What's New: 5 UX/UI tips to improve your website

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Don't underestimate the power of an appealing website or app:

• Excellent UX/UI design entices potential users to check out your product and give it a shot! The UX/UI tips below can help you elevate your visuals.
• Finding customers is hard, but lead magnets give people a reason to invite you into their inboxes. Check out Dru Riley's guide to using lead magnets to find customers, upgrade content, and lock in case studies.
• Founder Simon Høiberg hit $75,000 in pre-sales for a SaaS that he hasn't built yet. Here, he shares his pre-launch strategy, including the pros and cons of offering pre-sales. Hint: Never promise something that you can't deliver.

Want to share something with over 100,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🛠 Five UX/UI Tips to Improve Your SaaS Website

by Jim Zarkadas

Making your SaaS website more appealing and credible entices potential customers to visit, and give your product a try. These tips can get you rolling in no time!

1: Show several features in one visual

Show, don't tell. Show me your SaaS, don't describe it to me. There are many ways to do that.

One of them is to use screenshots with annotations. It's easy, fast, and engaging, and you can show many features at the same time:

2: Your content leads your UI

In the screenshot below, notice the beautiful hearts floating around the testimonials.
Content is about happy users and happy vibes. The UI should visually reflect that, and this company used heart shapes to achieve it:

3: Be specific about what you offer

Be specific, then narrow things down even further. Here's an example from Travelperk ($50M ARR):

4: Make your social proof short, exciting, and specific

Social proof is a must-have, and it should be engaging. Avoid making it boring with classic testimonials. Here's an example of interesting social proof from Basecamp:

5: Add some motion in your UI

UI motion is a great way to make your SaaS website stand out. This is a great tool to use when you're presenting your product features, but don't want to show the whole SaaS UI.

Here's how Typefully is doing it:

Join 1K+ indie hackers who are improving their SaaS UX/UI design here!

What are your top tips for good UX/UI? Let's chat below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

👻 Heavy Twitter users are disappearing from the platform.

🛩 This airline has started a lottery to entice people to take the middle seat.

🦉 Duolingo's owl will now shout fractions at you.

📉 YouTube's battle with TikTok is taking its toll, as Alphabet's revenue dips.

🥩 Plant-based meat has a tough road ahead.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🧲 Trend Alert: Lead Magnets

from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley

Why it matters

You can use reciprocity to boost sales.

Problem

Finding customers is hard.

Solution

Lead magnets give people a reason to invite you into their inboxes.

Players

Lead magnet examples:

• Supplement Quiz: Get personalized recommendations about the right supplements for you.
• Contract Management in the Digital Era: Webinar used to engage prospects with useful information, while demonstrating how DocuSign can help.
• Mortgage Calculator: Zillow's tool to help homebuyers estimate their mortgage payment, then connect them with a lender.
• Social Selling Index Score: Scores your social selling ability when you create an account, then explains how LinkedIn can help you improve.
• Project Management Kit, Formeer: A Discord server feedback generation tool that curates a list of project management resources.

Lead magnet tools:

• Beacon: Create written lead magnet templates.
• Attract: Build checklists, how-to guides, resource guides, and case studies.
• Vidyard: Video marketing tool for tutorials and demonstrations.
• Outgrow: Create interactive content like polls, assessments, chatbots, and calculators.
• StealthSeminar: Video-based tool for webinars and training sessions.

Predictions

• Access to exclusive communities and private groups will become a popular form of lead magnet. Mary Fern's best performing lead magnet for her prenatal fitness service was a private support group for expecting mothers on Facebook. Nikki Gundy offers a weekly "Honestea" session in her private Facebook Group that helps her build trust with new leads. 80% of customers are more likely to buy from businesses that offer a more personalized experience.

• Lead magnets will be used by individuals to demonstrate skills to potential employers. Businesses are not the only ones who will reap the benefits of lead magnets. Thomas Ong wrote The Creator's Manual to share lessons he's learned while establishing his personal brand and audience as a student-creator. Brian Moore is a viral marketer who was featured in Vice for Do Not Touch Your Face, a website that uses your webcam to shame you when you touch your face, to prevent COVID-19.

• Free platform credit will become one of the most popular forms of lead magnets. Social media ad platforms like Snapchat and Google offer hundreds of dollars in ad credit to new signups. SuperRare offered $50 worth of $RARE to NFT collectors who collected new artwork on the platform within 30 days.

