How would you grow this?
This is an opportunity to get and give help in growing (your) indie hacker products.
Here's what you need to do:
- Post a link to a project and provide a few words of what you have been doing to grow your product. It would be helpful to include challenges you've had and what has or hasn't worked.
- Because this community is about giving back too, please comment on someone else's post with support and ideas.
Over to you!
Indie Hackers Milestones – It's a daily leaderboard of the top milestones that founders are reaching with their products. I launched it a few months back and immediately moved on to other things, so I've done very little to grow it since then.
The only thing I've done so far is that I regularly feature milestone posters on the IH podcast. During those episodes we talk a lot about the milestones they've been posting, which advertises the feature a bit. The only concrete thing I'm planning in the future is to spruce up the landing page for milestones a bit and submit it to Product Hunt. In the meantime, I'm still busy working on other parts of IH.
How would you grow this?
Maybe you could ask people to do a twitter thread version of their milestone post and then retweet it. Both IH and the poster get additional marketing boost with little extra effort
Or you could do a thread of their milestones to date: each tweet would be a milestone, with 1) brief description of milestone , 2) #1 tactic that helped them reach the milestone and 3) link to IH post. Would be cool to see the progress of the company over time
Wonder if there's a way to automate submitted posts into an IndieHackers twitter / IG feed linking the submitting user's profile and a quick summary of the milestone (subject). I'm sure founders such as myself would love an excuse to retweet / IG share to our respective audiences and as a side effect broadcast the indiehackers brand to others.
https://www.everscript.co
Everscript is a professional content creation service offering unlimited monthly content requests from experienced and talented writers for $299 per month.
Our writers are able to provide your business with SEO optimized content that brings in new traffic and leads in the form of:
So far we have been experimenting with a lot cold email campaigns. This has worked well in getting some users and lots of feedback.
For anyone interested in trying our service, please let me know. I would love to hear feedback from other IndieHackers and can even offer a discount off your first month, if you’re interested in testing our 14 day risk free trial.
I would love to hear how some of you would market or advertise this business.
We have plans to launch an affiliate program as well as white-label program for marketers and agencies looking to add another revenue stream to their business.
Exposure and Authority. Define your target audience and reach out to its influencer and do a collab with them. For example, if you want to sell this service to SEO agencies that want to outsource content creations (which I see this is a huge demand), you can reach out to influencers of the industry. Note: The influencers must have their own private groups so you can easily get referrals.
Hope you find this helpful.
Nam
Sales!
Go out and craft a personal e-mail to 50 - 100 businesses that need content cheap every single day. Follow up religiously!
Also: If you do SEO optimized content, you should be plastered on top of Google for anything I search about content. A blog makes sense.
Appreciate the advice!
https://intravert.co – It's a way for content publishers to serve and sell their own ad and sponsorship pages. Launched it a few months ago, and got about 150 sites on it now.
Most of the growth has been integrations (Wordpress and Ghost), Blog posts and direct outreach. Planning an affiliate and referral scheme soon too.
Make a deal to place some ads of your own on the 150 sites that have signed up?
Don't have a great rec, but bookmarking your site for future reference when we consider monetization options! seems like a cool idea..
Hi @rosiesherry 👋,
https://www.metricsjar.com
A key metrics dashboard that pulls in data from all the different tools you use.
So far, I've only done the following:
Hi @johnkueh - this looks awesome! A few notes,
You can be more aggressive in the way you distribute your content. Besides Linkedin, you can distribute them via Slideshare. You can put your blog post into a Slideshare presentation. Use the Slideshare and chop it into smaller parts for visual presentations where you can elaborate more on other channels like Quora, Medium and Linkedin.
As for direct outreach, I'd recommend you reach out to authorities of your market and give them a trial. It's like influencer marketing in E-commerce where brands reach out to YouTubers. The concept is the same for you.
Cold emailing campaign: This a another huge topic. You can follow Alex Berman or Steli Efti to get more insights on cold emailing.
Hope this helps,
Nam Tran
This looks great @johnkueh - have you tried reaching out to founders on IH? I feel like combing through the products page here and targeting some bootstrapped business would be a great way to get some users onto the site and eventually nurture them into paying customers. Maybe giving some IH type deal specifically for founders on here e.g. $29 instead of $49.
Thanks @lukewduncan, that sounds like a good idea.
Btw, how much time do you spend jumping between systems to track your business?
Hey @johnkueh - what do you mean by systems?
hi @lukewduncan, between GA, Stripe, Intercom, Spreadsheets etc?
Honestly with my own products - not too much. It depends on what I'm working on. If it's something related to marketing - then I would say I hop between systems more than when i'm coding.
