What's New: Do cold emails still work?

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

It's not a matter of if cold email works, but how:

• Cold emailing is a scalable way to get in touch with nearly anyone, and can be extremely effective. Here's how to make it work for you!
• The Apple App Store is available in 175 countries, and remains a powerful way to acquire users. These tips can help your app get featured.
• Founder Dominik Sobe just hit his goal of $1,000 in monthly revenue with HelpKit, a Notion-to-knowledge-base SaaS tool. Below, he shares his tips on building products rooted in Notion, and weighs in on the MVP vs. landing page debate.

Want to share something with over 90,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

📧 Does Cold Email Still Work?

by Soham Sarkar

Cold email can be a superpower, but it's not as straightforward as just sending something out. Here's how to make the most out of your cold email campaign!

Special delivery

First, you need to determine whether your audience reads their emails, and how. Who are you trying to target? Developers, marketers, executives, lawyers, journalists, VCs, founders? Having a thorough understanding of your target audience goes a long way.

Content matters

What are the elements of a cold email? Let's examine:

1. Subject line.
2. First line.
3. Value and pitch.
4. Call-to-action (CTA).

If you're not getting results, one or more of these elements need help.

Common mistakes

These are the most common reasons that your cold emails are not working:

1. The subject line is not relevant, so your email is not even being opened.
2. The first line doesn't "hook" the reader.
3. Your entire message is a pitch fest trying to extract value, instead of giving.
4. You don't provide a compelling reason for the prospect to take the time to reply back.
5. The CTA is too involved.
6. Not enough valuable follow-ups or outreach volume: Many follow-ups are along the lines of "Thoughts?" "Any feedback?" "Did you have a chance to check out my last email?" etc. None of this adds value.

Fix it or nix it

If your cold emails are guilty of one of the common mistakes above, here's how you can fix it:

1. Make the subject line relevant: Add your prospect's name or company name, use a keyword that they are obsessed with, talk about a specific goal hyper-relevant to them, etc.
2. Make sure that you're not coming across as being too sales-y: Don't just say "Found you on LinkedIn!" or "Saw you're into fishing!" That is not personalization; it's just pedantic. Either talk about specific pain points that they have, or compliment them on something that is also related to the pain point and your value prop.
3. Clearly show the exact benefit that you can give them, not a list of your features or who you've worked with. Be very specific.
4. Keep it short.
5. Go for soft closes: "Are you interested in more details?" "Would you be interested in hearing more?"
6. Follow up several times (my recommendation is five, one per week) unless they unsubscribe.

If you focus on them, thoroughly addressing their pain points, goals, and values, they will likely respond favorably!

Quick B2B guide

Here is OneIsPrime's process (meant primarily for B2B):

1. Use LinkedIn Sales Nav, Apollo, or any other lead generation tool to get emails based on companies and roles that fit your target persona.
2. Use any mail-merge tool (I like MixMax) to import the contacts that you found in step one.
3. Create a 3-5 step sequence, with follow-ups spread out between two days on average. Do a few minutes of research for each contact. You're looking to find out if they've posted anything new, whether they're hiring, or anything that is related to what you're trying to sell that solves their problem.
4. These tools also let you track opens, link clicks, and other metrics. When someone opens your email more than three times, even if they don't reply, manually send them a follow-up with some customer proof added on top of the original email. The point isn't to book a meeting at this stage. You just want them to reply back and share anything about their current situation or interests.
5. Be consistent. Try to spend around an hour each day monitoring stats and adding new contacts to your sequences. If you send 30-40 new emails a day, you'll get a steady pipeline within the first two weeks.

Once you get comfortable, this becomes a very quick thing to set up because the rules are simple, you understand your customer type, and you learn exactly what type of emails perform best.

The best part is, even if you hire someone, they can follow your playbook to get started in very short amount of time!

Wrapping up

Most people send cold emails and follow-ups in a very value extractive way. This is the number one thing to avoid.

