(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)
2020 was packed with new startup trends:
But for my money, the rise of newsletter businesses took the cake. Free and paid newsletters saw a massive spike across the board in the indie hackers community.
One of the biggest successes in the paid newsletter industry? Morning Brew, which made over $20 million in revenue in 2020.
So below, we'll end the year right by diving into some growth insights shared by Morning Brew's co-founder.
Here's what you'll find in this issue:
As always, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
from Courtland's Newsletter by Courtland Allen
Morning Brew is a very impressive newsletter business:
Austin, one of the co-founders, is one of my favorite follows on Twitter, because he likes to share numbers and learnings. (Lots of people with newsletters like to share numbers, actually.)
A couple days ago, Austin had a really good thread about two insights that helped them grow 10x in a single year.
Here's the first:
If you're building an X, find users from other X's. Simple.
Lots of people I've had on the Indie Hackers podcast have noticed this. For example, while running his growth agency, Julian Shapiro learned the secret to doing well on Kickstarter is to advertise to an audience of people who've bought on Kickstarter before.
This is also why you often see similar restaurants near each other. Would you rather build your coffee shop across the street from another coffee shop, or across the street from a clothing store? It's unintuitive, but I'd pick coffee shop, because I want to reach people who obviously love coffee.
There's also a hidden insight in Austin's follow-up tweets:
Just because you're early to a market doesn't mean you win. We can all name a handful of first movers who got crushed by the competition.
You need a playbook for how to take advantage of being early. Austin's was:
I've shared a few other takeaways in the full post. But here's the bottom line: You don't have to be crazy insightful to do what Morning Brew did here. You just have to keep your ear to the ground.
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Courtland's Newsletter for more.
💡 Daniel Vassallo got 400 paid newsletter subscribers in 24 hours. He made headlines two years ago after leaving a $500k salary at Amazon to go indie.
💃 The New York Times wrote a feature story on an indie hacker, which nearly doubled her newsletter subscribers. Get the backstory.
✋ TikTok became the first social media platform to ban multi-level marketing. See what indie hackers are saying about the move.
🍎 More indie hackers are building mobile apps on the Apple App Store now that the tech giant's dropped its fee from 30% to 15%.
from the User Acquisition Channels newsletter by Darko G.
Question: What's the one thing Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, and Google have in common?
Answer: Over the past four months, they've all launched their own Instagram story-like feature as part of their main product:
In addition, these platforms are actively working towards giving short video more exposure.
On December 29th, Google announced they're about to make short-form videos more discoverable in their search app.
I know what you're thinking: "Can ads run on stories?"
Affirmative. On the same day in early December, LinkedIn introduced a beta version of LinkedIn Stories Ads and Google announced the launch of Web Stories Ads.
Expect Twitter to follow soon. These social networks are actively pushing short-form content so more of their users can see and engage with it.
If you're familiar with the law of shitty clickthroughs, you'll know that each acquisition channel strategy declines over time:
There is one thing you can do about this: Keep an eye on new channels so that you can be the first to reap the benefits in case that channel takes off.
This was a key insight for the founders of Morning Brew as they grew 10x in one year. And it could be key to unlocking your growth as well.
Discuss this story, or subscribe to User Acquisition Channels for more.
from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry
Simple CTA trick.
Add a few words to your button to handle the user's biggest objection to clicking.
Go here for more more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.
from the Exploding Topics newsletter by Josh Howarth
Fewer people are clicking on Google's organic results than ever before, according to Sparktoro data. Instead, they largely find an answer to their query directly from a search engine results page (SERP) feature.
SERP features are any elements of Google search results beyond the traditional "10 blue links." Common SERP features include featured snippets, knowledge panels, Google Ad results, and top stories.
And a recent industry study found that 97.6% of Google results contain at least one of these features.
Google has publicly announced that one of their goals for the next 20 years is to "shift from answers to journeys." And SERP features are only one of many ways that Google is transitioning from a search engine to a discovery engine.
Some other features and products they've rolled out to support this initiative:
Check out the full post to see this week's other exploding topics. And join Exploding Topics Pro to see trends 6+ months before they take off.
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Exploding Topics for more.
I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's 2020's final pick:
Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to a friend, and let them know they can subscribe here.
Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.
Special thanks to Nathalie Zwimpfer for the illustrations, and to Courtland Allen, Pete Codes, Darko G., Harry Dry, and Josh Howarth for contributing posts to this issue. —Channing
Is something with $20 million in revenue even remotely close to indie? Isn't it "just" Big Business?
Comes down to how you define indie! To my thinking, "indie" refers to how a company gets funded, not how much money it makes. And though Morning Brew has done some fundraising since it got started, it began as a bootstrapped business and quickly became profitable the old-fashioned way (by iterating toward product-market fit).
In fact, I'd argue that if Morning Brew had gotten a traditional start by raising venture capital out of the gate, they never would've taken the unconventional route of scaling a lean, newsletter-only news product.
So the growth playbook Morning Brew followed is highly applicable to other bootstrappers.
You're right. But certain businesses are so huge it's difficult to relate to them and think they started small.