What's New: HubSpot acquires The Hustle for an estimated $27M

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

• HubSpot just announced that it acquired The Hustle. The deal is reportedly valued at $27M.

• The Super Bowl is tomorrow, and millions are expected to tune in. By relating aspects of the game to your product, you can "newsjack" the event and gain attention.

• Two founders who can't code just hit $80K MRR with their marketplace product. Two key drivers of their early growth: word of mouth and product tutorials on their YouTube channel.

As always, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🤝 HubSpot Acquires The Hustle For an Estimated $27M

from the Indie Economy newsletter by Bobby Burch

On Thursday, HubSpot announced that it had acquired The Hustle for an undisclosed amount. Axios reports that the deal was valued at about $27M.

The acquisition

The background: This acquisition is major for indie hackers, as it reflects HubSpot's desire to connect directly with an audience of founders and scaling companies.

HubSpot currently has 95K+ customers that use its marketing, sales, and service software. In acquiring The Hustle, HubSpot plans to beef up its content for entrepreneurs. It also envisions a more direct sales channel with founders, a segment of the economy valued at roughly $10B.

The Hustle

Beginnings: Founded in 2014 by Sam Parr, The Hustle has 30 full-time employees and boasts a newsletter audience of 1.5M+ people. The newsletter, known for its casual tone and speedy pace, shares topical tech news, commentary, and other analysis on business stories.

• The Hustle's "Trends" newsletter has ~10K paying subscribers.
• Axios, in comparison, has ~200K paying subscribers.

What's next for The Hustle: The San Francisco-based company has big plans ahead, buoyed by the resources obtained from the HubSpot deal. It intends to introduce new podcasts, products, and original features, and will continue to fulfill its mission to hire the best content creators (and pay them well). The Hustle's main email newsletter will remain free.

The trend

Newsletters are hot: The Hustle connects HubSpot with a niche audience of business-focused readers. HubSpot's acquisition of The Hustle underscores how hyper-focused, easily digestible media is serving as a customer-acquisition and retention tool.

Similar moves: Stripe's acquisition of Indie Hackers in 2017 is another example of how valuable an active audience of founders can be.

What was in it for Stripe? Indie Hackers is home to a founder-led movement to grow successful businesses and empower one another's growth. The community, in turn, created more opportunities for Stripe to serve growing businesses with their existing suite of products.

Are you subscribed to any paid newsletters? What are your thoughts on this deal?

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

📰 In the News

📓 This 12-year-old developer has gained over 100K users across his various projects. In a recent AMA, he talks platforms, tools, and barriers as a kid coder.

🚘 Apple is nearing a deal with Hyundai-Kia to build out its autonomous electric vehicle, Apple Car.

🚴 Peloton raked in $1.06B in revenue last quarter, but supply issues have caused months-long wait times for new customers.

🚦 Robinhood has lifted restrictions on GameStop stock as momentum continues to subside.

🎥 The Sundance Film Festival was held virtually, with many of this year's films featuring themes related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

🏈 For You, the Super Bowl Could Mean Money in the Bank

from the User Acquisition Channels newsletter by Darko G.

Super Bowl LV kicks off tomorrow. Major events like this one provide unique opportunities to bring attention to your product or service, and gain more paying users.

Using strategic timing

The numbers: Last year, the SuperBowl had over 100M (predominately US) viewers. Since we're still in the middle of COVID-19, it's safe to assume that Super Bowl LV is on the minds of Americans as something to look forward to amidst the months of lockdown.

The opportunity: When a certain event is on everyone's mind, there is a temporary opportunity to use that focus to your advantage. There's even a term for it: "newsjacking" happens when brands piggyback off of the day's biggest news stories to draw attention to their own content.

A word of caution: Newsjacking can be beneficial, but be cautious with the events that you choose for this technique. Newsjacking certain events, particularly those that are political in nature, can actually do more harm than good. Also, several platforms are suspending ads connected to certain events, so be careful with the connections you make.

Relating to the event

What if my product isn't related? Here's the thing: it doesn't matter! If your product is not football-related, even doing something small (like adding a football photo or emoji to your Facebook ad in the days leading up to the Super Bowl) can get more people to notice you. You don't have to connect your product directly to the event; rather, try to connect it to aspects of the event. In this case, it would be football in general, the teams, the mascots, etc.

Example: Last year, Kobe Bryant lost his life in a tragic helicopter crash. Calm, an app that had a previous relationship with Lebron James, had run this ad long before the tragic accident (many, myself included, would have been furious if they had intentionally created this ad to capitalize off of Kobe's death). However, the ad started appearing more frequently on Facebook, due to many people discussing their grief at once:

The ad displays Lebron James pensively sitting against a wall under the phrase "mental fitness is just as important as physical fitness." Calm noticed that this ad suddenly began receiving much more attention due to the fact that topics like basketball/NBA/grief/mental health were on people's feeds because of the accident.