If you truly believe that your product or service is genuinely of value, and would greatly improve some part of your prospect's business or life, let them know about it!

As for the follow-ups, send things that add value to them: An actionable strategy that they can use with no paywall, a Twitter thread that would help them in some way, a list of best industry practices or tools, summarization of complex documents that they can use, etc.

No one is going to be annoyed to receive these things. Just add a casual CTA at the end, like this one: "Would love to chat to share more!"

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

⛽ Klarna now lets you pay for gas in installments.

💵 Small businesses can benefit from retail in the metaverse.

🛏 These sleep myths may be keeping you from getting a good night's rest.

🍲 Bored Ape Yacht Club is getting a restaurant IRL.

🧠 This new method can help you boost your creativity.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🍎 How to Get Featured in the Apple App Store

by Joe Barbour

A few years back, after building All Hours (no longer available), I did no marketing. As expected, I launched to crickets.

About a week after launch, downloads suddenly went through the roof. I was confused as to why, until I got a text from a friend saying that it was on the front page of the App Store. Over the past few months, I've been dissecting other apps that have been featured by Apple, and have extracted what worked with All Hours. I hope you find it insightful!

Native only

Don't build non-native apps! Apple wants you to use Swift, which is optimized to run perfectly on all Apple devices. Plus, non-native is UX blasphemy.

Uniqueness

This doesn't mean that your idea has to be unique. Often, building on an existing idea is a safer move, since you know that the market exists. However, your app needs a wow factor!

This may come in the form of a super unique feature, the simplicity of your UI/UX, an incredible onboarding experience, or even just a super cool transition or animation. All Hours, for example, aggregated reviews into a super clean UI so that users could see reviews from both Google and Yelp to present a better rating. This was not unique, but it was unique in its approach and UX/UI.

Animations and transitions

Now, with SwiftUI, transitions and animations are easier than ever to achieve. This was not the case when I was building All Hours, but I knew that many of the most impactful apps on the AppStore utilized animations. So, I spent a lot of time perfecting the way each of the tiles transitioned into a detailed view. This created a small, but effective, wow factor.

That being said, overdoing the animations can harm the UX experience more than it benefits. So, go easy on the rotating flashing views!

Inspiration

With everything I build, I research to see if anyone has done it before me, and if so, how they did it. Look at what works. Observe what is already tried and tested.

I highly suggest looking at past winners of the Apple Design Award, as this are essentially what we are trying to achieve here. Outside of that, there are plenty of places online to find great inspiration. For instance, I check Dribbble daily for ideas. This has helped me immensely in finding ideas on how to approach a feature. For example, this Dribbble post from Golo gave me the idea of having a progress bar for the events within SprintDock.

Data handling

Many people do not want to hand their personal information over as soon as they open an app. More importantly, Apple's recent policies and privacy-focused features have made it very clear that the company frowns upon apps that harvest unnecessary user data.

Think about which metrics are the most important for you to capture. Less is better. But, if you do need to have a signup screen, demonstrate value first (maybe with one of your wow factors). A user does not owe you anything! It is your job to explain why they should hand over their name, email address, or phone number to you. Give them a valid reason to do so, and be transparent with how it's used.

Localization

The App Store is now available in 175 countries, and most locales have their own team of curators. Have your app translated into different languages. This is a simple, affordable way of vastly expanding your market share and increasing your chances of being featured. You'll have more Apple eyes (curators) on your app from different locales.

Accessibility

Another simple, but sometimes overlooked, way of increasing your audience is to add accessibility functionality in your app for individuals who may have auditory, physical, cognitive, speech, or visual limitations. Your app should be accessible to everyone who wants to use it!

Apple has made note of developers that do this in previous Apple Design Awards, as it continues to push for accessibility.

Use Apple APIs

We've already established that you should use the first-party accessibility APIs, but should you use the rest? Absolutely! Apple is known to highlight apps that utilize its latest and greatest features, since it's a great way for the company to showcase them.

