🗞 What's New: How to share your work with confidence

Some founders find it difficult to speak with customers:

• Whether it's shyness, fear, or awkwardness, these tips can help you develop your social skills and confidently share your product with others.
• Are you discouraged when loved ones are underwhelmed by your journey as a founder? Find encouragement below. Remember, it takes guts, skills, and determination to do what you're doing. Just keep going!
• Founder Jason Leow launched a 5 AM club to share resources and tools on sleep biohacking. Here are his learnings from launching, and why he believes that communities need at least 100 members to work.

Want to share something with nearly 95,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🌟 Sharing Your Work With Confidence

by Prakash Natarajan

As an introverted person, I am trying to develop my social skills to gain confidence in pitching Gainn. When I'm in a client call, it is very difficult for me to properly pitch my product. I feel that I am failing because of my introversion. Fellow founders, any tips for me?

Focus on improving

Justin Chu also struggles with feeling awkward and self-conscious in many social interactions:

I remember getting so nervous and bombing my first phone interview when I couldn't solve a simple programming problem. The way I've been able to overcome such obstacles is through repetition and practice. Some examples:

• After I bombed that phone interview, I told myself I wouldn't let that happen again. I bought Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell, and studied every week for six months. Some of the tips in the book helped me feel more confident.

• I recently had a booth for my games at a large gaming convention, Gen Con. I felt so awkward standing at my booth "bothering" people passing by. For the first hour of the convention, I wasn't able to get a single person to check out the booth. But by the second day, I had talked to hundreds of people. How? Well, I had put together a well-oiled pitch. I was able to grab people's attention with a simple question ("Do you like X game?"), which also guided me in pitching my own games to them. I ended up making my first $1K of indie hacking revenue that weekend!

• I started offering career coaching on Fiverr this year, and I had no idea what I was really doing in the beginning. I just tried to be as helpful as possible with my early clients. After three clients, I became much more confident and had a clear strategy. The next 20+ were a lot easier!

The takeaway is that I've always felt so nervous and unsure of myself in the beginning, but just by trying and not giving up, I have always found that it got easier. Something that really helps me is, if I'm feeling down about a poor attempt, I ask myself what I could do better next time. By focusing on improving, and not dwelling on spiraling negative thoughts, I am able to make progress.

Lean into your best work

Jacob H. recommends relying on automation at the beginning of a client interaction:

It's really tough when it comes to winning a new client. If I were you, I'd handle as much of the initial interactions as possible via email prior to meeting with them. Answer questions, get information about their needs, and talk about pricing ahead of time. Then, all of the tough discussions are out of the way, and you'll (hopefully) feel more prepared.

It's also worth noting that most people have a specific rhythm that can be easily identified. I would start documenting when you feel the most social. Is it in the morning? The afternoon? After a cup of coffee? Determine this, then try to schedule your more extroverted tasks accordingly.

After you have the client, the most important thing to remember is that you're in charge of how you want to work. This means that if you don't want to have meetings, don't have meetings. Or, if you're okay with meetings but don't want to turn on your video, don't turn on your video. Ultimately, what your client wants is your best work. Only you know what will get them your best work. If a meeting will exhaust you so much that you can't give them what they need, then they don't actually want that.

Face your fears head on

Faptebune recommends exposure:

I usually don't talk over the phone with clients. I try to use email as much as possible. But there are situations where I can't avoid phone calls, and I've found that these two things have helped me:

• About 10 years ago, I enrolled in an online anxiety management program. When I started, I was asked to choose a situation that produces the most anxiety for me. I selected phone calls. Each week, I was given exercises and instructions on how to get to the next level. In most cases, it involved doing the thing that caused stress, while following some instructions to help keep anxiety away during the activity. After enough practice, my phone calls became almost anxiety-free. The anxiety comes back when I don't practice, but when I return to work, it usually goes away after the first few calls.

• Volunteer for a campaign that requires calling people. I got to make 100 phone calls a day to unknown people, in mostly awkward situations. People are angry that you called them, may have bad phone connection, perhaps are attending an important event at the time, and so on. This will definitely prepare you to deal with anything!

Activate your superpower

Kevin Sahin believes that automation is counterproductive for this situation:

I saw a lot of people advising you to automate or write emails as much as possible to avoid the sales call.

My advice is the complete opposite. I'm an introvert, and I've done hundreds of sales call for ScrapingBee. At the beginning, I was scared. It put me outside of my comfort zone.

But the more I did it, the more I learned to use my introverted personality as a superpower: Introverts tend to be great listeners!

Sales are more about listening to your customer's needs and having genuine curiosity about their problems, than about cold pitching your product. I think that as an introvert, you're probably naturally better at this than extroverted personalities.

The more you do it, the more comfortable you will get!

What are your tips for confidently sharing your work? Let's chat below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

🏛 A US federal judge ruled against Elon Musk, limiting his "right to free speech."

👀 YouTube's major growth challenge.

👀 This new US bill would limit employer spying.

💨 Wind power is heating up.

📹 Instagram users now spend over 20% of their time watching Reels.

❤️‍🩹 When Loved Ones Are Underwhelmed

by Yi Lin

Sometimes, it can be discouraging when I talk with people in my life about what's going on with my business. I was excited to tell a friend about my recent success in selling GreenBooks on Setapp, and rather than being impressed, he politely suggested that it wasn’t a lot of money. I think that, since most people don’t aspire to be founders, until you “make it,” people compare what you are doing to a typical job. Compared to a typical job, many of us make a lot less, have less structure, and are sometimes struggling in some way. By that standard, it may look like we are not doing well.

But when I have those moments, I have to re-center and remind myself why I do what I do. How do you weather the storm?

