My Blog

Yes, you read that right. Scholarships, not startups. :)

Today, I launched a project that may seem a little counter-intuitive; one where I give away 12 scholarships next year for causes close to my heart.

As indie hackers, I find that we're all so focused on growing our projects to more revenue, more pageviews, more followers, etc. I include myself in that mentality -- so no judgement to anyone.

But... I want to be cognizant of this hedonic treadmill at play. In particular, that there is no day where you suddenly have enough to give.

I've realized that learning to give is just like learning any other skill like coding or writing.

Giving may feel uncomfortable at first, but you can get better at it. It takes practice for it to go from being foreign to a reflex.

I launched on Twitter earlier today and have already had $3k donated past my own contributions, in addition to numerous others reaching out proposing future scholarship ideas or interested in partnering. Shoutout to 6 early partners, including fellow indie hackers Pieter Levels and Marc Köhlbrugge, that you can find on the homepage, that I'm tracking openly starting today and throughout next year.

The first three scholarships were ones that resonated in particular for me, but there are 9 more to come!

• Women in STEM
• Continuous Learning
• Green Innovation

If you want to learn more about the project or participate, you can learn more at: stephsmith.io/amplify

Just 50 days ago, I tweeted about a guide that I had started, but never ended up pursuing, to see if the world wanted it to exist. Fast forward to yesterday, when I launched my first ever book , which ended up being 70k words and over 200 pages! As of writing this, it's made almost $14k and sold over 500 copies.

Across all of the projects that I've worked on over the last few years, this one was the toughest to complete, but also the most rewarding. It required me to stick to a crazy timeline, but also learn a lot about distilling knowledge such that it's both readable and compelling, how to price my first paid product (more about that at this milestone), improve my skills in programs like InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop to create the book itself, and more.

My biggest concern with writing an ebook was that people tend to buy ebooks and not actually use them. In an effort to combat this, I created live sessions to incentivize people to follow along, but I also I left a letter to the readers at the very beginning, asking them to do me a favour. The favour was simply to make sure they read it. This blurb has been shared multiple times and I'm super happy to say that I've had multiple readers let me know that they took me up on the favour and have already finished significant chunks of the book.

Special thanks to the early supporters that encouraged me to do this -- especially those that actually said I should charge more, like @taskett and @sebu.

Just a month ago, I posted about my ebook launch, which brought in my first real revenue after years of indie making. Well, just a few weeks later and the sales have grown to $7k or nearly 300 sales!

I haven't promoted it much outside of Twitter, but here's what's worked for me (other than the tiered pricing which I spoke about in my last milestone! ) :

1. I've been working in the open and posting about my progress each week. Since I was on a tight schedule, this actually worked to my advantage, because I was writing 10k or 20k words in a weekend (bc I still have a FT job 😅)
2. I recently tweeted the tentative table of contents. This alone drove at least a dozen new sales. I think this is because so many "guides" online are really low quality, but this showed how much thought I was putting into the product and that it would be detailed.
3. I've started to work with a few friends with newsletters themselves to promote the book. I'm pretty careful about who I set these deals up with, but if it's a good match, it's a win-win! One of the newsletters I worked with promoted me for free and drove over a dozen sales and over $100 for them. All they had to do was add a short line in their newsletter. Plus, their audience gets a discount, so while my net revenue per sale is lower, it's a scalable way to have this reach more people. I'm starting to offer promo codes for communities too (which btw... you can get $10 off with the code INDIE ☺️ ).

I haven't done a great job of promoting the guide outside of Twitter, which accounts for well over half of the sales. So, before this thing launches, I'll be promoting it on several other channels and working with other affiliates, hoping to reach $10k before this thing goes live!

One final thing I'm testing with this guide is launching it like a bookclub. Instead of a one-time drop, I'll be running 6 live sessions with readers that focus on each major part of the book, where they can AMA or discuss what they learned with others. I think this should incentivize people to sign up before the first launch, but then also in the future when I run other "cohorts". Hopefully, it also delivers a lot more value to readers, so that they can fill in any gaps the book was missing.

