17 May Full Indie Hackers Recap

📈 Growth & Sales

Are you a fan of Google Sheets?
Check sheetlist.net to find highly useful sheets categorized into marketing, finance, business, and useful categories. They are further sub-categorized too. marketing category is further categorized into SEO, content marketing, social media, app store optimization.

SEO Strategies I Used to Reach 200k+ Monthly Page Views

Jack Kinsella describes his SEO strategies for his site Oxbridge Notes to get more exposure by creating different sites for different regions. He uses Google Adwords to check the keywords with more searches and replace keywords accordingly for each country version.

What's a good growth newsletter?

According to community recommendations, Growth bites (by indie Hackers), Marketing examples(by Harry Dry), Zero to Marketing (by Andrea Bosoni), Growth.design, and Growth Hackers.

Gain early traction quicker by offering a done-for-you premium service

Generally, indie makers have more time but less money to promote their products. Nathan barry started convert kit and he offered free transfer services etc to bring customers on board. You can do so in the early days. If your product is an app builder → offer custom app development services. If your product is a web scraping product → create custom scrapers for your users. If your product is text analysis software → create custom models for your users

Make Money from Helping People to Unsubscribe Emails

This post mostly describes LeaveMeAlone but these are key points of this post. When you are building products, focus on getting to ramen profitability ASAP. To grow faster, you can use a proxy currency that has value to the user such as free credits for referring your friends to LeaveMeAlone or get 100 subscribers for referring any friend to convert kit, and similar programs.

🌈 Product Development

How to start developing a SaaS product?

This is a good post with different viewpoints of fellow indie hackers. Give it a read to learn more about building a SaaS product.

💪 Developers

I couldn't find a tailwind-react boilerplate. So I created one.

Being a developer, one of the most important skills you need is to minimize your time in setting up a project. Rajeev Singh was trying to build a CRA(create-react-app) + tailwind.css based project and created a boilerplate while working for his project. You can access this github repo here.

Blogging for Devs

Monica has been writing code for 20 years. 4 years ago she started blogging. Since then, one of her blogs has grown up to 1,728,575 pageviews. You can also learn the exact strategies by joining her free email course "Blogging for Devs"

👨💻 Learning to Code

App Ideas: 17 Web Apps You Can Build To Level Up Your Coding Skills

If you don't know WHAT to build and HOW to build them. Well, you've come to the right place. You will get basic features, useful resources, and tutorials for each app in this blog post along with difficulty level.

💋 Design and UX

Chekhov's Gun

Chekhov's gun is a dramatic principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed. For example, you're building or designing a product, only spend time building (or adding) a feature that is absolutely necessary, otherwise, it might be understood as a "false promise," sometimes intentional but more often unintentional.

I'll give unbiased feedback for your logo

Drop a link to your logo or website with your logo on it and get some tips on how you can improve! (45 comments)

🔥 No-Code

How to build a marketplace without code?

Connor built unicornfactory.nz with no code, here is the recording of how he did it. You can also use Sharetribe (quick and easy marketplace, not much customization), Bubble (Bubble = Would take longer, but offers max customization/flexibility for any no-code tool) or purchase a fully functional template( starting from $29) for building the next Amazon, Upwork, Airbnb, Fiverr or similar marketplaces by purchasing fully functioning no-code templates from Flippa Zeroqode

🗣️ Podcasters

Podcast Growth Hacking : 0 Plays to $5k in 5 Months eBook Launch!

Ryan Myher grew his podcast revenue from 0 to $5K in 5 months. You can steal his strategies by purchasing his ebook for $5 on gumroad. You will learn how to leverage your audience and monetize your podcast from sponsorships, events, and many other methods!

🎦 YouTubers

How do I reach my audience on YT and get them to stay?

1. Cross-promote your videos on TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
2. Ask people to subscribe to your channel (you can ask once in the beginning and at the end.)
3. Increase your uploading frequency
4. Create clickbait thumbnails yourself by using Snappa or hire someone from Fiverr
5. Engage with your audience by liking and replying to their comments. You can also ask for feedback to increase comments.
6. Leverage pinned comment by adding timestamps, asking for feedback or link to other videos
7. Check your YouTube analytics and compare numbers for different content to figure out what your audience is most interested in and create similar content in the future.
8. When you are just starting out, try to create maximum content around a single keyword. Use a free keyword tool like KeywordTool.io, which is specific to YouTube, to look for the most searched keywords in the niche you're looking to target. Also, do competitive analysis by using TubeBuddy.
9. Use YouTube cards feature and place your recommended videos at the timeframe where most viewers are leaving your video. In this way, they will jump to another video of your channel.
10. Add end screens to promote your other videos, Patreon link or another channel (it can be yours or of another person you are collaborating with)
11. YouTube offers a great feature for adding your logo to the right bottom of the video. Instead of adding a logo, place the subscribe image to get more subscribers.
12. According to YouTube, the first 15 seconds of your video is key. So don't waste it by making a 15 seconds intro. Instead, use a 5-second window for your intro.

👨🎓 Course Creators

Wes Bos - Creating & Launching your own Products

Harry dry shared this 41 minutes video of Wes Bos where he shares how he is making 1 million dollars per course. Watch it. I am also watching it now.

💯 Productivity

A Shortcut To Add Emoji Anywhere In Mac OS X

Use CTRL + CMD + Space to add emoji anywhere without copying it from somewhere else.

Do you use a bookmark manager? Which one?

There was a great debate about features for building the next bookmark manager but I don't think it's a good idea to build as Google started rolling out tab groups this month. Personally, I like Toby which is 100% free for individuals and has 200K downloads on chrome extensions store. You can also use Toby mini extension if you don't want your bookmarks to appear in every new tab.

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