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❤️ 20 growth marketing hacks to get your first 1000 customers, and how to distribute your content effectively.

Hi there. It's the daily curated edition of IndieLetters.com, a daily newsletter curating the best content from IndieHackers.


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  • Toolbase.io - a personalized SssS tool recommendations based on your company size, pain points and industry by @ozzie
  • Customer and client are two different words. 'customer' is more about a one-off operation which always involves money. On the other hand, the word 'client' describes something more long-term and ongoing. In a nutshell, customer = payments, client = relationships by @akhlystova

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How do you distribute your content? by @gordon

  1. Fb, LinkedIn → Short description + Image + Link
  2. Twitter → Make a thread and add a post link at the end. Use chirrapp for doing it easily
  3. Instagram → Image as post + story with a link
  4. Pinterest → Make an infographic + short description + link (or make an ugly template like Neil Patel. Then change headings and boom!)
  5. Medium → Post complete article there + link + slidetosubscribe(free) form to make an email list
  6. Quora → Post article there with a link to your site
  7. Community Groups → Post complete article there
  8. You can also record it as a podcast or a video.

You can use IFTTT for automation or use an Indie Hacker tool like Publer (my link) for scheduling same social media posts in 1 click to all platforms or tweak it quickly for different platforms.


20 growth marketing hacks to get your first 100 customers by @NScode

  • Treat every customer like they're your first, and reap the rewards.
  • Leverage already established channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Quora. And remember one size doesn't fit all. So tweak your content.
  • Do quick SEO. You are a SaaS form builder, go after long-tail keywords like: "No code form builder comparisons" or, "No code alternatives to Typeform". Organic traffic is a great 'always-on' source of leads.
  • Hunt for Press coverage. Press outlets suffer from massive FOMO. So if you get featured in one press, others will automatically publish about your startup. Use HARO to reach out to journalists. It boosts SEO too.
  • Go to Where Your Customers Are. Tinder targeted offline at the start. Etsy also participated in local fairs. Same is the case with Uber, Lyft, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
  • Do partnerships. Businesses rely on distribution and distribution comes from connections. Connections are often mutual: You give me something, I'll give you something.
  • Encourage word of mouth marketing by having a strong referral system. AirTable has a referral system of giving 10$ referral credits to each user.
  • Have a strong affiliate program to get more backlinks. And if you suck at marketing, it's an essential thing for your SaaS. RewardFul (my link), is the best software for running an affiliate program. And it has over 100 000 affiliate users.
  • Use exit-intent pop-ups to generate email leads.

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5 mistakes I made with my latest indie-project that you should avoid repeating by @souravray
1# Attempted to build something too complex
2# Counted on unproven collaborators
3# Building solutions for demography that you vaguely understand
4# Not chalking out an incremental release plan
5# Not getting out of the developer's mindset fast


StackOverflow 65k+ developer survey results by @stusim
Rust ranks first, TypeScript 2nd and Python on no. 3. For more details, check it out.


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How to build habits effectively by @andrewprastya
4 laws of making long-lasting habits:-

  • Make it obvious: Something that you can really see, really feel, really hear, etc
  • Make it easy: It should take 2 min (or even shorter) for you to start the activity.
  • Make it attractive: Make it interesting or exciting to do it
  • Make it satisfying: Create a reward system

My favourite indie hacker advice by @chr15m

  1. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself --- and you are the easiest person to fool.-- Richard Feynman
  2. "I'm going to launch and everyone is going to shower this with upvotes!"
  3. "I'll just ship this thing and customers will definitely throw money at me!"
  4. "Of the thousands of ideas I already had this is the great one I will follow through on!"

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1. I created a SaaS product because I wanted to get Uber Rich...why that didn't work by @stets

2. Nine advanced Hubspot CRM growth hacks for start-up sales teams by @Azovtsev_Il

3. Three cool retention hacks you can automate today by @keyserfaty

4. Failure is Ok by @brayson

5. What can you learn from Warby Parker's email sequence? by @Email_Mastery


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  1. 4

    Very nice curated list - good stuff, mainly. I'd disagree with very little. Referrals: highly overrated. Affiliate programs: build your own with a simple UTM parameter on a link. You don't need to pay to pay to pay, which is what the total tax, friction and payout costs will look like if you pay for an affiliate "solution." What's more, affiliate marketers are random.af; they read nothing, learn nothing about a product and grossly misrepresent it. But they expect lifetime payouts (while leaving your customer service team to clean up their misstruths). We have an affiliate program for RiteTag only, not eager to do more, from the experience.

    Content Distribution

    We built our 9-year-old 100% bootstrapped RiteKit (4 SaaS products, 17-endpoint API) in Twitter. Social is what powers our inbound marketing, and nearly all of it is from Twitter and Instagram. We do distribute our own content with our automation tool, RiteBoost, but primarily share the content of others - with our ads riding on top.

    The ability to curate the best content for our customer avatar and share posts with our ads riding on top is what makes this possible.

    Example:
    Meetedgar is a competitor to one element of our RIteBoost. Here's us advertising on their video - and showing how it can be done. Try the Rite.ly link in that Tweet. Yes, that's me.

    For the why and how, please see this post of mine, including a Tweet that continues to get a heck of a lot of Retweets and likes. This could work for a great many of us indiehackers.

    Marketing is war. Questions welcome.

    1. 1

      Would love to see a post on how you use Twitter :)

  2. 2

    To be honest, I build use Slack groups as a way to find my audience - This turned into Top50Slack.com which now helps me to find better audiences.

    T

  3. 2

    Cool :-)
    Thanks for the mention on the Worth Reading section :-)

  4. 2

    hey @FalakSher heads up, that 20 growth marketing hacks article is actually mine. I wrote it :)

      1. 1

        Thank You for writing an awesome article. Should I update it with your blog link or medium publication link is Okay?

        1. 1

          This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

  5. 2

    Thank for including my first IH post in IndieLetters.
    So glad that you find it useful.

  6. 2

    Great summary! Tweeted :-)

  7. 2

    Great summary! Subbed.

    1. 1

      Thank You.
      You made my day.
      I really like your name. Gene Machine.

      1. 1

        Haha, glad to make your day! ;)

        "Gene Machine" is a nickname that was given to me by my 7th-grade science teacher.

        1. 2

          School life was awesome. And school life flashed in memory after reading your comment.
          My name meaning in urdu language is "Sky Lion" and my teacher often called me with this name.

  8. 2

    Thanks for the shout out @FalakSher, much appreciated!

    1. 2

      @gordon you are just like a constant for my newsletter.

      1. 2

        Appreciate you my man!

  9. 1

    The banner images look very nice on this post 👍

    1. 1

      Yup.
      I actually copied this banner images idea from a quora answer.

      1. 2

        Hey, it still looks great 😄👍

  10. 1

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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