97 because he could not afford a $100 App Store fee, and used Gumroad. After four days he reported 1,051 sessions, 149 buy-page views, 15 buyers, 90 Product Hunt upvotes, and $74.55 in total revenue. Those are mprove launch figures. They are not CSS Scan's $100,000.

He kept the smaller extension in view without letting it impersonate CSS Scan. toast.log, he wrote in the AMA, had gotten a bit less attention but already had over 1,000 users, and lots of people from CSS Scan had bought it. He pointed to a CSS Scan Pro 2.0 Product Hunt launch when someone cited angry reviews of earlier Pro pricing. None of that rewrites lifetime sales as a subscription book.

Read in order, his posts refuse the mash-up. Lifetime licenses produced lumpy monthly sales, including a $4,000 average and a January that approached $10,000, both founder-reported as revenue in a month, not as MRR. Pro, when he attached an MRR tag, was $646 after two months. The $10,000 and $100,000 checkboxes are cumulative sales. The March 2021 AMA restates more than $100,000 in revenue and more than 7,000 people in 116 countries. Catalog copy that turns those sales into $100K ARR, or that average monthly revenue into $4K MRR, is arithmetic he did not publish.

Do not annualize a Gumroad lifetime total, call average monthly sales of one-time licenses a run-rate, or fold cssscan.pro into the $100,000 he excluded. Do not promote mprove's $74.55 or $129, or Moniesto's $60, into the CSS Scan column. He sold a hover tool people paid for once and separately tried to rent a Pro layer, while the sales counter crossed $10,000, $70,000, and $100,000.