What's New: Online challenges are a hot trend for growing your audience

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• Founders are building communities in lockdown by issuing online challenges.
• Which generates more users from Hacker News, commenting or posting? A marketing expert gives you the answer.
• Cold emailing can be instrumental in growing your startup. Learn how to run a successful campaign below.

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

⏳ Online Challenges: A Hot Trend for Growing Your Audience

from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley

Online challenges have been around for a while, but they've grown in popularity since COVID-19 began keeping people at home. With names like "30 days of Content" and "30 Day Financial Cleanse," these challenges can be a surefire way for founders to strengthen their brands.

Problem

You need to build a strong brand and community.

Solution

Internet challenges are time-bound games with clear rules and incremental steps. Challenges build new habits, identities and communities.

Challenges turn non-coders into no-coders, coach potatoes into runners and consumers into creators, through action.

Players

Creator Challenges

• Trends Pro Challenge
• 120 Video Challenge
• 100 Days of No Code

Writing Challenges

• 90 Days Of Prose
• Ship 30 for 30
• Flash Fiction Challenge

Health Challenges

• Whole30 Program
• Appalachian Trail Challenge
• 30 Day Meditation Challenge

Predictions

• Challenges will lead to iconic personal brands: Casey Neistat shipped daily vlogs 534 days in a row. James Clear published twice a week for 3 years.
• Challenges will become lead magnets for paid communities. Members tag updates and drive traffic back to the community.

Opportunities

Use challenges to build audience-first products:

• Rejection Proof: Face 100 days of rejection (book).
• 1000 Awesome Things: Share one awesome thing each weekday (blog).

Turn your public challenge into a paid community:

• See #100DaysOfNoCode.
• Yarty and Daniel are also doing it with Kick Ass Letters.

Use challenges to build an email list or course:

• Align your value ladder with the challenge.
• Add a challenge to your self-paced course to boost accountability and completion rates. This can be done without affecting scalability.

Crafting effective challenges

Challenges are more about changing behavior and building "atomic habits" than anything. You want participants to walk away feeling transformed and to have something to show for the journey. That is where the value lies.

Guidelines for effective challenges:

• Have clear rules
• Encourage sharing
• Place consistency over intensity
• Celebrate completion
• Leave room for self-expression

Check out this thread for examples of effective challenges, and ideas for new ones.

More reports

Go here to get the Trends Pro report. It contains 200% more insights. You also get access to the entire back catalog and the next 52 Pro Reports.

Subscribe to Trends.vc for more.

📰 In the News

🌱 As customers demand sustainability, carbon neutral companies are growing faster than the competition.

💵 Robinhood raised an emergency $1B from investors, as #DeleteRobinhood continues to trend.

🎙 Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton explains how she navigates the VC industry as a Black woman.

🦠 COVID-19 has forced companies to do their consumer research remotely. And evidence suggests that this new standard of remote research will outlast the pandemic.

📜 US Democrats vow to advance federal legislation to decriminalize cannabis and invest profits into minority communities.

🔔 Hacker News: Commenting > Posting?

from the User Acquisition Channels newsletter by Darko G.

Indie hacker Gabe Ragland recently posted about how one targeted Hacker News comment brought him over 16K visitors and $891 in sales. That's right: a comment, not a full-blown forum thread. And Gabe's not alone.

Commenting on Hacker News is even better than posting

Background: The Hacker News (HN) crowd is pretty unforgiving when it comes to spam. If you push your product more than once in a short period of time, you're likely to get warned or banned. You can avoid this by engaging in the comments more than you create posts. Target threads that are relevant to your product or service, and participate in conversations in the comments.

I first started to experiment with HN by posting relevant comments on various HN threads. By doing this, I managed to get an article on the front page.

After I spent time both posting and commenting, I discovered that the comments actually brought me more sign-ups than making it to the front page did (I even wrote a post on IndieHackers about this).

Other founders have experienced the same thing. Crowdraising ($500 MRR), a crowdsourcing platform where people pledge time instead of money, got their first users from commenting on HN:

We posted on Hacker News...but it wasn't as large as we expected. On HN [we] actually got better results when responding to other people's posts like this one.

Commenting on HN brings more predictable success than actually posting. Once you post something on HN, it is very unlikely that your post will reach the front page. With comments, you're getting on the "front page" towards relevant audiences automatically, since your comment is being read by audiences that you are targeting as potential users.

