From Our Desks: Avoiding Election Doomscrolling

Welcome to From Our Desks, where the people behind Indie Hackers share the stories behind the headlines. This week, we talk election doomscrolling, new AI releases, and rival newsletter platforms.

@ChanningAllen (Channing Allen, co-founder and editor-in-chief): I'm glad to say I didn't have much time this week to doomscroll through all the US election drama because I was so busy working with the Indie Hackers newsroom and working on product strategy. Granted, I did enjoy reading this piece from our very own Stephen Flanders on what Trump's victory might mean for tech regulation over the next four years.

I was sad to say goodbye to Otto Nagengast, a really talented writer from our newsroom, as he left the team to spend more time working on his own startup. The upside was that he wrote up a post on what he's learned profiling 80+ companies for our Ideas database, a tool for finding new business ideas and following the playbooks used by successful companies in their early days.

The Ideas database is one of the most popular features of IH+, our paid content subscription. Yet we've done an abysmal job at surfacing features like this to new subscribers, who often can't distinguish where the free community content ends and paid subscriber content begins. So one of the things we're building right now is a dashboard for subscribers that centralizes all of their paid features in a single place: the latest idea reports, the paywalled journalism, links to their premium profiles, and more.

@krhignett (Katie Hignett, journalist): These last few weeks have been super busy for AI, from Claude’s computer use skills to the release of X’s Grok API. It’s exciting — and a bit scary.

I really enjoyed finding out how hackers have been using AI models like Claude at an Anthropic hack-a-thon earlier this week. Some of the projects developers put together in just a few hours were incredible.

It’s a little overwhelming at the same time. I code on the side of my writing, so progress on my projects is already relatively slow. There aren’t that many tools for journalists out there, so I benefit from not having that much competition. But I’ve never been more concerned I’ll get pipped to the post.

@StephenFlanders (Stephen Flanders, journalist): One of the articles I’m working on right now is a comparison between the newsletter platforms Kit and beehiiv. A large part of the research process for the article is talking to people who have used both (if you’re one of them, hit me up!), and it’s from these conversations that I’ve been reminded how little competing platforms often differ. The people who ultimately chose Kit or beehiiv didn’t do it because it blew the other out of the water. Instead, it almost always came down to something very small.

This insight points me to two main takeaways. 

First, as a consumer, don’t spend too much time debating which platform or tool to use. For the most part, all of them will be able to get the job done. 

Second, as a builder, put in that extra time to improve your product on the margins. In a world where most products are pretty similar, that one extra feature can make all the difference.

@zerotousers (Darko Gjorgjievski, journalist): There's been a bunch of interesting news this week. Here are some of the headlines I've tried to draw more attention to:

• Most big tech companies have published their Q3 reports for 2024. The results are positive: an increase in revenue, ad spend, etc. This is also good news for IHers because a lot of our products are B2B and target the exact segment that also spends on those platforms.

• AI agents are becoming a thing; Google has "accidentally" published a leak of its AI agent that can browse the web for you.

• TikTok is becoming "everything" for Gen Z. I've seen news on how it's replacing Google for Gen Z, and now it's also replacing LinkedIn. Woah.