What's New: Tornado Cash wins its sanctions appeal
(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)
Here's what you'll find in this issue:
- Tornado Cash's court win is a win for all privacy-focused crypto products.
- How will the influencer economy evolve over the next decade or so? This deep dive explores that question.
- $20K MRR with a bug tracking tool. Garrett Dimon targeted non-technical users specifically, and word-of-mouth helped it grow.
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Tornado Cash wins its sanctions appeal 🌪️
Crypto’s been killing it this month, with bitcoin redefining “all-time high” by reaching a peak price of over $99K.
Now, crypto is hanging another banner on the rafters: A victory in the Tornado Cash case.
Tornado Cash, which anonymizes crypto transactions, was sanctioned by the US in 2022 due to frequent use by criminals.
On Wednesday, it won its appeal and sanctions were removed. This sets a strong precedent, giving similar privacy-preserving crypto products the green light.
The evolution of the creator 👥
Recently, I found myself thinking about how the meaning of “influencer” has evolved over the years. Also, I've been pondering how the companies that underpin the influencer economy will change in the coming decade. This has been a frequent topic on Digital Native. One of our first pieces covered the phenomenon of everyone becoming an influencer:
Just as silent film stars like Norma Desmond were replaced by movie stars like Grace Kelly and Bette Davis a century ago, today’s movie stars (your Angelina Jolies and Jennifer Lawrences) are being replaced by internet stars. The internet obfuscates the gatekeepers of fame; anyone can be influential.
We’ve since come a long way from #sponsored hashtags; many large technology companies have been built on the back of the creator phenomena. But what does the future hold for this space?
SaaS Watch 👀
SaaS Watch is a roundup of all the latest micro-SaaS acquisition opportunities. Here are the top three for this week!
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React template marketplace: $200 MRR, 1K-10K users, $2.1K asking price.
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Tool that shares high-authority expired domains daily: $196 MRR, 10-100 users, $13.1K asking price.
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Tool for turning blogs into shareable infographics: $2K MRR, 100-1K users, $60K asking price.
A bug tracking tool for non-technical users 🪲
Garrett Dimon built Sifter because he believed that the existing bug tracking systems were too complicated for non-technical users, which meant that often, these sophisticated tools simply went unused.
While working as a consultant, Garrett encountered difficulties because of a broken system. He was struggling to get non-technical users at his client companies to provide feedback on what his team had built. He tried a dozen bug trackers, but the non-technical users couldn’t figure any of them out.
Garrett had no way to force them to use it, so they ended up having some stuff in the tracker and some stuff in email threads. This meant that things inevitably fell through the cracks. He realized that no matter how good a bug tracker was, it was useless unless everyone used it.
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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Stephen Flanders, Rex Woodbury, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing