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Man, your stuff is way cooler..
pageflows.com - User flow videos and screenshots of proven products that designers and product managers use to learn best practices and find inspiration
I haven't done much to grow this so far. I run a big, related newsletter/site and have used that to drive some traffic. Naturally as this is a content business, some customers find Page Flows on Google.
I've just started getting into content marketing and honestly, I'm struggling. Most customers are designers, but I'm not one myself, so I'm struggling to think of useful things I could write as a non-designer and there's so much design-related content out there (mostly crap).
I personally like creating guides rather than blog posts, but I can't write design guides as a non-designer.
Things I plan on trying other than writing blog posts:
Consider interviews. Unless you already have massive distribution, it can be tough to recruit experts to write for you, because they're usually busy doing the thing that they're an expert in. Interviews are a great hack, as they accomplish the following:
That's such a great idea! Knowing the Indie Hackers story, I can't believe I didn't think of it yet.
I guess the first step is trying to think of who to interview and the types of questions to ask. Thanks!
Re the distribution, I do have decent reach (~28k email subscribers across Page Flows and the related side-project), but interviews is still a great call.
I could potentially interview customers who also happen to be experts as a way to get to know them better at the same time.
It's quite image/video heavy - perhaps there is room to add content to each page to help with SEO?
Great call - even if it doesn’t end up improving SEO much, it’s such an easy thing to try out. I will do this 👍🏼
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I have indeed, Page Flows has been around a few years now - it has been on Product Hunt in various forms 3-4 times!
It tends to do well from there traffic-wise, but not in terms of sales compared to other sources of traffic (which makes sense!)
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That actually makes a lot of sense. I'm in a few groups, but I usually just lurk around to try learn what designers care about. Finding places I can respond with helpful examples is a great call
https://stratascratch.com
Strata Scratch is a platform that helps you improve your analytical skills by helping you build a strong technical foundation for your career. I launched it about two years ago and have been growing linearly ever since due to my ever-changing marketing efforts and product improvements.
Currently, my most successful marketing effort has been with content marketing. Most of my visitors come from organic Google searches and Medium blogs.
I've done Google Ads, blogs on my website (to increase SEO), and cold emails without much of a positive ROI. I'd be interested in reading some feedback either about the product itself or about any marketing efforts ideas.
Hey everyone.
Currently, I'm building Bardo, a Tool for Software- and Product-Teams. Bardo's goal is to make tasks smarter and remove uncertainty while building products. All with the help of your team's knowledge + history and a community full of experts.
Bardo uses your team’s current workflow (Jira, Clubhouse, …) to analyze previous tasks. And giving you the following for upcoming work:
You can check out the website here: https://bardoapp.com/
And the community: https://bardoapp.com/community
Oh and if you are a CTO, PM, Dev, Designer and work in a product team that - I'm currently looking for beta users.
Would love to ask you a few questions.
https://introcave.com Intro Maker
Email Newsletter - Since buying the site last summer, the user list has grown from ~20k to ~50k. Sending a monthly newsletter to a list this size has proved to be extremely challenging! Most ESPs recommend culling the list drastically to avoid the kinds of problems I've been facing, but I continue to see long tail value from people who haven't engaged in months... so I've been trying to figure out (mechanically speaking) how to send a blast out to a list this size without getting flagged as spam.
Lifecycle Emails - Part of my strategy for making the newsletter easier to send has been to increase my overall email volume day in and day out. I've implemented the ability to send email sequences and have 2/3 welcome emails done, 3/3 cart abandonment emails done, and 0/3 post-purchase emails done. I've seen pretty good engagement with these and several attributable sales already.
SEO - I've been paying more attention to HARO and spent a few days tuning page speed. The last algorithm update a few weeks ago gave me a nice traffic bump.
Ads - I'm trying Ezoic. The ads perform better, but I'm currently running a funnel test through Google Optimize to make sure the conversion rate on video sales doesn't drop.
Twitter - I've been building scripts and bots to make prospecting on Twitter easier. I have a couple of scripts sampling the firehose for certain link/keyword combinations that get dumped into a curated feed of likely customers I can browse through and interact with. I have a different set of keywords and filters to scout for content that might be worth retweeting to my small but growing following. The goal is to post about 1/5 links back to my stuff and amplify other YT/video content for the rest of the tweets.
https://olive.gives
Olive Gives is a web app that helps user link their bank account and round up their spare change for charity. We launched it a month ago and still growing slowly.
We did: Facebook ads (to compare CTR in UK, US and AU) for a month, Instagram influencers starting last week and we tried to launch a University program - Brand Ambassador. But right now we're still open for new ideas to growing Olive.
