What's New: Canva's new price hike creates a market gap

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Canva has announced that it will triple its prices:

• Small businesses will be impacted the most by the price increase. Build for them, or build tools around Canva's app marketplace ecosystem.
• Running a community allows you to hear different perspectives, ask questions, and understand pain points. Here are the biggest challenges.
• From laid off to venture-backed in two months. Bree Flemings launched memberships and hit $300 MRR, then landed $120K in venture capital.

Polar is an open source alternative to Lemon Squeezy, with better pricing. #ad

Canva's New Price Hike 📈

from the Trendy Software Ideas newsletter by Darko

When a company increases its prices by 30%, people complain. But when a company increases its prices by 300%, people switch.

Canva, the world's most popular online design software, has announced that it will triple its prices, saying that its new AI features are worth the new cost.

Why is Canva doing this? Well...IPO. Canva is getting ready to become a public company, and this price hike is part of its preparation.

Who will be affected?

Small businesses will be impacted the most by the price increase. For now, there are no price increase announcements for individual plans, but people are already panicking.

However, people are also already looking for cheaper alternatives, as evidenced by a quick search on X. Also, when you search for the company's name, the sentiment is mostly negative.

This Reddit comment sums things up pretty well:

New product appears, challenges the status quo. Becomes hugely popular. Turns into status quo and does the same s*** the other products were doing. Rinse and repeat.

At the moment, we seem to be between the "rinse" and "repeat" stages.

Opportunities for founders

Canva was launched in 2013. Fast forward to 2024: We have better tools, more libraries, and AI to speed up the whole process. And, we have SDKs to add photo-editing abilities to our web and mobile apps.

Today, it's totally possible to build a tool similar to Canva as a bootstrapped founder. In fact, bootstrappers are already building and selling tools like Canva, without needing millions of dollars in funding.

Will Adobe become the new Canva? Or, will someone else (like you!) appear on the scene, and take a significant portion of Canva's small business users?

The important thing is that a significant gap in the market has just appeared as a result of this change. You don't have to create a new Canva to leverage this change, though.

Here are a few more opportunities:

1. Monitor change in market share, and build around the ecosystem: Canva has an app marketplace, and the next Canva will probably also have a marketplace. There's always an opportunity to build tools around a growing ecosystem.

2. Create information around a rising competitor: Say most people switch to competitor X as a result of this change. There'll be a need for courses, books, and videos on how to use X. With content, recency matters. Something created in 2024 will be perceived as more valuable than something created in 2015.

3. Add team features to the individual plan: This is more of a temporary opportunity. If Canva does not raise the price of its "individual" plan (currently $15 per month), my guess is that there'll be tools and extensions that add team features to individual plans on Canva.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Trendy Software Ideas for more.

A New Open Source Monetization Platform 💵

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Overcoming the Challenges of Running a Community 👥

by Joshua Tiernan

Communities are great business models...except when they're not.

I've been running the No Code Founders community for nearly five years now, and I'm sharing my learnings!

1. It's harder than you think

Just because the community exists doesn't mean that people will talk. They might at first, but then they forget about it, or no new members join.

This is a people business, and you're relying on the people continuing to act in the same way forever, but they don't. That's not how people work. One of the biggest challenges that communities face in each stage of their development is keeping the conversation going. When it dies, it's really hard to get it started again, and can involve manually linking people up, initiating conversations, etc.

If people stop talking, your revenue stops, too. Members don't want to pay for access to a dead community, and neither do sponsors.

2. Sponsor monetization is a hard sell

One of the great things about community building is that it's a genuinely great way to deliver value to sponsors. Unlike other advertising options, community sponsorships offer businesses the chance to interact with customers in more organic ways, by engaging in communities directly.

Many companies have recognized this, and jumped into community-focused sponsorships, but most haven't.

One of the ways around this is to break up the sponsorship, and sell different forms of advertising separately. For example, you could sell sponsorships for your community newsletter as a standalone option, since companies are more familiar with that. Then, use that to upsell your other options.

3. It's always "on"

You will have new messages daily, and you need to constantly monitor for spam and other content to maintain high-quality content.

You might think you can engage members of the community to become moderators, but this is really tough to get right; most people don't have the time or interest to moderate a community long-term, so you would most likely need to hire a community manager or part-time moderator.

4. Marketing and monetization options change

Each stage of building a community is different:

• 0-100 members: Often has a lot of direct outreach to find relevant people to invite to the community.

• 100-1K members: You may move to marketing channels instead of direct outreach. At this stage, the community becomes less personal and intimate, so the types of conversations will change.

• 1K-5K members: At this stage, you're totally away from the personal approach, and you can focus on larger scale community options, such as online events, meetups, or creating community resources.

Each stage has its own unique set of challenges, and you may need to change the way you market, engage, and monetize at each different stage.

It's not all bad!

Though it has many challenges, running a community can also be very rewarding. Some of the many benefits include:

• Direct connection with a lot of interesting people, many of whom could become useful connections or buyers of your products.

• Direct insight into your industry.

• Ongoing monetization options once you reach scale.

• Options to launch other businesses on top of your community.

Discuss this story.

In the News 📰

from the Trendy Software Ideas newsletter

📱 Grow your TikTok following.

💻 Test these five different landing pages.

💲 Link to your product here. Our most affordable ad.

🤔 How do you decide whether to fire or keep your biggest client?

🖥️ Update on Instagram's Basic Display API.

🪚 Here's why America has so few carpenters.

Check out Trendy Software Ideas to discover more software ideas inspired by recent news.

$120K in Venture Capital 💰

by Bree Flemings

Life has really lifed in the past year! Let me take a step back and reintroduce myself.

I'm Bree Flemings, and two years ago, I came on Indie Hackers blabbing about an idea I had: Jem Social is an app where creators can match with each other. I needed a technical cofounder to help with our technical strategy.

The waitlist

We had over 500 waitlist users, and launched our beta app after two months. We acquired two paying users, and that was it. Nobody else became a subscriber.

We realized quickly that connections are just not enough to get people to sign up. After talking to our users, we realized that the majority of them liked the app, but not enough to pay. They would pay for opportunities.

The pivot

So, we turned Jem Social into a marketplace. I went through a pre-accelerator to help identify product-market fit, and we relaunched back in March. This was all happening while I still had my full-time job.

In June, I was laid off from my job. This was a full year after grieving my father's passing, and my move from Miami to Houston. The company went under tremendously.

I was distraught, confused, and worried. I reinvested my disposable income into expanding Jem, and I thought that would be everything I needed. We still weren't making money, because we wanted to see how people enjoyed the product.

The program

A few weeks later, I landed an interview with an accelerator program, and they were blown away. In July, I made it to the second interview for the program.

In August, I launched our memberships (we're currently at $300 MRR, with no money spent on ads), and I was fully accepted into the program. I received a $120K investment!

I am so excited for the next phase of Jem Social. We're truly disrupting the creator economy, and can't wait to expand our features. We have been 100% bootstrapped up until now, and can't wait for our members and brands to fully enjoy Jem!

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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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Darko, Joshua Tiernan, and Bree Flemings for contributing posts. —Channing