What's New: Getting customers to promote your business

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Most people trust word-of-mouth over traditional marketing:

• Encourage your customers to promote your business by asking for reviews and UGC, and implementing referral programs and contests.
• Looking for a virtual assistant? Clearly define the role, create a relevant test, and implement a paid trial period for your top candidate (or two!).
• From rage quitting with no safety net to $10K MRR. Angus Cheng built a tool to convert bank statements to CSV, and hasn't looked back.

Want to grow your business? Try running a promo in the Indie Hackers newsletter to get in front of 80,000+ founders.

Help Customers Promote Your Business 🗣

by Syed Balkhi

81% of people say they trust the opinions of friends, family, and peers over traditional marketing.

With that in mind, here are several effective ways to make it easy for customers to promote your business to others in their lives!

Encourage customers to leave reviews

72% of people say they refuse to shop with a new company unless they can see reviews from real customers.

Social proof is evidence that other people trust and respect your brand. Here are ways to encourage users to leave reviews on your website:

• Email customers a week or two after their order, asking them to share feedback in exchange for a discount.

• Add a visual star rating to each product to make it easy for new users to assess the quality at a glance.

Invest in a referral program

A referral program is when a customer is paid via cash, discounts, or other incentives in exchange for convincing others to try your brand.

Influencer marketing can be a great tool here. ~16% of all US online sales are predicted to come from affiliate marketing. On the influencer side of things, close to 50% of shoppers say they've purchased a product because one of their favorite influencers promoted it first.

Share user-generated content

User-generated content (UGC) is promotional content created by customers, not by you. UGC includes product reviews, testimonials, social media posts, videos, and success stories.

UGC is more influential than brand photos or videos. Here are a few tips on generating and sharing it:

• Credit the original creator.

• Ask existing customers to share photos, videos, or stories. Sometimes, simply asking: "What's your favorite part about our products?" can yield a ton of helpful UGC.

• Compile relevant UGC and turn it into bigger pieces of content, like case studies and infographics.

Online contests

Choose a prize that resonates with your target audience, and give users a way to enter that involves them sharing the contest with others. For instance, our giveaways usually have three entry methods: Visit our website, leave a comment, and share the post.

Once the event ends, don't forget to announce the winner publicly, and thank everyone who participated!

Discuss this story.

In the News 📰

from the Growth Trends newsletter

🤖 HubSpot's strategy to integrate AI across the platform.

🤝 Landing your first 10 B2B customers.

💻 Google says that LSI keywords have no effect.

👀 The evolution of open source business models.

🎼 Sound is a powerful tool to get customers to buy things.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

How to Hire a Virtual Assistant 💼

by Maddie Wang

Hiring a virtual assistant can be a challenge, but these tips can help!

Create your role and craft a test

First, define and write out clear roles. Outline what high performance vs. low performance looks like. Consider things like:

• Able to take initiative.
• Any measurable growth goals.
• Expected targets. For example, responding to emails within X hours.

Next, create your test. An Airtable form can work for this. Here's an example:

• Ask applicant to review a certain Instagram post on your page.
• Outline what you want them to note about the post. For instance, notice that the tone is kind and excited, and the pictures are vibrant.
• Have them draft three Instagram posts and captions that capture the same tone.

Once you have one or two top candidates who feel promising, run a paid trial period for your top candidate (or top two). The trial doesn't have to be long; you just need it to be long enough to determine whether the candidate works well with you, and is able to hit the goals that you outlined for the trial.

Posting your application

• Post your job listing on online job boards, like HubSpot Talent, LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.
• To cut down on spam, do not put the actual application in the job post.
• Ask interested candidates to email their resume. Once they've sent it via email, have an autoresponder send them a link to the actual application. You can set up the autoresponder so that it only sends out the link to emails that include a certain word, which you can add in the listing.
• Be sure to include links to your website and all of your socials to add legitimacy to your listing.

For more, check out Founder's Cafe, an intimate founder's community!

Discuss this story.

Landing Page Hot Tips 🔥

from the One Page Love newsletter

Strengthen your landing page with these design, development, and conversion tips:

Marketing to everyone resonates with no one.

Know your audience and your niche very well, and craft landing page copy that your targeted community will appreciate.

Headline:

🚫 Join the biggest Lord of the Rings fan club online.

✅ An online community where second breakfast is a dietary staple, and Old Toby’s smoke can be seen drifting from humble abodes.

CTA:

🚫 Join the club for $9 per month.

✅ Enter Hobbiton for $9 per month.

Subscribe to Rob Hope's One Page Love newsletter for his favorite UI, design, and development finds.

Bank Statement Converter Hit $10K MRR 🏦

by James Fleischmann

Angus Cheng recently hit $10K MRR with Bank Statement Converter, a tool that accurately converts bank statements from PDF to CSV.

Let's dig into his finances.

Quitting with no safety net

In November 2020, Angus rage quit his job as a backend developer at a crypto exchange. He was annoyed with the company, so he gave notice. He had a side hustle releasing games as Baller Industries, but that didn't bring in enough to get by.

A few months later, Angus asked for a CSV from his bank, but they could only give him PDFs. So, he wrote some code to extract the transaction data. It was really difficult, but led to the realization that others might want statements in that same format.

Angus turned it into a web app and invested in Google Ads. People started subscribing and using it!

The numbers

• Revenue: $10K MRR.
• Revenue from Baller Industries: $500-$1K MRR.
• Business bank account: $10K.

Business expenses total $770 per month, and his personal expenses total $5.3K per month.

Angus uses a high-interest savings account from an Australian bank called Westpac. He gets 4.75%, which is pretty great, considering that he sets aside thousands every month so that he can buy a house with cash. Rentals in Hong Kong are very expensive, so he's looking to buy!

Because interest rates are so high right now, and because he doesn't want debt, Angus plans to buy his home without a mortgage. He believes that having a mortgage puts added pressure on you to make money, and if he had one, he says he probably would have stayed at his job instead of becoming an indie hacker.

He's been putting money away all year, and hopes to be able to buy a place in another year or so.

Advice for indie hackers

Angus advises indie hackers not to dump all their money into cost-per-click advertising. He says it's a really common pitfall: People make a product, buy CPC ads, and run them at a loss, thinking that they just need to keep tweaking the ads. His advice is to focus on content marketing, instead.

He also recommends being diligent about writing off your business expenses.

If you'd like to be featured as a guest in a future interview for this series, leave a comment to let us know!

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 Syed Balkhi, Darko, Maddie Wang, Rob Hope, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing