Indie Worldwide
Virtual meetup for Indie Hackers around the world 馃寪
Before the global pandemic I was a digital nomad. Hopping from city to city was awesome but made it difficult to meet other Indie Hackers. What was missing was a global meetup, so I started Indie Worldwide!
I decided to raise our prices for Founders' Club from $80/year to $120/year and to publicize the price ahead of time.
It was a technique I'd seen work well from @damonchen (it worked on me, I FOMO'd into buying his product) so I figured it could work well for Founders' Club as well.
I emailed my email list (about 2k), sent out this Tweet, and @channel'ed the Slack to start drumming up attention.
And it worked great!
Ultimately leading to our best sales week ever, and over $1k in new revenue:
Since the last update we've tripled our ARR to $3k, mostly driven by Founders' Club, a matching service that sends out carefully selected introductions between indie founders every Tuesday.
To get here we've more than doubled the size of the community through two Product Hunt launches and large challenge: https://100in100.co/
We've also added about $3k in new revenue from sponsorships, however most of this is non-recurring or paid up front.
Most sponsors also found us through the 100 in 100 challenge.
If you're interested in sponsoring Indie Worldwide and reaching more than 1,000 active indie hackers across multiple touch points, packages start at $200 per month.
Give us a shout: sponsorships [at] indieworldwide [dot] co
Founders' Club has hit 16 paying subscribers and a bit over $1,000 in ARR, collected up front, in its first week after launch.
The group is now well over 150 founders strong, as many are grandfathered in as free users.
Most of the sales so far have come from Product Hunt or from within the existing community of 1,000+ founders as well as existing club members who wanted to pay.
At the current price point I need about 1 sale per day to be Ramen profitable and cover my living expenses as a solo founder, ~$2000/month to have some buffer.
That's the next milestone to hit.
So far 14 indie founders have signed up after we turned on payments for Founders' Club.
The price increases as more people sign up, so the latest couple signups have payed $80/year while the first few only payed $60.
The service gets more powerful and useful the more people sign up, so we increase the price to reflect that.
The next 50 signups get the $80/year price point, once those seats are filled we'll bump up to $100/year.
At that point we're considering adding a monthly option.
Stats
Membership: 155
Customers: 14
ARR: $865
Current price point: $80/year
Yesterday we launched Founders' Club on Product Hunt, here are the stats:
Founders' Club Product Hunt launch stats:
Upvotes 265
Placement #10 for the day
Visits ~800, measured by Cloudflare
Sales from Product Hunt 5
Conversion ~.6%
Revenue $300
PH Page: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/founders-club
Landing Page: https://indieworldwide.co/founders-club
add 2 sales from existing members who wanted to support the initiative
= Total sales of $420
Nice.
Today we launched Founders' Club on Product Hunt.
The service has been running for a few weeks now matching indie founders from around the world and already has well over 100 people.
Who's this for?
If you're working on an online-business or tech startup then it's for you!
Once a week we make carefully selected introductions between founders based on things like revenue, shared interests, and the type of businesses they're building.
Check it out: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/founders-club
This is the last week to sign up for Founders' Club for free, starting on Monday new members will be asked to pay.
What is Founders' Club?
Once a week, I send out carefully selected introductions between members of the club who I think has the potential to change your business or become a friend.
The average member of Founders' Club has made at least $30,000 in lifetime revenue from Indie Hacking.
Current active members include Dru Riley of Trends.vc, 1Hackr from SimpleOps, and Richard Kong of Gravity Tales.
To get the word out I sent an email to our mailing list and posted in our Facebook and Slack communities. All told that's about 1,000 active members.
This is the link to sign up for Founders' Club: https://anthony169666.typeform.com/to/TIIKLIRf
The Indie Worldwide Podcast now has 13 episodes out, 3 upcoming, and 200 total downloads. We also have 24 5-star reviews on Apple Podcasts.
The first 100 downloads I came from reaching out to almost 100 people to ask for a review on the podcast, whereas the latest 100 have come more organically from people who stuck around and from posting here on Indie Hackers.
Currently thinking about how to make the podcast stand out more from the market, but regardless of how well it does as a podcast, it's been a great vehicle for me to meet interesting people who I probably wouldn't be able to get to talk to otherwise.
For now, YouTube is still much bigger for us than audio, as we usually get at least 100 views per episodes and sometimes several hundred.
We're now at:
11 episodes out
Red circle 1 scheduled
Headphone 110 total downloads
22 5-star reviews on Apple Podcasts
Growth so far has mostly come from messaging friends individually to give the podcast a listen.
Not a scalable strategy but it's gotten us to 22 reviews on Apple Podcasts which is pretty good for one week.
Need to figure out more scalable distribution strategies for the long-term.
Indie Worldwide has a large backlog of Q&A's that have only ever been distributed via YouTube. This week I decided to use the power of Transitor.fm and Audacity to redistribute the audio from those Q&A's as a podcast, and also began a more aggressive recording schedule of one new Q&A every week.
The first 5 episodes are already up on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our RSS feed https://feeds.transistor.fm/indie-worldwide