Don't compare

Jay says that the comparison is not a reasonable one:

You must understand that it's 1K times (maybe even 10K times) easier to make $1 from traditional employment than from online products. It's not even the same sport.

It feels like a fair and valid comparison, but they're fundamentally different pursuits. It's like comparing distances when you're running and the other person is driving a car.

• Indie hacking: You're starting from zero and creating something from nothing. You, and only you, are the resource. Every single star must align for you to close even one sale. You are literally building everything from the ground up. Very few people are capable of even that, sale or no sale.

• Employment: You're piggybacking off of years of shareholder equity, product development, customer relations, brand equity, business goodwill, infrastructure, systems, etc., and you have to pawn away your valuable time to a company. But it pays well.

To many people, traditional employment is a necessary evil and the only viable path. Many people don't have the skills, determination, self-learning capabilities, courage, and gumption to do what founders do. Some people enjoy being employed, but don't understand what you're doing. Others may be coming from a place of jealousy. If your thing takes off and you surpass them, some people will feel terrible about themselves. So they have a vested interest in seeing you fail, if only to protect their fragile self-esteem. Trust me, I know. I've lost ex-coworkers as friends after proudly telling them about my SaaS business.

I'd rather make $2K MRR from a SaaS that I can grow at my pleasure, than to make $10K in monthly salary from an office job under an annoying, oppressive boss, and potentially toxic workplace.

Never confuse standard of living for quality of life. It takes one sentence to tear someone down. It takes years of blood, sweat, and tears to build something out of nothing.

Consider the curve

SquishyCoder looks at the difference in the curve:

The difference is that employees get paid on a bell curve, while founders get paid on a power curve.

It's much harder to make a living wage as your own boss. On the flip side, a top 1% employee is lucky to earn 2-3x the income of the average person in their field, but a top 1% founder will make thousands of times more than the average founder in their field.

It's hard to get to survival level, but if you can, you can probably get much further over time.

Justin Fransen puts it simply:

Do not ask other people for their opinion on validating your success. Your $2K MRR is scalable. Their salaries aren't.

How do you handle negative reactions from loved ones? Share below!

Discuss this story.

🧠 Harry's Growth Tip

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

“Treat copy as a visual object. Copy that looks good has a knack of reading well.”

— Adrian Holmes

Go here for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.

🕔 Jason Leow is Getting Founders up at 5 AM

by Jason Leow

Hi, all! I'm Jason Leow, and last year, I was a new parent, I was sleep deprived, and I had little cognitive capacity for work. I knew that I had a window of undisturbed time from 5-8 AM while mom and baby were asleep, but I had been a night owl all my life. I didn't know how to switch chronotypes to become an early bird. Furthermore, I knew that I couldn't do this alone.

That's how I came to launch a 5 AM club for fellow indie hackers.

The 5am club is actually a chat group on Telegram, now 141 members strong, where we chat async about:

• Sleep biohacking.
• Early AM productivity tips.
• Public accountability.
• Mutual encouragement.
• Building in public at 5 AM.

Members can:

• Post wake times daily for public accountability and mutual encouragement.
• Ask questions about sleep hacks.
• Pair up as accountability buddies.

Here's how I launched the club!

Set a new goal by starting a chat group

What began as just a way to socialize with others around a topic is becoming a habit hack (an intentional intervention) to ensure accountability, learn from others, and to grow collectively.

I had always thought that setting a goal was a personal affair, an individual struggle. Previously, the concept of a community banding around a common goal that everyone is individually gunning for was novel for me.

But many goals are social, not just personal. Socially personal. Here are some benefits that I've enjoyed from setting up the 5am club:

• Social accountability: Starting a chat group is a forcing function against stagnation. I have to keep reading and learning new things in order to share them in the group. It's also a way to post my streaks, and lean into accountability for compounding.

• Learning from others: There were so many occasions where I learned new, interesting things that I probably would have never learned had I not been part of the group. For example, I learned about polyphasic sleep from a member of the club, and I would have never tried it myself otherwise.

• Collective growth: It's heartening to witness how the floor gets raised when everyone learns together. You see someone posting their wake time once or twice, and by the third time, you might feel inspired to finally take the plunge. The multiplier effect of collective learning, and mutual support and inspiration, are so underrated.

Community-driven product development

The experience of collective learning was what I initially loved about this project. But there's another, more meta aspect that I love just as much: It's a great learning opportunity for community-driven product development.

I started the group chat not thinking about a product, but just as a way to learn collectively about sleep. But in the back of my mind, I always knew that there was a possibility to build something for it in the future. I'm slowly getting a better sense of the common challenges that we face when starting out in sleep biohacking, and info products are always easiest to start with. Stay tuned!

Challenges

My biggest challenges with running the club have been engagement and patience. From 0 to 70 members, it felt like I was messaging into the void. I was probably the only one who was active in the chat for a while. However, now that we are over 100 members, engagement has increased.

There's this 90-9-1 rule about online communities called the Rule of Participation Inequality:

• 90% are lurkers who only read and observe, but don't create or contribute anything.
• 9% are contributors who reply and comment on content created by others.
• 1% are creators. These are the most active members of the community, and they create, contribute, and consume.

Following that rule, it probably takes at least 100 members to have a handful of contributors and creators in a community! It really does take patience for the community and engagement to grow.

The funny thing about sleep biohacking is that it's an infinite game. You're never done, so there's always something to work on, learn about, and share. People will come and go from the community, but since everyone needs to sleep, and everyone can benefit from sleeping better, there will always be a need for it. How's your sleep been recently?

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

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

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Prakash Natarajan, Yi Lin, Harry Dry, and Jason Leow for contributing posts. —Channing