If anyone has any advice on launching ebooks or guides, I'd love to hear what has/hasn't worked for you!

I’ve been running my blog since the beginning of 2019 and have been making projects since 2018. I’ve experience a lot of “launch highs” and my blog was read 400k times in its first year, but… I’ve never really made much money from these projects. This is partially by design (I’ve never really prioritized charging), but also something that I struggle with (I’ve never really felt comfortable charging).

Throughout the last year, I’ve made anywhere from $50 to a couple hundred dollars per month. Some months, I made even more due to one-time projects that I was brought on for, but none of my products were really driving the income. You can see how my revenue grew over at my open page or even more detailed in this image.

On Wednesday, I stumbled upon a draft that I wrote a year ago, after I was starting to see success with my personal blog. It was a guide on exactly if people should launch a blog, how they can select their niche, and most tangibly, how they could grow their own blogs. I felt like I could write a good blog back then, with learnings from my personal blog, alongside my experience leading the Publications team at Toptal. In fact, I wrote a 4000 word outline and got overwhelmed by everything I had to say.

But as I stumbled upon the draft a year later, I realized how much people could really use this resource and how much more I knew today, given my year of working on Trends (one of the world’s largest premium newsletters) at the Hustle (one of the world’s largest newsletters, period). So I decided to try things differently this time. I decided to ask: is this something people would pay for?

When I tweeted about it, I didn’t even have a landing page. I just wanted to know: should I make this? Quickly responses started piling in, with dozens of people saying they would indeed pay and many saying that they would pay more than the quoted price of $10.

This was the first time hearing this kind of true validation. Not just upvotes or shares. Actual people saying that they would pay me actual money for a product. So I rushed to create a Gumroad landing page, came up with a title and cover, and told people I was open for business.

I really struggled to decide whether I should go with the initial price or bump it up, based on the feedback of many people saying I should charge more. So, I went with a tiered pricing model, where prices increase with every 30 sales. The reasoning? I figured this would give me some real feedback, based on data. If I started to see conversion rate drop off a cliff, I would stop increasing.

And then I launched the pre-sale. Sales poured in almost immediately. In the first 15 minutes, I made my first $100. Within a hour or two, I had to shift tiers! Soon after that, I shifted again. I got to $30 and chose to keep it there, since I finally started to see the CVR drop more significantly at $35.

Anyway, this is one of the many reasons on IndieHackers to get real feedback from users and charge before you’re comfortable. It’s been 48 hours and I’ve made nearly $4k in sales! Now I’ll be spending the next several weeks making this the best damn guide on the internet. If you’re interested in signing up for a copy, you can do so here.

EDIT: Thank you everyone for the support! Just through this post alone, I’ve made it past 200 sales. I just created a code INDIE that anyone from Indie Hackers can use to get $10 off.

This week was an exciting one, as I surpassed the 2000 subscriber mark on my personal blog.

In January, I decided to finally launch something that I long wanted to, but wasn't sure the world would want. At the time, I set my yearly goals, including getting my blog to 1k subscribers. At the time, that was the goal I was most unsure about. But this week, I managed to double it.

I've been tracking the number of subscribers almost daily, and this has been my path since January 1: https://imgur.com/a/PDPn0Jf

As you can see, a lot of movement came from 3 articles which went "viral", particularly on Hacker News.

The three articles were:

• You Don't Need to Quit Your Job to Make
• How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably
• Writing is Thinking: Learning to Write with Confidence

One other helpful thing to mention was that I've been experimenting with my subscription copy. Over time, I've found copy that's converted much more effectively, by including social proof and also tailoring it to the reader.

Starting subscription copy:

• I enjoy sharing my thoughts about remote work, learning to code, personal growth, and tech. If you liked this one, stay updated here.
  CTA: Subscribe

Current subscription copy:

• I write a weekly newsletter about productivity, remote work, continuous growth, and tech. If you liked this article, join 2000+ subscribers here. Forecast: 0% chance of spam.
  CTA: Stay Updated!

