🗞 What's New: The power of Facebook Groups

Having a business Facebook page is no longer enough:

• Facebook Groups is a powerful way to create and grow a passionate, dedicated user base. Here's how to start, promote, and harness your group for maximum impact!
• Upwork, Fiverr, and similar platforms have exploded, and hiring freelancers is easier than ever. These tips can help you make the most of freelance platforms and avoid bad experiences.
• Founder Ilya Novohatskyi went from 0 to 2,800 email subscribers for Microns, his acquisition platform for micro-startups. Below, he shares how he harnessed content and consistency to keep people engaged.

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

👥 The Power of Facebook Groups

by Syed Balkhi

A successful business has a lot of small, but impactful, factors that go into making it that way. One key element that you may be missing out on is a Facebook community. Let's dive in!

Why Facebook pages aren't enough

Facebook pages are becoming increasingly less effective. Their organic reach has been on a steady decline for years now. At present, the average reach of a Facebook page's post is just 5.2%. This means that only one in 19 fans sees a page post.

People are also using Facebook in different ways than they used to. 10 years ago, Facebook was primarily a way to connect with friends and family that you already knew. These days, people are using it as a discovery tool to find new businesses, products, and services that they didn't know existed before.

When people are looking for new businesses on Facebook, they're usually not looking only at pages. They look at Facebook Groups. So, if you want your target audience to actually see your content, you need to be posting there.

Finally, Groups provides a level of engagement that pages simply can't match. When people comment on a page post, it doesn't notify others like it would in a Group (unless people have that particular notification turned on). People are much less likely to actually see and engage with the content on a page.

Groups, on the other hand, are designed for engagement. When someone creates a post, or comments on one, everyone in the Group gets a notification. That encourages people to actually participate in the conversation. And, when people participate in the conversation, they're more likely to buy from you.

Creating a successful Facebook Group

Here's how to get started with your Facebook business community:

1. Center your brand or niche:

Create a Facebook Group that is extremely relevant to your niche. You can also create a Group around just your brand, and name it after your business. Your audience will be able to find it easily, and will join it to engage with you.

2. Promote your Group:

Your next step should be to promote your Facebook Group and make it popular. You can also consider running ads. Try these tips to get more people to join:

• Invite your customers to join your Facebook Group when you onboard them.
• Let your customers know that they can get educational content and support in your Group. This provides an incentive for them to join.
• Include a call-to-action on all your social media channels, website, and email list.
• If you have an offline business, include a call-to-action in your store.
• Create weekly posts based on different themes. For example, you could have a weekly live Q&A, or you could feature a customer every Friday.

These are just some ideas to get you started. When promoting your Group, make sure that you're clear about what benefits people will get from joining it. When you keep nudging people to join your Group, you'll have more members and start to grow organically.

3. Engage people regularly:

It isn't enough to have Group members. You also need to engage them regularly. If you don't, they'll stop visiting your Group, and eventually leave.

The best way to keep people engaged is to post interesting, relevant content on a regular basis. You could post videos, podcast links, blog posts, images, infographics, polls, etc., but make it interesting, visually appealing, and relevant!

Your Facebook Group is also a great way to reduce the strain on your customer support team. Group members often answer each other's questions.

A Facebook Group is an essential tool for growing your business. Start one today!

Do you run a Facebook Group? Share your thoughts below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

💵 Elon Musk plans to charge some Twitter users a fee.

💻 Tech companies face a legal nightmare if Roe v. Wade is overturned by the US Supreme Court.

🙅‍♂️ Warren Buffett says he wouldn't pay $25 for all the BTC in the world.

🤝 Robinhood will let users lend out their shares.

🚫 Wikipedia will no longer accept crypto donations.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

💼 Tips For Hiring Freelancers

by Olha Lenkivska

Upwork, Fiverr, and similar platforms have exploded in the past couple of years, and they come with both benefits and drawbacks. How can founders make the most of hiring through freelancing platforms?

The magic words

Donn Felker has hired many people off of Upwork with great success:

The key is having a good hiring and filtering process. I will pick the top 3-5 candidates, and give them a paid take-home task with a budget and a time constraint. Whoever does it the best within the given amount of time (and satisfies or exceeds the other multiple factors in play) will get the gig.

In short, winning candidates have to reply a certain way. For example, somewhere in the job post I'll put something like this:

The key words are meant to show that people are reading the job post, not to be rude or controlling. Most applicants are mass applying to jobs without really reading the job description. I've been hiring on Upwork since 2006 when it was oDesk, and that has been a constant problem since then.

If my applicants don't include the words that I specify, they're automatically declined. This filters out about 80-85% of them. With the 15-20% that are left, I look at their profiles, links, and replies. Then, I choose 3-5 of those and pay them for their time to do the take-home task.

It's a process, but it works great! You can read more in my blog post here.

