What's New: Clubhouse will hit Android as soon as next month

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Android is the world's most popular mobile platform, with over 2B+ users:

• 84% of smartphones shipped in 2020 were Android devices, and Clubhouse is looking to tap into that market. Clubhouse has more than 10 million weekly active users, but competition is tough. Reddit is the latest giant to enter the audio-only platform game with today's unveiling of Reddit Talk.
• Only 16% of founders did not validate in 2020, down from 30% the previous year. Your secret weapon in a validation deep dive? The Mom Test. Talk about the past, not the future. Have 20 conversations with one type of customer, not one conversation with 20 types of customers.
• This traveling couple shared how they acquired their first 100 customers for Leave Me Alone, an automated email unsubscriber. They recommend saving yourself a lot of heartache by sharing your landing page in relevant communities to gauge interest before doing any development work.

Want to share your ideas with over 70K indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🎧 Clubhouse Will Hit Android as Soon as Next Month

from the Indie Economy newsletter by Bobby Burch

Clubhouse has announced that it will be coming to Android phones as soon as next month. Android is the world's most popular mobile operating system, with over 2B users worldwide.

Clubhouse's road to Android

The background: With its recent funding round, and a multibillion dollar valuation, Clubhouse is eyeing world domination. Its upcoming Android launch will make Clubhouse accessible to millions more users around the globe.

The details: Clubhouse's recent Series C round (amount undisclosed), led by Andrew Chen of Andreessen Horowitz, valued the year-old company at $4B. This was 4x its value in December 2020. Clubhouse cofounders Paul Davison and Rohan Seth announced that the app has more than 10M weekly active users.

What it means: Although Clubhouse has enjoyed a meteoric rise, it’s competing in an increasingly crowded space. To solidify itself as the audio platform for creators, Clubhouse has rolled out a direct payments feature that allows users to pay creators directly. Best of all, Clubhouse doesn't take a cut. An Android version of Clubhouse will likely attract many more creators as Clubhouse's list of competitors, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Slack, continues to grow.

Android inevitability: Clubhouse’s invite-only, iOS-exclusive approach grew its allure, but it was only a matter of time before the company launched an Android version. Android is the dominant mobile operating system throughout the world, with 84% of smartphones shipped in 2020 running the operating system. This is compared to about 16% running iOS.

Timing is everything

Good timing: Clubhouse announced that its new funding will be used to fuel hiring, scale its international reach, invest in localization and accessibility features, and launch more accelerator programs:

Fundraising is only important because it allows us to keep focusing on the product and the community, and we’re so excited to continue to build Clubhouse with you. We are hiring across all areas, so if you are excited about our mission, we’d love to hear from you.

Investors galore: Clubhouse has courted many of the largest investors in Silicon Valley and beyond. In addition to its latest round, which featured Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, Tiger Global, and Elad Gil, Clubhouse says it now has nearly 200 investors, including members of the Clubhouse community, professional musicians, athletes, and comedians.

Twitter considered Clubhouse? Twitter reportedly held acquisition discussions with Clubhouse for a roughly $4B deal. The conversations apparently spanned a few months, but have since fizzled out. In December, Twitter began testing its own audio conversation platform, Spaces, which it hopes to publicly debut in April.

Do you find Clubhouse useful? Have your thoughts on the platform changed since January? Share in the comments!

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Indie Economy for more.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

🇹🇷 Turkey has banned cryptocurrency payments, citing "non-recoverable" losses.

🚘 Ferrari will unveil its first all-electric vehicle in 2025.

📹 Facebook unveiled "Soundbites," an audio version of Instagram Reels.

🏦 UK central bank is considering launching a cryptocurrency called "Britcoin."

👂 Reddit released its Clubhouse rival, "Reddit Talk," today.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🧐 Validation Strategies From Easiest to Hardest

By James Fleischmann

Only 16% of founders did not validate in 2020, down from 30% the previous year. Last week, Indie Hackers caught up with HootSuite founder Ryan Holmes to discuss his new idea validation platform, Kernal. (If you missed his special invite for indie hackers, here you go!) But what validation steps should founders take before building a prototype or posting on Kernal?

Here's a list of validation techniques on a scale from easiest (which also tend to be low-confidence) to hardest (high-confidence).

Define "validate"

Validation is the process of determining whether there is a need for your product in the market, and if so, what people are willing to pay for your solution.

It requires a deep dive into the problem, the market, and the solution (product). It's how founders can step outside of founder blindness and rely on cold, hard data to determine whether a product has legs.

In this context, the truest form of validation tends to be the exchange of money.

Market research

• Check out review sites: Look up reviews of your competitors on sites like G2 and Capterra. You can learn a lot about the struggles of your potential customers this way, and you'll learn whether your idea fills a void that other products aren't filling.
• Online (and offline) communities: You want to go where your target customers hang out and watch them interact. You'll often hear about pain points, purchasing decisions, and all sorts of things you might otherwise be clueless about.
• Quora: Check out questions people have asked in relation to your idea. What are they trying to solve? What are the most upvoted answers? Again, this can provide invaluable insight into your market and how relevant your product will be.

