What's New: Your guide to finding users

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Struggling to find users?

• You may have the best product out there, but without users, it won't go anywhere. This guide can help you ask the right questions, find the right places, and implement the right strategies to onboard users for your SaaS!
• Converting customers can be expensive and time-consuming since people want to know what they're getting before they buy. That's where freemium comes into play. Dru Riley explains how to unlock it below.
• Founder Andrea Vacondio started his OSS project 17 years ago, and now works on it full-time. Here's how he monetized in the OSS space, and why he warns against using ads.

Want to share something with nearly 100,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🗣 Promoting Your SaaS Product

by PassionDev

I spent a few months building an AI writing tool for content marketing, but I really don't know how to find users. This seems to be my biggest problem. I've built quite a few projects in the past few years, but mostly failed to acquire users. I feel really defeated.

Here's what I did to promote my site this time:

• Posted in Hacker News: No one replied.
• Used Google AdWords: Got five clicks. It's very expensive, and only one person signed up...they didn't use it too much.

How do you find users?

Arm yourself with information

Erik Arrabal recommends taking a step back and defining who is struggling most to solve the problem you want to address with your business idea:

Be as absurdly specific as possible. What demographics, geographics, psychographics, or behaviors do they all have in common?

• Demographics: Age, gender, education, income, marital status, etc.
• Geographics: Country, city, region, or radius around an area.
• Psychographics: Activities, hobbies, interests, and opinions.
• Behaviors: What do they do regularly (i.e. publish content on Medium)?

Then, create a list of the watering holes where your dream customers hang out:

• What top websites do they already visit?
• What forums or message boards do they participate in?
• What Facebook Groups do they engage in?
• What influencers do they follow on social media?
• What podcasts do they listen to?
• What email newsletters are they subscribed to?
• What blogs do they read?
• What channels are they subscribed to on YouTube?
• What conferences or events do they regularly attend?
• What keywords are they searching for on Google?

Armed with this information, the most promising channel strategy for your business will reveal itself as the easy and obvious choice, and you can then begin running tests.

Follow the founders

Justin Chu mentions that the business related posts that do well on Hacker News are either:

1. Related to developers building startups: For example, developers talking about how they built their product, with a focus on the tech that they used.
2. Related to big tech companies (i.e. FAANG): A lot of people on Hacker News work at big tech companies.

If you want to post on Hacker News about your product and have it do well, you need to write about how you built the tech behind it. That probably won't really help you get customers, though, and it actually might lead to competition.

Your best bet would be to go where the highest density of founders are. Here on Indie Hackers, smaller communities of founders, and local meetups are all great options. If your target audience involves people who are into tech, you need to go where they are.

Promote on tech Twitter as well, although that is a long-term strategy that takes a lot of time and effort to pay off.

You can also try creating some free side projects with your core tool and use that as marketing. Jon Yongfook did an amazing job of this with "Tweetagram" for Banner Bear.

At first, feedback > paying users

Vacord recommends writing to relevant blogs that you like and asking for feedback on your tool:

You can use WhoWorksThere to help find author email addresses.

Start hanging out where your ideal customers are, get involved in the community, and work on getting feedback on your tool. Don't worry about paying users at this stage. You just need feedback. What's keeping people from using your product? What do they use now that could be similar? What problem can you really solve for them?

Beg for feedback.

Push and pull

Rajbheda5 offers two major marketing techniques:

After you have a firm grasp on your ideal customer profiles, you must devise marketing strategies to raise product awareness. There are generally two approaches to take:

1. Push Strategy: If you don't have enough traction yet, this is the recommended strategy. Many big companies use it. In this strategy, you find potential decision-makers in your target organizations and tell them about your product or service. You can try cold emailing or cold calling. This strategy has a low conversion rate and is quite exhaustive, but it usually works if done correctly.
2. Pull Strategy: This is the most effective strategy, and it should be used in combination with your outreach campaigns. In this strategy, you are not approaching anyone about your product or service; rather, you are making information and benefits more accessible so that potential buyers are pulled towards it. This can be accomplished through SEO. Write quality blogs to get good backlinks, and create product videos and post them on multiple social media platforms. You can also list your product in a variety of communities. This approach requires a lot of work, but the leads you get have a high intent to buy, so conversion rate is quite high.

What are your top tips on promoting your product? Let's chat below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

🔎 TikTok's in-app browser could be tracking your private information.