Opportunities

• Build free tools to solve problems for your prospective customers. Tweet Hunter grew to $20K MRR with free side products like Unretweet and Powerful Dynamic Banner, which drove growth to its Twitter monetization product. Wall is an NFT analytics platform with a free tool, Rekt Meter, that tracks the performance of other NFT wallets.
• Make your lead magnets easily shareable. It should be easy to spread the word about your resource. Visme gives leads the option to share its free course on presentations to their LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest profiles directly from the landing page. Trends.vc tags the projects and experts referenced in our newsletter on Twitter when we announce a new topic.
• Build dedicated landing pages to customize your value proposition and attract different leads. Dashword created a page for its content brief generator to promote independently on social media platforms, while generating leads for its paid content tool. Aiseo created a standalone slogan generator in order to promote its copywriting product.

Risks

• Losing attention: Keeping leads engaged after the delivery of your lead magnet is difficult. Create additional value, and follow up to retain and convert prospects.
• Over-promoting: You risk exhausting your audience if you focus too much of your content on directly promoting your product. Ideally, only 20% of your content is direct promotion.
• Loss of credibility: Typos, and other small design errors, are easy to miss. Be very thorough, as these can make your brand look sloppy.

Key lessons

• Follow up on leads with new offers. Retaining prospects is as important as finding them. 73% of leads may never convert to a sale.
• Make value instantly accessible. The sooner prospects are able to access and benefit from your lead magnet, the better your odds of converting them.

Hot takes

• The most effective lead magnet will become ownership. Web 3.0 protocols, like SuperRare, offer their project's token to incentivize prospects to try the platform. Airdrops (like this one from LooksRare ($LOOKS)) are becoming a ubiquitous form of marketing to crypto-savvy prospects.
• The information that lead magnets ask for will change. Inboxes are saturated. Businesses will ask you to join their Discord server, follow them on Twitter, or complete a bounty.

Haters

"No one is signing up for my lead magnet. What am I doing wrong?"

There are a few reasons that your lead magnet might not be getting visitors or signups:

• Not enough exposure: Your website is not getting enough traffic to drive signups, and would benefit from promotional efforts like paid ads.
• Lack of urgency: How are you convincing potential signups that they would benefit from your lead magnet immediately?
• You're targeting the wrong audience: Are the people who are visiting your lead magnet actually a part of your target audience?
• Lack of value: Make sure your lead magnet is something the desired audience would actually benefit from having.

"Lead magnets are dying. No one wants to read e-books or attend webinars anymore."

In some cases, this may be true. The truth is that there's no one-size-fits-all approach to lead magnets. What works for one business may not work for another. That's why testing to uncover the "perfect" lead magnet for your target audience is critical. There's no reason any specific type of lead magnet won't work if you are providing real value.

"How will giving away something valuable for free get me paying customers?"

Modern consumers are inundated with content. Lead magnets help you stand out from your competition, and prove why your product or service is the best option to satisfy their needs.

Links

1. Who has the best lead magnet you've seen? The tweet behind this report.
2. Lead magnets are boring: Max Haining shares tools and tips to create lead magnets that actually convert.
3. The Threado Case Study: A case study about using side products as a lead magnet for your core business.

Related reports

• Curation-as-a-Service: Curating links and resources is a valuable lead magnet strategy.
• Build in Public: Building in public creates unique opportunities to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise, and generate leads for your lead magnets.
• Programmatic SEO: A cost-effective way to generate and target lead magnets for your prospects.

More reports

Go here to get the Trends Pro report. It contains 200% more insights. You also get access to the entire back catalog and the next 52 Pro Reports.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Trends.vc for more.

🚀 The Spector Report

by Josh Spector

I'm sharing growth tips for creative founders! Here's this week's:

If you’re struggling to grow your audience, you need to either:

1. Do more, or
2. Do less.

Every creator struggles with one of these two issues. Figure out which one’s holding you back, and adjust accordingly.

Subscribe to Josh's For The Interested newsletter or I Want To Know podcast for more.

💰 Simon Høiberg Hit $75K in Pre-sales

by Simon Høiberg

Hi, founders! I'm Simon Høiberg, and I pre-launched LinkDrip a little over a month ago. So far, more than 650 early adopters have joined the waitlist.