Let me know if you have any ideas/feedback - it will be so helpful for us and our non-profit partner!
https://www.dottieandco.com - It's software that allows event based companies (think photographers, venues, decor rentals) to easily create proposals to send to clients.
So far we have been doing the 1-to-1 sales approach. Digging up contact information of small event businesses around Houston, Texas (where we live). We have either been sending emails to these companies asking for feedback on our product then gradually prying them into users, or we straight up say hey why don't you try us out. So far our open rate and communication back and forth has been great. But turning these people into users has been hard because they are happy with their current solutions. While we have gotten great feedback - the main success has been from individually owned businesses. Those that are owned by one person e.g. photographers, DJ's etc.
We haven't really put any effort into doing any digital marketing - which would hopefully open us up to a bigger market than just companies in Houston.
Would love to hear some ideas on digital marketing efforts. Thanks so much!
Leonardo English (www.leonardoenglish.com) - English language learning podcasts for the intellectually curious.
I'm so far just testing out the content with some early users, and have reached out to friends, posted on some Facebook groups, and have been interacting with others on Instagram.
One of the main challenges is that I'm looking for users who are learning English, and are thus not always going to be interacting in an English-language setting. I speak French and Italian, so can interact with these kinds of users, however I want the product to remain an 'English-only' language service (early users have already said this is something they value).
I haven't yet submitted the podcast to any podcast directories, and am focussing on improving them before doing so.
Thoughts, feedback and ideas most gratefully received :)
https://hellowow.crd.co/ - this is the demo listing in a pre-prototype launch. The plan is to add a form to gather a few key pieces of info and push to a 'reserve your spot' with a small $ pledge for the social proof to being in the investment dollars.
Does this strategy make sense?
https://www.emucast.com
We have been trying mainly Twitter and our network of friends only to do.
Our plan at the end of October is to hit up bloggers and influence's in the agile space to help put the word out.
Too many things to do and not yet done any blog posts, they a coming.
Mind Mapping 3D - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.scapehop.mindmapping3d | https://apps.apple.com/app/id1470288732
So far, I've been relying on ASO, and I recently did a PH launch for the iOS version. I get about 100 installs a day regularly, and about 1.5%-2% convert to paying users ($2.99 per year). The volume is not there to make this sustainable. I tried raising prices to $3.99, and revenue fell in a proportion higher than the price change, so I switched back.
I think part of the problem is that people don't realize value soon enough from the app. I'm looking at revamping my onboarding process. But between now and then, I decided to kick-off a newsletter with videos of 3D mind map examples to my email list of about 650. Here is a link to my first one: https://shoutout.wix.com/so/fdMtB5CEy#/main . The strategy is that the newsletter can keep my existing audience engaged, and the YouTube videos could introduce new users to the app. My thinking is if people can see it in action, they are more likely to get it. I hope to have content ready before the end of next week to do a second one.
Longer-term, I think I need cloud-based file syncing and a desktop option to justify a per month pricing option that will make this more sustainable.
I'd love to hear other ideas. Thanks!
Who do you imagine is your ideal user? Create some niche subject matter mindmaps to help get found by certain audiences, via search or social media?
Hi Rosie! Great idea. Before launching, I had a sign-up list that I used to group people that expressed interest. Four groups stood out; then there was a long-tail. The top four were: 1. Educators 2. Trainers 3. Small biz consultants, 4. Students. Maybe I can make a few "how to teach with mind maps" and "how to study with mind maps" videos and mind maps.
StartupLadder - Created a platform for recent grads to find entry-level non-technical roles at startups and tech companies. I just built the MVP earlier this week and am planning to get first subscribers by spreading the word through various business/entrepreneurship clubs on college campuses.
Would love any ideas you may have on how to increase email newsletter subscribers! Thanks :)
Get into other newsletters!
A) Subscribe to 20 newsletters
B) Get their next edition (usually within a week)
C) IF you think it's a fit for their audience, reply and ask if they can feature your newsletter.
Repeat if you like the process and it works out for you.
I grew my newsletter by a few hundred subscribers by being featured in only a few similar newsletters. Just one might not move the needle much, but getting a good process will help you reach more people over time.
That's a great idea! Thanks Andrew!
https://www.grepmed.com - We're trying to use quick reference infographics to shortcut the information retrieval process and decrease cognitive overload for busy and text-overloaded clinicians.
Traffic is growing but we're trying to figure out how to showcase/highlight our platform to physician-educators looking to teach others at scale (currently mostly post content onto twitter where exposure is so fleeting.).
Are there any people on Linkedin already sharing similar content? I'd approach them and see if they can reshare your content. Usually they'll use similar hashtags.
https://albumdaily.com
Album Daily is a passive way to discover and re-discover the best of the music world. Subscribers receive an album everyday, straight to their inbox, entirely free.
