What's New: Making your product more user-friendly

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

SaaS UX design principles can help make your product easier to use:

• It's key to tightly close the engagement loop, from first touch to completion. This creates an enjoyable, gratifying experience for your users.
• If you're building a community, identify and empower your most active members. Also, implement a gradual onboarding approach.
• Stephen Campbell couldn't sell his small tool built with no-code, so he built the Tiny Acquisitions marketplace and listed it there. It sold within days.

Berkeley startup, Bimotal, launches on Wefunder, garnering 45K+ Instagram followers and 10M+ Reels views. Founder Toby Ricco explains: "Our product, Elevate, doubles powertrain torque density. We will scale this technology to e-bikes, wheelchairs, and more.” #ad

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

Making Your Product More User-Friendly 💌

by Shounak

In his book, The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman mentions five key design principles.

Here's an overview of them, and how we can apply them to SaaS UX product design.

Affordances

Affordances show how a user interacts with a product. For example, on Instagram, the user can like, share, comment, and DM with people.

They can also post photos, Stories, and Reels, and enable other users to like, share, and comment.

Signifiers

Signifiers are features, or the buttons that enable users to trigger and avail the affordances.

The core affordances, and their corresponding buttons, are always visible to the user, allowing them to engage with the core product.

Mapping

Mapping is the spatial distribution between one signifier and the context it is showed in. The more context a signifier is in, the higher the probability of the user engaging with the signifier and the affordance.

With the Instagram example, the “create a story” signifier is at the top part of the screen where other stories are shown. The button is in context, so it makes sense for the user to hit it and begin creating a story.

Feedback

Immediate feedback and tight closing of the loop, from engagement to completion, is key. On Instagram, when users post a story, they automatically get notified that their story is posted, and that they can now go and check it out.

The affordance is obtained by the user, and they have a receipt to show for it.

Conceptual model

This is slightly more meta, but here, the idea is that users prefer products that look or feel similar to what they’re already used to.

Instagram’s scrolling feature is similar to that of X, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. There’s no abrupt learning curve involved, since the user is already familiar with other products in the market.

Check out MarketCurve for more actionable, not-boring tips on growing your SaaS product!

Discuss this story.

In the News 📰

from the Growth Trends newsletter

🤯 Sponsored post engagement rates are through the roof on TikTok.

💻 The most common technical SEO issues.

🔎 Reddit rolls out enhanced ad targeting tools.

🌟 Differentiating your product from all the others.

🎹 Inside one of America's last piano factories.

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

Data-Backed Strategies for Building a Community 👥

by Darko

Sharath Kuruganty is Head of Community at Threado, a community engagement and automation platform.

He has studied over 800 communities of various sizes, and across different industries. Here's his analysis, and how you can use it to build your own community experience.

Top of funnel

Community experience can be thought of as a funnel. The first touchpoint begins when a member joins the community. What separates dormant members from the active ones lies in how well you personalize this experience.

Best approaches to scaling communities:

• Implementing referral programs that members can share in their internal networks.
• Activating community advocates to drive word-of-mouth flywheels.

Great onboarding

Onboarding is a critical part of community building. This is the perfect time to bridge curiosity and action, because when a member joins the community, they have very little idea of what to expect.

Follow a fragmented approach; you don't want to overwhelm new users, but you also want to give them all of the critical information that can encourage them to participate in the community.

A 30 day onboarding is ideal, because the longer you keep new members engaged, the better the chances of them being activated.

Retention

The data shows that members recognize the value within the first month of being a part of the community. Leverage this time to have frequent check-ins to avoid dormancy.

If you have a smaller community, consider holding one-on-ones!

Community engagement

Only a handful of members carry community engagement:

• Identify your most active contributors, and gradually nurture them to become your champions and advocates.
• The top 2% of your community are already your champions. Create community programs, like super users or advocacy programs, that will add structure to word-of-mouth growth.
• Excite weekly and monthly active users through weekly updates, recaps, guest events, AMAs, mentorship programs, and more.

We found that late afternoons (~3-4 PM) and mid-weeks (Wednesdays and Thursdays) are when most of the communities are active.

Figure out when your community is most active, and schedule all of your content around that time in order to drive maximum engagement.

Check out Threado AI, a support bot for your community that can learn anything you want it to learn. You can install it in your Slack or Discord community, where it can automatically respond to questions within seconds!

Discuss this story.

Harry's Growth Tip 🧠

from the Marketing Examples newsletter

How to be memorable? Twist a familiar line.

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.

$3K MRR and 10K+ Email Subscribers 🚀

by Katt

Katt here, from No-Code Exits. In this week's issue, Stephen Campbell, founder of Tiny Acquisitions, talks hitting $3K MRR!

Starting out

One day, Stephen decided to leave his chemical engineering job at a process plant in Jamaica to pursue his dream of making money online. He signed up for Bubble’s Immerse Program, and started building Virtual Ghost Writer. It hit $2.5K in total revenue, and amassed 5K subscribers.

However, Stephen recognized that he was not the right person to bring the product to the next level. He was also not interested in partnerships, funding, or employees, because he preferred the flexibility of solopreneurship. So, he felt that exiting was a great option.

Easier said than done

Stephen listed Virtual Ghost Writer for $25K on MicroAcquire. It resulted in ~60 inquiries, but never a meaningful offer.

He started to think that Virtual Ghost Writer may be competing in a space where buyers were looking for something in a category that it was not qualified to enter. Maybe the buyers were looking for projects that were more valuable and successful, and were just not interested in acquiring an app so small in size and early in stage.

Stephen thought that there was a market specifically for founders who are not looking for life-changing exits, but for exits significant enough to feel in line with the invested time and effort.

So, he built it himself!

A new venture

Stephen started building the first version of Tiny Acquisitions with Bubble. He used a canvas from AirDev for the webpage, and built the workflows and automated email system with ConvertKit and SendGrid.

Of course, he listed Virtual Ghost Writer on Tiny Acquisitions. Just a few days after the launch, it was acquired! He had solved his own problem.

This also gave him the validation to keep working on it.

Launch mode

Stephen launched Tiny Acquisitions on Hacker News, and it reached number one on the front page. This resulted in tons of signups, 88 listed projects, and an article in Business Insider. Later, Stephen launched on Product Hunt, where he hit number three Product of the Day, and gained even more visibility.

He built in public, posted on Reddit, started a newsletter, set up Google Ad campaigns, and started to focus on SEO. He started a blog, and did a lot of link building through interviews and mentions. Word-of-mouth also played a vital role.

Advice for indie hackers

• Use a custom domain email address to set up accounts.

• Create a pre-recorded video walkthrough of how everything works. If you get lots of detailed questions, this will save you time, since you can just share the link to the video.

• Build in public from the very beginning. Being transparent helps with building trust.

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 Shounak, Darko, Harry Dry, and Katt for contributing posts. —Channing