Market testing

If everything looks promising with your research, start talking to other humans.

• Share with colleagues: After all, they know the industry and will be able to provide solid insight.
• Coffeehouse test: Ask a random person at your local coffeehouse (or anywhere, really) to review your concept or product. Don't tell them it's yours. Offer to buy them a coffee in return.
• Conduct formal interviews: Sitting down with target customers can be a big advantage. Whether it's existing customers, an email list, or random people, remember: Don't pitch. Talk about their lives, not just your idea. Talk about the past, not the future. Have 20 conversations with one type of customer, not one conversation with 20 types of customers. These tips are from The Mom Test. And here are a few pointers based on the book.

Getting commitments

• Waitlist: If people are willing to sign up for your waitlist, they may be willing to purchase your product in the end. Create a landing page with email capture, then get the word out. The more you have to show for the concept, the better, but people have done this with as little as a description. Putting some money into Google Ads can be a good way to get some traffic and test your hypotheses.
• Pre-sales: Getting a pre-sale is true validation because people are giving you money, which could be an indication that others will as well. It would be helpful to have a clickable prototype at this stage. Tools like Marvel can help with that.
• Crowdfunding: Technically, this is a type of pre-sale, but it's worth mentioning on its own. There are lots of options for this, like Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

Some validation tools

• ProductValidator: A free service where you enter a few keywords about your idea and it spits out information about how the market is responding to ideas like yours.
• Startup Builder: Guided templates and resources to help you validate quickly.
• Customer Discovery: Connects you with early adopters so that you can interview them and learn.
• AreYouInterested: A free platform that helps you think up, validate, and discuss business ideas.
• UserTesting: Instead of interviewing users, this tool records user reactions to your product.
• PingPong: A tool that schedules calls with people who will check out your product.
• Javelin: A suite of products designed to help founders create a landing page, run Google Ads to it, and pull relevant data from it to validate your product.

Are your results not validating your product? No problem. Pivot. Then pivot again until you find market validation. Good luck!

What's your best advice on validation? Did you find any of these tools helpful?

Discuss this story.

🧠 Harry's Growth Tip

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

Same title. Same painting. Same subreddit. One gets 300 votes. The other gets 70K.

Make your marketing REALER.

Go here for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.

🚫 How Leave Me Alone Acquired Its First 100 Customers

By Bhumi

Danielle Johnson and James Ivings are JavaScript developers and digital nomads. Coding while traveling suits their desired lifestyle, and they've cultivated a "couple brand" while building their company in the open and blogging. They shared how they acquired their first 100 customers as the cofounders of Leave Me Alone, an automated email unsubscribe app.

What's the problem?

The problem: Too many unwanted emails in your inbox. You could unsubscribe from them by opening each one, finding the tiny unsubscribe link at the bottom, and going through the process that way. But that's tedious and boring. So you don't do it, and clutter keeps piling up.

The solution: An automated way to unsubscribe by seeing all of your emails in one place and unsubscribing with a single click. With this a pay-as-you-go option, customers pay for the convenience and the time saved.

First 100 customers

Action 1: Building, and sharing, a landing page before doing any development work:

• Shared in communities where the founders were active members: Maker Log, Women Make, and Indie Hackers.
• Shared on Twitter (few hundred followers). People retweeted.
• Shared in a few Slack groups.

Outcome: Got 50 beta users within a few hours.

Action 2: First Product Hunt launch

In January 2019, Danielle and James launched on Product Hunt.

Outcome: ~2000 upvotes. Leave Me Alone also stayed on the front page for a few days, and was voted #1 product of the week.

Action 3: Second Product Hunt launch

In October 2019, this was a more mature launch. They had existing customers and fans. For both launches, they were able to get someone from Product Hunt to hunt them as well.

Outcome: ~1000 upvotes. Leave Me Alone came in #2 product of the day.

Action 4: Started charging right away ($3-8) to convert the huge list of sign-ups to customers. Offered a giftable version of the product over the 2019 holiday season with this tagline:

Give the gift of a clean inbox.

Outcome: This made it really easy for people to share the product and buy in bulk for their whole team at work. It also created a referral effect in online communities.

Danielle and James also engaged in other customer generating events. They were featured by a newsletter with 25K+ subscribers and featured in Life Hacker. Both of these opportunities arose due to their other activities; they did not directly pursue them.

You can learn more about Leave Me Alone's customer acquisition journey on the Indie Hackers Podcast.

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 Nathalie Zwimpfer for the illustrations, and to Bobby Burch, Priyanka Vazirani, James Fleischmann, Harry Dry, and Bhumi for contributing posts. —Channing