We launched ~ 3 weeks ago, so our growth has contained a combination of social media, reddit, and IH. Any ideas on creative ways to market Album Daily?
Work with other music newsletters.
Do a guest post on Flow State.
perhaps Platform & Stream can feature you.
I would definitely try Instagram and Facebook ads since there are plenty of musicians, music labels etc with accounts on there that users follow. Since Album Daily most likely caters to people who are passionate about music, I would target ads towards them on social media and maybe even reach out to some DJs and musicians to see whether they're willing to spread the word about your product to their followers. You should hangout where your users are :)
This probably profits from a good social loop. If you get people to share their playlists over social without much effort, that can give you a lot of compounding growth!
https://onji.in/
Been cold mailing e-commerce websites with an Instagram page.
It has not been going good. No clicks either.
Here is the email copy I am using -> https://telegra.ph/Get-More-Sales-from-Instagram-10-16
Personally I couldn't understand what your service does really. Read it 3-4 times and I have like 2-3 ideas of what maybe it does and personally I wouldn't use it because of that.
I do agree, the copy quite sucks. So I did add a video. :)
A few notes
These are good todo notes. Will surely implement. Thanks a lot.
I also needed some time to get what it does. A bit annoying is that there is an ad displayed in the video before I can see the video. Why not use Vimeo here? The video helped though. However, I'm not sure about the usefulness of the product itself. So the visitor has to copy the code, go to the website and enter it into the search. What's the alternative? Searching for the product name directly instead of copying the code? Looks almost the same for me. Given that the e-commerce site has a proper search.
Thanks for the time & notes. The video is now on Vimeo. :)
The search part is skipped using Onji. Imagine a customer wants a product on an Instagram post, knowing simply typing one word can take to the purchase page supports the impulse. It is not unknown search results often return numerous items that could fizzle that buying moment.
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I always use https://formspree.io/ for this. What do I get with contact.do over this?
You need to make that clear through copy. Integrations could help – still very hard to have a proper contact form on Ghost blogs and Shopify. This could help.
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Your articles seem really cool. I am a self taught programmer but have lots of professional experience with spreadsheets (finance background) so this is intellectually interesting to me. When I was in finance we used excel plugins from CapIQ and Factset that let you pull market data into excel and those were essential to my job
What are your most popular use cases? An easy thing to do would be to talk to a few paying customers for your most popular use cases, figure out how they use it and how it helps them, and then find and reach out to other similar users manually (cold email or old-fashioned networking).
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PRICING
It's probably also worth increasing your prices. If you are getting 150 readers a week and 2% of them convert to paid at $20 / month (2% conversion to paid is pretty good), then you're getting $60 / week or $240 a month in new MRR. To get to $10,000 MRR, you'd need to increase your traffic 40x. That seems...daunting.
But if one of your use cases is worth $500 / month, you just need 20 customers to get $10K monthly revenue. You can get 20 customers by cold emailing or networking and can probably get there within 2 months.
Charging higher prices also gives you more options for marketing channels. For ex, you can afford to run ads if a customer is worth $500 / month, but probably not if they are worth $20 / month. You can also afford to do low-touch sales at the higher price point.
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LANDING PAGE
Are you getting much traffic to your landing page or the knowledge base page? What are the bounce rates for those pages? I personally found it a bit hard to figure out what you're doing from those pages: i was hoping to see example use cases on the landing page, and the knowledge base page was just overwhelming -- it took a lot of effort to find what i was looking for (guides for connecting to popular APIs). If I hadn't read the intro paragraph in your above comment and had just somehow found your site, I would have bounced before understanding what you are doing.
If most of your traffic comes from the articles, probably less important to fix the landing page and knowledge base page, but if those are "leaky" and get traffic I think you could improve them a lot with a bit of effort: include examples, more white space, and add some copy to orient your reader to what they're looking at
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Your current approach with content marketing seems great and will compound over time.
How have your paying customers found you? If they're not the type who read blog posts, maybe it's worth trying to figure out where they do find content (if at all) and how more people like them can learn about you.
Also, are there any pain points that people frequently feel that API Connector could help with? My guess is that maybe the first couple of times people read your guides they may not end up subscribing, but if upgrading helps them solve a pain they feel multiple times a week, they would eventually upgrade.
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Create a video for your that fb page. Some story or lesson about mood.
You can also create qr code stickers.
Promote the reason/benefit to track one's mood.
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Content! Anything that you can do. Research about mood tracking, mental health, blog posts about success stories. Much easier to get into reddit again.
You should try sharing your creation on Betalist and ProductHunt. I’ve never done it myself but I hear they’re a great way to get a lot of feedback.
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