Make it more human

Qdoguz has hired most of his talent on Upwork (~$5K spent in total for graphic, motion, and web design):

I prefer Upwork above Fiverr because it's more straightforward and feels more credible to me. My go-to strategy is as follows:

1. Make a Loom video explaining the job details. Here, I'm capturing my face and desktop. This makes the request more human, and enhances my credibility with potential freelancers.
2. Add a code word for people to use when they're applying. Include that in the video.
3. An applicant replying to me with a video explaining how they would tackle the job would be a definite winner for me. Sometimes, I deliberately ask for this.
4. I screen a lot of potential candidates that didn't reply to my post, and sometimes make personalized videos if I'm impressed with their work. I've gotten my best results from handpicking freelancers by thoroughly checking their profiles and portfolios.
5. Sometimes, I reach out to previous customers on LinkedIn to verify the references. This isn't applicable to all situations, but it works for web design.

I'm now looking into setting up a Slack or Discord server to get in touch more easily with my previous freelancers, and even let them collaborate on tasks. Payments will always go through Upwork, though!

Choose your best platform

Tim Parsa recommends understanding the unique value of each platform, and choosing the one that has what you actually need:

I've hired freelancers from Fiverr, Toptal, Upwork, Freelancer, Workana, Freemance, and probably a few that I'm forgetting.

I've found the platforms easy to use, and brimming with plenty of eager talent ready to bid on jobs and get to work.

• I've built app prototypes with Toptal: Great experience, but pricey.
• I've hired copywriters from Freelancer: Okay.
• I've hired meme lords from Fiverr: Meh.
• I've hired growth hackers from Workana: Very good.
• I've hired designers from Upwork: Okay experience, and pricey.
• I've hired developers from Freemance: Great price, great attitude, and great quality.

The principal problem always arises because the freelancers are looking to do the least for the most, and maintain a quality to exertion ratio that fits the supply and demand curve.

I feel bad for some of the freelancers on the platforms because there is supply from all over the world that puts downward pressure on their pricing power, plus the platforms take a big cut.

I like Freemance, a new platform out of Cuba, because the quality is great, the developers are eager, and the price is affordable. Full disclosure, many of the Cuba-based freelancers use my fintech platform, Slyk.

What's your experience with freelance platforms? Share below!

Discuss this story.

🧠 Harry's Growth Tip

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

"The pain is the pitch."

—Alex Hormozi

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

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.

📧 From 0 to 2,800 Email Subscribers With Ilya Novohatskyi

by Ilya Novohatskyi

Hey indie hackers! I'm Ilya Novohatskyi, founder of Microns, an acquisition platform for micro-startups.

I didn’t know much about marketing and growing startups when I launched Microns. When I started building, I was following competitors in the field. After creating the product, I didn’t know how to acquire users.

Here's how consistency helped me go from zero to 2.8K email subscribers!

Resource source

After six months of development, I realized that having a lot of features means nothing if you can't reach people to talk about them, and build things that are actually important to your potential users.

I stumbled across Pieter Levels' book, MAKE, which taught me to be fast and explicit. Users should be first, and your app should focus on one feature that it does exceptionally well.

After considering many options (blog, YouTube, podcast, newsletter, social media, etc.), I chose to start a newsletter. Why? Well, I had previous writing experience, I love writing, and I like reading other newsletters.

From 0 to 50

To be fast, I decided to go with Revue, since it's an all-in-one solution for running a newsletter. I set everything up to send out the first issue.

To find the first 50 subscribers, I engaged with people on Twitter and Indie Hackers, setting out to be helpful and share valuable things:

This also positively impacted my Twitter following and Indie Hackers connections.

350 subscribers

Within a few weeks of being active, I found a growth partner and started planning next steps. We knew that, to go further, we needed a brand new custom website. We built the first version of Microns in under two weeks.

After this, we implemented three essential things:

1. We made our product completely free for the next six months.
2. We posted a newsletter in many startup and newsletter directories to get some SEO juice.
3. We launched on 10words and Product Hunt. We were on the first page on 10words, then got third place on Product Hunt.

And people loved the product!

On the way to 700 subscribers

After launching on Product Hunt, we began gaining more popularity on Twitter. A week later, The Hustle noticed us, and mentioned Microns in its newsletter issue. That gave us around 300 new subscribers.

We were also mentioned by a lot of small newsletter creators, and this gave us a boost as well!

Reaching 1K subscribers

I consistently wrote newsletter issues every week, and continued to engage on Twitter and Indie Hackers. We also started testing paid growth channels.

After six months, we monetized Microns and introduced a premium plan. We spent all the money made from premium subscriptions to advertise in other newsletters, which also helped us to sponsor creators and communities. This gave us brand awareness, new listings, and improved SEO.

Nowadays

We are now at 2.8K subscribers, and growing.

The way was long and hard. Every activity helped us spread the word about Microns. We’ve made many mistakes, but we learned from them.

Soon, I’ll be happy to introduce our next project built by the Microns team, which will help startup founders promote their side projects!

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 Syed Balkhi, Priyanka Vazirani, Olha Lenkivska, Harry Dry, and Ilya Novohatskyi for contributing posts. —Channing