Let me break down how I planned and executed this pre-launch, and how I used it to validate interest in my product before I started building!

Prior to the launch

It's important to point out that I already run FeedHive, a social media management tool with more than 3K paying users, and 15K total users.

LinkDrip is a link engagement tool that's actually a sophisticated link shortener. It's a product that can bring a ton of value for marketers in itself, and it's a great companion to a social media management tool.

The problems that I chose to solve were selected very intentionally. I chose products that go hand-in-hand, so that one can play off of the other. We built two small things before launching LinkDrip:

• A website, created in Webflow.
• An integration with FeedHive. This allowed our current users to auto-shorten their links when they schedule posts.

In total, this took less than a weekend. When we launched the link shortening feature, no one knew that we were building a full-fledged link building tool. It was announced as a small FeedHive feature.

Three stages of launching

We launched LinkDrip in three different stages:

1. A soft-launch, exclusive to current FeedHive users:

At this point, no one knew about LinkDrip. We set it up so that, when FeedHive users signed in, they were met with a modal that announced the product:

We also announced LinkDrip in our closed Facebook Group, and sent out a special edition newsletter to a select group of users. For one week, we offered a lifetime subscription at an extra discounted price, and it was only available to paying FeedHive users.

At this point, the link shortening feature had already been live for about two months, and one of our selling points was that all analytics would be unlocked as soon as they got access to LinkDrip.

The exclusive, limited time offer drove an incredible amount of hype and excitement among our users. We hit $40K+ in the first week alone!

2. Opening LinkDrip signups to everyone, including non-FeedHive users:

In this next step, we raised the prices, and removed the restriction that allowed only paying users of FeedHive to purchase the lifetime deal.

During the first week, the word spread in other small communities, especially in a bunch of Facebook Groups where people talk about lifetime deals. This led to another wave of users signing up for the early access deal, and in the two weeks that followed, we saw sales coming in daily (although at a much lower volume).

3. Publicly announcing LinkDrip through all of our channels:

Finally, a week ago today, I announced LinkDrip through my own social channels and newsletter list.

The two pieces of content that drove the most sales were the launch video on my YouTube channel, and my launch thread on Twitter.

Pre-sale pros and cons

There are both pros and cons associated with a strategy like this, though the pros greatly outweigh the cons.

As someone shared in a comment on my YouTube channel:

Starting out with a bag of money to fund the product development, and having 650+ eager users waiting to jump on onboard, is an extremely luxurious situation to be in, for obvious reasons.

On the other hand, this also created sky high expectations, which put a tremendous amount of pressure on us.

Additionally, although we consider LinkDrip validated, there's still no guarantee that the business will survive.

There are cases where a pre-launch like this, especially one including lifetime deals, actually ends up being a massive false positive. It's definitely something to be very aware of when using this strategy.

Why did this work so well?

I believe it's a combination of multiple things:

• The psychological elements of exclusivity, scarcity, and urgency drove a significant amount of hype in the first week of the launch.
• We already have a loyal user base that trusts our product and our team. We're very close to our users, talk to them on a daily basis, and have a very engaged closed community on Facebook. This had a significant impact on securing the first early adopters.
• I have a large platform, with a combined 250K followers and subscribers across five different channels. In the last two years, I have spent a lot of time creating content and giving away value for free. Occasions like these are exactly where this pays off. It's a win-win.

Action points

If you're considering doing a pre-launch of your next product, here are a few action points to consider before moving forward:

• Build an audience: Start sharing value and creating an audience before pre-launching your product. It doesn't have to take long. Spend a few hours per week creating valuable content, then schedule it to post on various social media platforms.
• Engage with your users: Use these conversations to narrow in on their pain points. This will help tremendously with angling your launch correctly.
• Play the cards you already have: You might have an existing SaaS, a client base from freelance work, an email list from infoproduct sales, a blog with active readers, access to certain speaking events, etc. Whatever cards you already have on hand, and most people have some, find a way to play them for your pre-launch.
• Underpromise and overdeliver: Be very careful not to promise something that you cannot execute.

The early access deal for LinkDrip is still available, and you can pick it up right here. I hope you enjoyed reading!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.

Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Jim Zarkadas, Priyanka Vazirani, Dru Riley, Josh Spector, and Simon Høiberg for contributing posts. —Channing