Notable changes:

• Number of subscribers
• Stating exact offering (weekly newsletter)
• Explicitly calling out no chance of spam
• Updating CTA from Subscribe to Stay updated

These changes resulted in over 700 subscribers coming in from my latest article.

Anyway, I just wanted to share as this was a big milestone for me and can hopefully help some others looking to build their "list". 🤗

I read Pocket Hits almost every day and it's one of the only emails that I'm subscribed to.

Today, I woke up to it in my inbox, but this time it was titled with my article: https://imgur.com/a/lHokev7

I literally thought I was dreaming (partially since I just woke up and partially because I normally only see articles from large publishers like Fast Company in there) but clicked through and saw over 100 live readers in my analytics. One of my subscribers actually reached out to let me know as well! https://imgur.com/a/k2yGvrQ

So far, 17k people have read it through Pocket alone, leading to over 200 more subscribers. 8 hours later, there are still over 100 active readers. It's so crazy what kind of traffic a single newsletter can drive!

If only every day started like today. 😄

Here's the link to the email for those curious! https://getpocket.com/explore/pocket-hits/2019/writing-is-thinking-learning-to-write-with-confidence-21244

Yesterday, I wrote an article about my writing process. In the article, I was really transparent about not actually being a "natural" writer and how I've designed a process enabling me to get past that. I think that sentiment resonated with many others, since many people also don't consider themselves writers.

I submitted the piece to Hacker News and just before I went to bed, it hit the front page! It hovered in the teens last night and interestingly enough, it actually moved higher as I slept through the traffic wave. It's been in the top 5 for most of today and 18 hours later, it's still sitting at 9.

There has also been a really lovely conversation in the comments section, where people are sharing their own writing tips, practices, and techniques. There's a few that I want to try, like attending writing meetups which I hadn't heard of before.

Post is here for those asking!
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21172686
Link to article: https://blog.stephsmith.io/learning-to-write-with-confidence/

Around a month ago, I got my first sponsorship by reaching out to companies that I was hoping would give my newsletter a shot. I was lucky enough to secure one sponsor from the reachoout of 10, but realized that the cold reachouts were taking too much of my time. I thought... there must be a better way.

Since my blog gets ~500 readers on any given day, I figured that maybe instead, I would just put a note at the bottom of each article letting people know it's "open for business". This was the text that I put at the bottom of an article: https://imgur.com/a/qoIqTqd. Super simple stuff.

I put it there since I didn't want it to be intrusive and also am guessing that if someone made it all the way through an article, they can see the value they provide. The link directs them to my promote page: https://stephsmith.io/promote. That page is connected directly to Stripe Checkout, so I don't have to manage as many logistics and just get the notification that someone has chosen to sponsor!

Anyway, I implemented this around two weeks ago and was happy to wake up to this message this morning! My first "passive" sale: https://imgur.com/a/aEfprtO 😊She even sent over a template for the newsletter copy, so this will only take me a matter of minutes, versus the hours I had spent last time.

Hopefully, I'll be seeing more of these roll in over time and means that I can focus on writing and increasing traffic.

This morning I woke up to my article trending on HN.

Before heading to bed last night I was browsing HN and I ran into (for the first time) someone that had submitted an article of mine. It was such a nice thing to stumble upon, as in the past I've always submitted my own articles. It was so cool that someone thought my article was a good fit for the HN audience.

I actually submitted the same article earlier in the day and it got four upvotes, but never made it to the frontpage, so I wasn't expecting anything with this second submission. I added a comment to the new post and hit snooze. But this morning I woke up to an inflow of traffic and saw it on the second page! It's still there. :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20797210

I recently sent out some emails and got the e-verbal "okay" that a few sponsors would be willing to give promoting my blog a go.

I was stoked, but then I realized that there were numerous steps before there was any actual cash in the door.

Over the last week or two, I've spec-ed out custom ads for my site and newsletter, built a custom promote page (https://stephsmith.io/promote), and connected to Stripe for payments.

Today, I woke up to an email from Stripe saying my first advertiser officially deposited $ into my account! It's a small step, but surreal to get the validation that this could grow into an actual income stream.

https://imgur.com/N1vJM3s