👓 These new AR glasses allow deaf people to "see" conversations.

🏢 Millennials are more likely to work for startups, while Gen Z prefers well-established companies.

👥 Web3 brands are moving offline to explore physical spaces.

🍎 You should probably update your Apple devices right now because of this security flaw.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

💸 Trend Alert: Freemium

from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley

Why it matters

You need to acquire customers cost-effectively.

Problem

Acquiring customers is expensive and time-consuming.

Customers want to know what they're getting, and why they need it, before buying.

Solution

Lower your customer acquisition costs with a free version of your product.

Tinder scaled to 75M monthly active users by offering a limited version for free. 14% of those users convert to paying customers.

Players

Freemium examples:

• Trends.vc: Free newsletter that offers 90+ pro reports, community events, tools, and more.
• Spotify: Grew to 422M users (182M paid) by giving premium users the ability to avoid ads, skip unlimited songs, and listen offline.
• Fortnite: Free-to-play game with 83.3M monthly players. Made $9B+ in revenue through micro-transactions that unlock special features and abilities.
• Duolingo: Grew to 48.2M users and 2.9M premium users. Its model is supplemented by advertising.
• ClickUp: Project management tool that's free for personal use, but scales according to team size for enterprise users. The company is on track for $200M ARR in 2022.
• Webflow: Website design and publishing tool. Free up to 1 GB of bandwidth with premium prices that reflect website size and collaboration needs of a growing team.

Predictions

• Companies will use freemium models to build network effects. Even if users don't convert, they can contribute to your value proposition. Candy Crush encouraged competition among friends with a leaderboard system that drove network effects mostly to hardcore (often paying) players, whose love for the game benefited from social proof.
• Freemium models will help businesses undercut competitors in crowded industries. Coursera maintains a competitive advantage against paid competitors like Udemy and SkillShare by offering free introductory lessons to in-demand skills, like coding. It monetizes with certificates and recruiting.
• Startups will use data from free users to improve products. Viber used product event data to show that users found the group chat feature highly engaging, and achieved a 10% engagement rate increase after simplifying the feature. Quizlet uses previously created flash cards to automatically generate definitions, personalized study paths, and progress insights for Quizlet Plus users.
• Referral programs will help boost the value derived from free users. Dropbox grew by 3.9K% by allowing its free users to invite their friends for 500 MB of free storage each. Morning Brew is a free daily newsletter for professionals that offers free merchandise that grows in value the more you refer, culminating in a trip to the Brew HQ.

Opportunities

• Monetize free users even if they don't convert. Clash of Clans is a mobile strategy game that monetizes free users with in-game advertisements. Experian offers free credit reports, then sells the information and insights generated to third parties like banks and lending firms. Robinhood is a free investing app with a premium version, and sells its users' order flow to trading firms.
• Choose the right features to make free. Offer too much, and you'll detract from your premium offering. Offer too little, and users won't stick around. Zapier lets free users connect a single application at a time, which is a useful standalone tool, but not enough to link multiple tasks. Slack is free for teams of any size and allows near full access immediately. But you'll need to upgrade to see your full message history after 10K messages.
• Use your free product to build user habits. Users with strong habits are easier to convert and retain. Strava's free version introduces you to an engaging, competitive social network that can be fully unlocked with paid features. Strava users post every workout, typically automatically. Hay Day, a farming simulator game, requires players to check in daily to harvest their crops and continue progressing.
• Turn free users into promoters by tagging your product. Squarespace adds "Made with Squarespace" to free website plans. Kapwing is a photo editing tool that leaves a branded watermark on edited images for free users.

Risks

• Cost: Make sure that you can support free users without crippling support.
• Cannibalization: Free plans help drive users to your product, but they may detract from the need for your premium offer.

Key lessons

• Freemium might not be the best strategy if your product can't scale to millions of people.
• Find ways to monetize free users, perhaps with advertising.
• Use free users to drive value to your premium product. Figure out how everyone can contribute to your network.
• Your free product needs to be valuable enough to be useful, but not so valuable that it lowers the need for your premium offering.

Hot takes

• Physical products will implement freemium models by limiting certain functions until activated by a digital payment. BMW announced a subscription plan for heated seats.
• Free first, freemium later. Businesses will prioritize gaining users over monetization. Proving traction and desire for a product will be more important than monetizing it. Twitter waited years before monetizing with ads or adding a premium version.