The lesson: In the time leading up to a certain event (like the Super Bowl), ask yourself if you can incorporate various aspects of that event into your marketing plan. Events like this happen all the time: at the moment there's a rage about Wall Street and stocks, which is something that you can take advantage of in your marketing tools.

(Note: Please do not try to profit off of anyone's death, or advertise your product during a collective moment of sorrow or tragedy. We shared the example above purely as a case study of Calm's findings about the ad that they already had in circulation. Trust your judgment!)

You can check out the rest of the article, including tips on using Pinterest's new Story Pins, here.

If you liked this post and would like to receive three brand new acquisition channel opportunities each week, feel free to subscribe to my indie hackers series newsletter.

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🧠 Harry's Growth Tip

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

Sell outcomes, not features.

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

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.

🐉 Morten Jaeger Built an $80K MRR Startup Using No-Code Tools

from the Deep Dive newsletter by Halden Ingwersen

If you've seen blockbuster movies like Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and Pacific Rim: Uprising, you've probably seen some of Morten Jaeger's 3D modeling work.

But after five years in the business, Morten wanted a way out of the entertainment industry to pursue a more self-fulfilling career. He wasn't the only one feeling like he needed a change. His old friend, Henning Sanden, was also ready to leave.

Morten and Henning had already worked together on projects under the name "FlippedNormals" for several years, but those projects had been small in scope. This time, they decided to quit their visual effects jobs and see if they could turn their side projects into full-time gigs.

But they had one problem: although they knew how to build complex three-dimensional worlds, neither Morten nor Henning could code. As it turned out, they didn't have to. They set up a bevy of no-code workarounds and made heavy use of plug-in solutions, including:

• Wordpress (and plenty of plug ins)
• TransferWise
• Transloadit, and their open source uploader, Uppy
• Jilt for abandoned cart services (this was key!)

Morten said:

If I can give one piece of advice it would be to remove all friction from the checkout process. It probably goes without saying, but that's where a lot of customers lose interest.

In 2018, they re-launched FlippedNormals as a curated CG marketplace for all things 2D and 3D. For a while, the ship was running smoothly. Customers were joining fast, and the young co-founders had to find creative ways to handle the influx of new users. They hosted their vendor's files on Amazon, but they had a huge problem with serving extremely large files to their customers.

Since their whole market was made up of big files, this was a huge early roadblock. No amount of tech support helped, until someone offhandedly mentioned optimizing CloudFront as a possible solution. The assumption was that they were already using the additional content deliver tool. They were not:

Every developer reading this is probably laughing at us right about now. But this is just one example of what you face trying to set up a digital marketplace with no technical skills. Something so basic you might take for granted took us years to discover.

Now that their operational problem was behind them, they focused on attracting sellers and buyers alike to the new marketplace, with their innovative affiliate hosting model.

The program is simple. When someone buys a product on their platform, FlippedNormals pays the creator a commission. They also allow creators to make money with affiliate links, even if the customer doesn't actually buy their product. With conversion rates between 4-7%, it takes a lot of creators and a lot of users to turn a profit.

They didn't expect overnight success. They set a goal of $10K MRR to be able to support them both full time, but planned to live off of savings for a while. However, success came a lot sooner than they'd anticipated. They hit that $10K goal in just a few months, and were making $15K MRR by the end of the first year.

The foundation for FlippedNormal's success was its careful curation of products. Carefully-constructed guidelines reduced the amount of products on its page, but ensured that the products that made it to the marketplace met very high standards. Morten said:

Very quickly that meant that customers noticed a difference between us and our competitors. No longer would they have to guess if a product would live up to their expectations. If we hosted it, it meant that it was a great product.

The two key drivers of FlippedNormal's early growth were word of mouth and 3D CG tutorials on their YouTube channel, which drove viewers to their website. Paid ads were ineffective for their business.

Like many businesses, FlippedNormals was affected by COVID-19. It saw an early boom in revenue doubling month over month in spring of 2020, but by November, Black Friday sales produced only a 5% increase in revenue compared to the summer sale.

So far, 2021 is off to a bigger, brighter start. At just over $500K in revenue halfway through their fiscal year, Morten has set a new goal: make $1M by the end of the year. Between a growing newsletter, and a score of improvements planned for the creator side of the site, he's on track to make it happen.

We asked him for advice he'd give to help others replicate this rapid success, and he shared the following:

• Create an MVP as quickly as possible.
• Don't sacrifice "minimum" when creating a "viable product." Keep the small-scale goal in the back of your mind.
• Test your product firsthand, even as you grow, then try to use your own product routinely.
• When your product lands in the hands of the users, they will do things with it you had never considered. Embrace this.
• Don't get lost in all the business books floating around. You should sit down and build instead.

Morten's best piece of advice, however, is: don't take advice! He said:

Don't get caught up in the typical advice of how you should start and run a business. Figure out what works for you and your product, take inspiration from others where it applies, but don't live by some arbitrary rule that happened to work for someone else.

You can find Morten on Twitter here and check out the Marketplace on FlippedNormals here.

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🐦 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, Darko G., and Halden Ingwersen for contributing posts. —Channing