Growing a business is tough... particularly when you're working on it in your spare time, with no investors, a family, a full-time job, and little to no help. That's the situation that many Indie Hackers find themselves in.
Throughout my career as a growth hacker, I've helped many businesses double leads in under six months, close $1M+ contracts, and even get featured on the homepage of the top 100 websites in the world.
Yet, when it came to my own personal projects, I was never quite as successful. I couldn't figure out why until one day I saw this unbelievable Christmas Tree at a park near my house.
The Tree of Life: How It All Began
In 2008, the City of Draper had an idea. "What if we took all of our Christmas lights and put them on a single tree?" The resulting display, locally referred to as "The Tree of Life," became a full-blown spectacle—people traveled from hundreds of miles away just to see it, local news stations ran stories about it, and mommy bloggers couldn't stop pinning it.
In previous years, the City of Draper had hung a few thousand Christmas lights up around city parks and nobody really even noticed. It wasn't until they went all-in on a single tree that people started to notice and it got traction.
Side Projects Are Like Christmas Trees
Let's pretend your business / side project is a tree and your resources (time + money + effort) are lights. You can either put 1,000 lights on 65 trees and light up a couple of parks or you can put 65,000 lights on a single tree and make it visible from space.
- Which do you think people will talk about?
- Which would you pay to see?
Before I realized the difference, I would try and duplicate the success of large SaaS companies on my own personal projects with SEO, content marketing, FB ads, etc.
I was spread so thin, it was a mess!
Now, I focus on a single effective channel for gaining new users and I don't move onto something else until I'm either able to automate or there's nothing left to optimize.
And it's been a huge success!
$3K MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) in 4 Months
My latest side project Bitcoin Noobs, an educational website for crypto enthusiasts, started generating revenue in just a few months with zero paid promotion. By focusing on a single metric (organic traffic) and ignoring everything else, the website has grown much faster than I ever anticipated.
In addition to helping the site grow faster, my newfound focus tells me exactly what I should be working on all the time. And since I'm all-in on SEO, I end up wasting a lot less time chasing tricks, tips, and tactics.
Although I have experience with content marketing, SEO, PR, and FB ads, it's not possible, nor productive, for me to try and manage all of those channels with the limited amount of free time I currently have.
Whether it's a business, acquisition channel, or revenue model it's always more effective to do one thing really well than a million things mediocrely.