The Maker Report

I know there are many more indie makers out there but it's a great milestone that The Maker Report Twitter profile just crossed the line of 200 followers.

I created the profile back in December when I started to spread the word about the report. I didn't do anything special to grow the follower base, I just started to follow other makers. Probably that's the main reason why it took this much time to reach this point.

I don't have a content plan at the moment but I can clearly see that this is something I have to work on to make the profile worth following.

Well, it took more time than I expected but the results of the report are finally live https://themakerreport.com/results/2019/

A few interesting insights from the results:

☕ To get things done coworking spaces and coffee shops still rock but a steady 6.7% enjoys the silence of libraries and for someone, the sauna is the place where ideas thrive.

🕰️ 50% of makers spend less than 3 months building an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) ready to launch.

💰65.3% of makers earn under $200 per month but more than 5 years can get you close to your 1 million.

😣 When asked about what is the hardest task, out of all, 30.7% of makers answered that it’s growing their audience, and 25.7% said it’s finding customers.

💬 More than 85% of responders are part of a maker community and almost 59% of them are active in one or more.

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I didn't choose the right platform to build the page for the results because I went with plain HTML and CSS. At first, I wanted to create a really simple page with images of charts and a few paragraphs but during the process, I realized that the UX is going to be bad that way.
At that point, I thought using plain HTML is still ok and I was too deep into the process to change my mind and start over. Next time, I'll go with Webflow :D

Now I also know why there is only a PDF for most of the reports. Working with charts on the web is not the easiest task. Especially when you want to make it on mobile as good as possible. Luckily, there are great open-source tools out there, like ChartJS. That saved me a ton of time.

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Now it's time to spread the word about the results and start to create more indie maker related content to reach more members of the community and collect 1004 responses instead of 104 next year.

I thought it would be easier to reach this goal. It took only a week to get the first 50 responses and almost a month to get 50 more.

These were my distribution channels to get responses:

• Twitter: after I created the landing page for the survey I also created a twitter profile for the report, shared a tweet about the survey than retweeted it with my personal profile. I have just a few hundred followers and only a few of them are makers so I didn't expect a lot of responses from this resource, still, I got a few.
• Product Hunt Maker discussions: I haven't created a standalone post about the report but shared it as a comment in a thread. This was a pretty popular discussion with more than 100 comments and the one about the Maker Report was the first and that generated about 20 responses.
• Product Hunt Maker goals: I created a goal to reach 100 responses almost right after I published the survey, and I also included the URL of the landing page in the description of that goal. I haven't tracked it but I think I got lots of responses through that as well (the goal got more than 50 cheers, so I reached at least 50 potential "customers" with that)
• Hacker News: I created 2 Ask HN posts on Hacker News. I don't think I got any responses from that source. The first time I got a few comments, the second time I got only one.
• Reddit: I shared the survey on 3 Reddit channels (r/indiebiz, r/IndieDev, r/SideProject). I got 4 upvotes and 1 comment for my post on r/SideProject and that's all. Not sure if that generated any responses.
• Indie Hackers: I created a post about the report here and I also added it as a product to my profile. The post wasn't really popular, and I'm not sure if anyone saw the product page.
• Makerlog: I started a discussion on Makerlog about the survey, I didn't get any response there but after I published the discussion, I saw a small bump in the number of responses (the discussion was also shared by the Twitter profile of Makerlog)
• Twitter follows: I spent quite a lot of time on twitter searching for makers and although it was really time-consuming it seemed effective (I got a new response after I followed about 15-20 profiles and some of the profiles also followed back the Maker Report profile)
• DM: I spent DMs to the makers I know previously and asked them to complete the survey. Almost all of the responded immediately and completed the survey. So I'd like to send them a huge hug 🤗

Conclusion
I haven't used short URLs or URL parameters to track my sources but I think the most effective distribution channel was the comment I made on Product Hunt. After that, I felt that I could get 1 000 responses in a month. Maybe next time 😅
Also, I think this was the first product I spent more time with the distribution than development. The survey wasn't short (it took about 10 minutes to answer all the questions) so I'm happy that 100 makers took the time to complete it.
If you were one of them, I'd like to say thank you 🙏🏻

In less than a week, I got more than 50 responses. I was really happy but I knew that this is going to slow down right after the holidays kick in.
Still, based on these responses I already saw some "trends" in the answers that I think will be useful for other indie makers as well.

A few hours after I tweeted about the survey and got my first responses I felt the energy and decided to also post about the report on Hacker News. Maybe that wasn't the best decision. Let me paste here the first words of the first comment: “wow what a terrible survey.”
I learned the lesson that "maker" and "hacker" have different meanings based on the platform you are using them on.

I don't think I got any responses from that source. There were a few comments but most of them were around the same topic, that digital product builders are not makers or hackers.
I'll probably repost it later but with a different title to avoid these kinds of situations.

I spent a few days working on the landing page. After I finished it I felt that it would be better to use Webflow instead of doing the site build by myself. Well, next time.
I haven't created twitter profiles for my products previously, but this time I did that as well. Mostly because I knew that I want to use that platform for communication as that's the go-to social platform for lots of indie makers.
After the profile was ready I tweeted about the report and re-tweeted it with my personal profile. I don't have lots of followers but I had to start somewhere :)
Despite the small group of people I reached with my tweet some of them completed the survey so I got the first responses on the day the product went live 🎉

In most cases, I really struggle to find a great name for my products, but it was different this time. The name represents the product itself.
Of course, the original domain I intended to buy wasn't available so I ended up purchasing it with the "the" prefix (themakerreport.com). And to tell you the truth, now I like it that way much better.
I used Porkbun to register the domain. I wanted to try their service for a while now and this looked like a great opportunity to do it.
After that, I connected the domain to Netlify and I was ready to work on the landing page.