One successful example of this is WidgetSmith. The founders of WidgetSmith saw their opportunity to build an app that focused on the newly-announced widget API. They were one of the very first to do it well, and because of this, they were showcased by Apple on more than one occasion.

Have you been featured on a major app store? Let's chat below!

Discuss this story.

🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week

📱 Growing on Twitter? Let's grow together. Posted by Lee.

🥺 I can't trust myself anymore. Posted by José León.

🤷 How did you make it without social media? Posted by Sven.

🛗 Share your elevator pitch! Posted by Brandon Strellis.

💰 Is passive income a myth? Posted by Darko.

💻 How I used SEO to avoid marketing. Posted by Maxence Cornet.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

📋 Dominik Sobe Recently Hit $1K MRR With HelpKit

by Dominik Sobe

Hey fellow indie hackers! I'm Dominik Sobe, founder of HelpKit, a Notion-based SaaS that recently hit $1K MRR. I focused solely on building in public and engaging with the Notion community. This is a big milestone for me and, honestly, a small dream came true!

HelpKit is a no-code tool that allows users to easily turn Notion documents into a professional help center and documentation page. I started it because I was fed up with the existing knowledge base solutions. You can read more about the background story here.

Here are the stats so far:

• Total registered users: 408.
• Paying customers: 51.
• Customers on Essential Plan ($19 per month): 35%.
• Customers on Premium Plan ($29 per month): 65%.
• Churn: 0%.
• Happy customers: 99.88%!

I am extremely thankful for the Indie Hackers community, and all of the folks who have supported me on my journey so far.

AMA!

How did you go about finding a B2B SaaS idea?

Pursue an idea that you enjoy. The first two weeks are always golden, but you want an idea that goes beyond that period. Whatever the idea is, money aside, think about whether you could see yourself waking up six months later and still enjoying the process of building it. It is so easy to lose your spirit if you are not passionate about the problem.

So, how do you find a B2B SaaS idea? Observe your surroundings. Take cues from your friends, clients, company, and community. If you think you have identified a problem, reach out to potential customers. Reddit is an amazing way to find early potential users.

Do you suggest building an MVP or a landing page first?

This depends a couple of factors. If you can build an MVP in two weeks, then an MVP is better. It will give potentials users a feel for the product. If the MVP would take you longer, I'd set up a landing page with an email sign up form, and try to get people to sign up for a beta or early access type of thing.

As an indie hacker, there is one thing you particularly want to avoid: Swimming upstream. Ideally, you want your product and idea to carry you, not the other way around. As a rough threshold, I'd say that if, after one month of marketing your product, you don't see a bit of traction and revenue, focus on a new idea. Time is precious!

How did you validate the product?

I keep all of my documents in Notion, and realized how amazing it would be to use Notion as a content management system for my knowledge base. So, I decided to take on the challenge and scratch my own itch.

Over time, I've had countless companies reach out to tell me that they love how simple and clean HelpKit is. I didn't take a complete shot in the dark, though. I tweeted about HelpKit's soft launch on Twitter, and it was very well received. This provided me with enough motivation to start working on it.

What was your go-to-market strategy?

I would say that the Notion community is by far the most engaged no-code community that I have experienced thus far. Generally, you will receive a lot of early feedback and cheerful support from Notion fans, which is very rare to have.

For the first five months, I heavily focused on building in public and sharing my journey on Indie Hackers, Twitter, and Reddit.

Here are my top channels:

1. SEO/Google.
2. Twitter.
3. Product Hunt (haven't launched yet, but drove interest from another product).
4. YouTube.

What is your next goal?

I still need to be making more in order to become comfortably sustainable. While reaching $1K MRR was definitely my main goal, I see that there's potential for much more to come. Right now, I want to fully focus on growing HelpKit, and see where it leads within the next couple of weeks and months!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

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

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

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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 Soham Sarkar, Priyanka Vazirani, Joe Barbour, and Dominik Sobe for contributing posts. —Channing