Be careful about what you comment

When I first started commenting, I mentioned my site at every relevant opportunity. This worked well (I got 500 email subscribers) until I got a reply from the main HN moderator. It said:

You've posted your link 23 times in the last month—that's well over the line into spamming. Even apart from that, your account is using HN primarily for promotion, which is against the site guidelines. We ban accounts that do these things, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing the guidelines and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. The intended spirit is intellectual curiosity, which is not at all the same thing as having something to promote, though it's fine to bring up one's own work as part of good conversation.

My comments weren't spammy, but what brought me down was the fact that I posted my link at the end of each comment. I stopped doing this after the moderator's warning.

The takeaway: Instead of commenting a lot (quantity), write fewer high-quality comments that are more likely to get upvoted.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to User Acquisition Channels for more.

🤖 Idea Bot Beep Boop

by IdeasAI

Looking for a startup idea? I'm a GPT-3-powered business idea generator built by Pieter Levels. Here are today's top ideas:

To explore more ideas, subscribe to IdeasAI.

📧 How Cold Emails Can Help You Grow Your Startup

from the Demand Curve newsletter by Julian Shapiro

Cold emailing is the lifeblood for some early-stage startups, as it can jumpstart user growth. Here's exactly how to grow your startup through cold emailing.

Why cold email?

• Save cash: All you need is to acquire someone's email. The process for acquiring emails can be repeated to grow your list, and it only costs your time.
• Targeting: You can send personalized messages to the exact people you want to reach. People want to read emails specifically addressed to them. Show them that you did your research, and it'll pay off.
• Access: Most decision-makers still manage their own email inboxes. They can check your message on their own time.

Cold emailing is usually most profitable for B2B companies, but it's often the best way for any startup to build early traction, as opposed to ads or hacks.

How to write a cold email

The truth is that most cold emails sent from salespeople or eager founders aren't great or well-written; they lack personalization and end up getting deleted. It's easy to stand out if you put in the effort to treat the reader like a person, and not like a check.

Elements of a great cold email:

1. Clearly indicate why you're reaching out and how you'll add value.
2. Address and handle key objections upfront.
3. Add a personal touch to show your lead that the email isn't automated.
4. End with one clear call-to-action (CTA), and explain the value of the CTA: "On the call we'll do X so you get Y."
5. De-risk it: offer to provide value regardless of whether they buy.

Be sure to create 2-3 high level versions of your email so that you can test which works best.

The best leads

The best leads: Companies who are currently using your competitor, and are dissatisfied with them. You know they're motivated to solve the problem that your business solves because they're already paying for a solution. And, since they're unhappy, they'll likely be looking for better solutions.

The second best leads: Individuals who have the right title and have the clout to make budget decisions within their organization. They can write the check, and they have the power to sign the contract. Connecting with these people can reduce the time of your buying cycle.

How to find leads

Look up your competitor on the following platforms:

• YouTube channel(s): Look for negative comments from customers.
• Support forum posts: Unhappy users may be looking for a better solution.
• Twitter: Dissatisfied customers may have mentioned them in a tweet.
• News announcements (i.e merger & acquisition, press releases).

You can also use tools to find leads:

• ContactEcom: Find leads for e-commerce companies.
• KleanLeads: Find leads for most other business types.
• HunterIO: If you know the person's name, but can't find their email.

Running a cold email campaign

Here's an effective way to run your campaigns:

1. A/B test the 2-3 email versions you created (about 100 emails/version).
2. Analyze reply rate and booked meetings rate. Then, send the winning email to the rest of your list.
3. Continuously iterate on your emails.

Here's how to approach follow-ups:

1. Follow up once after three days. Make sure you add value in some new way (i.e link to a piece of content you wrote, or reference another point of your research).
2. Follow up again after seven days. If you still don't hear back, end your contact with the lead. After three unanswered emails, you go from being persistent to being a pest. Spamming will damage your brand.

Here are some tools for sending email:

• PersistIQ: Well-rounded tool with a free trial.
• MixMax: Cheap, and includes Gmail integration.
• Mailshake: Best for email list beginners.
• Lemlist: Similar to Mailshake, but with better personalization and email deliverability.

Important measurements to track:

• Labor spent per purchase
• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• Response rate
• Purchase rate

To learn more about email marketing, check out this thread, or get bi-weekly growth tactics here.

Subscribe to Demand Curve for more.

🐦 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 Nathalie Zwimpfer for the illustrations, and to Dru Riley, Darko G., and Julian Shapiro for contributing posts. —Channing