I analyzed a month’s worth of Indie Hackers data to see what the most frequent questions were

A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing the Indie Hackers Growth group and noticed that many of the posts that people were starting were very similar in scope.

Having run growth at my B2B SaaS for some time now, I’ve got a bunch of information in my head about what to do and what not to do. So recently, I decided to get that out and put it down in a blog on B2B SaaS growth

I decided to test my hypothesis that many of the questions people on IH have are shared multiple times in different formats.

So I copied out all of the posts made on IH’s growth group between 9 July 2020 and 1 August 2020 and to analyze that information.

And hey, it was selfish of me, but I also learned what blog posts people would be interested in reading.

Then I thought it might be interesting for you all to see the things that I found about the Growth group.

People are most interested in forming a marketing strategy and getting their first users

After grabbing all the posts, their authors, number of upvotes and number of comments, I started to categorize them by topic.

In total, I identified 41 [1] separate topic areas discussed in this channel in the period. Here are the top 10 by share of the total conversations started. Below this, I’ve gone into more detail about what kinds of things each of these topics contains.

Marketing strategy

Here’s a list of the top five posts in this category by number of comments:

As you can see, it’s a mixed bag.

For example, the post by @tejas3732 is mostly stimulating conversation and covers a controversial issue. That’s why it’s a higher performer.

@rosiesherry’s question asking the community to contribute growth ideas for other people’s companies is meaningful, warm and constructive.

Hardly a surprise it generated 51 comments.

As usual, case studies go down well on Indie Hackers’ Growth group. And that’s why one of @harrydry’s posts and also a case study from @gonzamordecki14 both went well.

First 10 users

I was actually surprised that this wasn’t the top question in the data. I’ve personally answered this multiple times for other Indie Hackers and [plug] actually wrote about it last week in response to my research here.

Because all of the posts in this category are practically the same topic title with slight variations in language and number of initial users someone wants, I won’t do a breakdown here.

But one interesting sub category within this is the topic of broadening reach outside of IH and the startup community for new users. For example, the second most commented on topic in this category was @ffmathy on ‘Most of my customers come from Indie Hackers - how do I get more exposure?’

I think this is a really interesting problem that a lot of IH community members have to solve at some point. Personally, I don’t think I have any customers from IH – but I’d love some for @doopoll 🙂 I’ll even get you guys sorted with a hefty discount – just ping me a message on marc@doopoll.co

Product promotion

The product promotion category includes things like: pitches for new products, special offers that people want to give to IH community members, and kind of a lot of clickbait, which makes me a bit sad.

There were a few posts in this category that felt pretty meaningful though and I was happy to see them. Those posts were all things like [this one] (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/reached-7k-sales-a-month-b87aaab4d2) by @joosst talking about a success his (?) company had and then one by @alexhillman whose new book (the subject of the post) I’m excited to read.

Email marketing

The email marketing category could have been better sorted into lots of small categories, but hey, I’m doing this for fun.

One of the standout posts in this one for me was this post about how @watus analyzed just under 65K emails that he had sent from his CRM to see what best cold outreach advice to share with the community.

I dived into the comments on this one to see what he had done and really enjoyed his description of the methodology. It’s the kind of info that I come to Indie Hackers to get:

• 4 other sales director + myself pulled our CRM data together, I did the heavy lifting
• industries: online marketing, recruiting, software (up to $10k ACV), consulting
• I looked at email templates that had been used at least 400 times each to take things that were statistically representative
• I had CRM data to tie the meetings booked with the sequences that were used
• Within the sequence, I had data to show at which step/touchpoint the meeting was booked
• that way, I was able to get the science behind the sequence itself and the "winning" email if you consider that the last touch should be used to measure overall success
• took me 7 days to compile everything, I'm by no means an Excel guy so I probably did a lot of things manually that could have been automated. In terms of results, we collectively booked 2133 meetings over 2 years which is more or less 3.2% "touchpoint to booking" rate it also represents 61% of the revenue generated by the firms who shared their data

Business model

The business model category covers topics such as:

• I added a trial version to my product and my sales evaporated
• Does Freemium make sense?
• Best business model for my MVP?
• Which subscription software should have a one-time fee?
• Have you ever licensed your SaaS product?

I found this set of questions really insightful because the business model is so foundational to the kind of company that you end up running. Additionally, I found this cluster pretty encouraging because business model is so often separated out from growth when in reality, the two topics are so neatly linked.

Idea validation

Within idea validation, there were two types of question:

1. Would you use this?
2. How do you validate ideas?

Again, it was encouraging that ‘would you use this’ was the smaller of the two by number of conversations. While the IH community is a good one, there’s a limit to the number of companies that IH can pay at once, right?

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I have the data set now and if you want to query it, let me know. I’ll happily try to work something out for you.

I’m planning on writing answers for a bunch of the most commonly asked questions over on my blog. If you’re interested in seeing that when I do, you can join my newsletter

Hope this was interesting to you!

Marc

[1] The topics by number of discussions were: Marketing strategy (55), First 10 users (38), Product promotion (28), Email marketing (23), Business model (21), Idea validation (19), CRO (18), Producthunt (17), Indie Hackers (17), Twitter (13), Content marketing (12), Customer success (12), SEO (11), Grow MRR (10), KPIs, OKRs and Metrics (9), Referral (8), Hackernews (8), Cold outreach (6), Investment (6), Retention and Churn (6), Launching (5), Facebook (4), Reddit (4), Video (4), Value Propositions (4), Social media (4), Instagram (3), Thinking of quitting (3), Landing pages (2), TikTok (2), Community (2), Retargeting (2), Press (2), Direct mail (1), Betalist (1), AppSumo (1), Google Ads (1), Influencer marketing (1), Social proof (1).

There were also 62 conversations that I classed as N/A [note: this comprises things that were either not readable, spam or in some cases related to personal growth – which is valid, but ultimately not useful for this data]