Haters

"Why would I devote resources to users who are never going to pay for my product?"

Offering a free product is a cost-effective form of lead generation despite low conversion rates. You can capture value from free users in the form of data, feedback, and network effects.

"How will I know which parts of my product to make free and paid?"

This will take a lot of trial and error. You may not get it right the first time. Experiment and talk to users to see which features they find most useful. Try to determine what (or how much) they could live without.

"How am I going to get enough users to make a low conversion rate worthwhile?"

Your product needs to have mass appeal. Niche products are better off pursuing different pricing models, like free trials.

"What if my product is completely free right now? Won't users get upset?"

You're right. Users may get angry when free features are restricted or ads are introduced. But they will be even angrier if you go out of business due to being unable to sustain a free product.

Links

• Looking for freemium examples: The tweet behind this report.
• What is Freemium? General guide to the freemium model and its merits.
• Freemium Model and Network Effects: Cornell blog on network effects in freemium apps and games.

Related reports

• Product-Led Growth: Build a product that sells itself, especially if it's free.
• B2B SaaS: Attract individuals to your free product to help convert their businesses to your premium product.
• Lead Generation: Generate potential customers and signups for your products.

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.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Trends.vc for more.

🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week

👨‍🏫 What I've learned from building an indie SaaS business. Posted by Pavati Dasani.

🥰 How do you build trust on your landing page? Posted by Augustas.

💻 What have you built but never marketed? Posted by Londoner.

💪 How to stick with your side project. Posted by Gustaf Broman.

👀 An extra set of eyes for your product. Posted by Subro.

🛠 How polished should an MVP be before launch? Posted by Gardenmwm.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

💰 Andrea Vacondio's OSS Product Hit $20K MRR

by Andrea Vacondio

Hi indie hackers! I'm Andrea Vacondio, and I started PDFsam 17 years ago as an operational support system (OSS) project because I couldn't find anything similar, and I was a fan of OSS. It found some early success and had a large user base.

I tried monetizing with donations, paid installers, website ads, and horrible ads bundled within the installer. I was very frustrated because, while my user base was huge, I still couldn't make decent revenue.

I finally found my balance with two premium versions sitting next to the free and open source versions.

I'm now at ~$20K MRR. AMA!

How did you go from zero to profitable?

The game changer has been to provide a premium version alongside the OSS. It really boosted profit to a level where I could leave my day job to do this full-time.

Before that, I tried donations. It's a nice form of support, but it's almost irrelevant. Ads can bring some money in, but they have drawbacks: They are not always very aesthetic, you may end up promoting your competitors, and ad blocker tools are growing more popular. My users didn't like the ads that I had bundled within my installer, and for good reason. I now offer the premium version through the installer of the OSS version in a very transparent and clear way, and I think that's acceptable.

Don't bundle third party stuff with your installer. Only use ads if it's really worth it, and keep an eye on the advertisers. You don't want to promote your competitors!

How long did it take you to bring in revenue?

It took me around 10 years to get to a decent income. Before that, I was getting some donations and some income from ads. In those years, it was mostly passion that kept me going. I liked having a project that allowed me to experiment and apply things that I learned; these were things that I couldn't do in my day job, or at least not as freely as I could in my own project.

What's your tech stack?

I started with Java 1.4.2 because Java was my language, and the only decent PDF engine available at the time for Java was iText. The desktop application was Java Swing. Now, it's JavaFX.

We have a PDF engine that we maintain. It's a fork of PDFBox, and we created a set of high level APIs on top of it called Sejda SDK. The website was WordPress (the blog still is), but we moved to a static website with a CI pipeline that creates a Docker image and deploys it in a Kubernetes cluster.

What's your advice for starting an OSS project?

My advice would probably be to really think about your "why." Why OSS?

If it's because you believe in OSS and its philosophy, go for it! It's very fulfilling, and you feel like one of the good guys by sharing knowledge and enabling others to do things with your project.

If you are not excited about your "why," then it may become a source of frustration. It's very hard to find a way to squeeze money out of OSS. Many users don't even know what it is. Just know what you are getting into!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

Forward it to a friend, and let them know they can subscribe here.

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 PassionDev, Priyanka Vazirani, Dru Riley, and Andrea Vacondio for contributing posts. —Channing