🗞 What's New: Are you struggling with customer growth?

Customer interactions are make or break:

• If you don't know how to connect with customers authentically, and feel like you're being too sales-y, these tips can help.
• For founders who have a few years of experience, consider skipping the hourly rate or per project pricing, and start charging a flat weekly rate instead. Here's why!
• Founder Ayush Chaturvedi used Twitter to validate his course idea, and made $512 in 35 days. Below, he shares his strategy on landing glowing customer testimonials.

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

📈 Mastering Customer Growth

by Joe Kaiser

I just can't seem to get the hang of customer development and growth. I always feel like I'm pestering people and turning them off.

For example, I've been active on Twitter and Reddit trying to interact with my target users, but I'm struggling to make sure that the interactions are genuine. It feels wrong to befriend someone just so I can wait for a moment to push my product onto them. Following up is even harder.

Does anyone have any tips?

Two simple rules

Taylor Brazelton points out two rules in the book The Go-Giver that you might try applying here:

1. The law of value: The law of value says that your worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment. So first, I would ask if you are giving enough value. Are these relationships based on your need to push your product onto people? Or, will you legitimately provide value that they have yet to realize? A bit of guilt is fine at first, but if you truly feel guilty, I would reevaluate the offering. Focus on giving them something that is valuable; in return, you will also accomplish rule number two.
2. The law of compensation: This refers to your income, and is determined by how many people you serve, and how well.

Change the way you post

Spencer Scott is reminded of the movie Inception:

If I tell you to do something, you will likely never do it. If it is your idea to do something, you are extremely likely to do it, even if the event is the exact same thing.

I learned this after spending the last five years growing two SaaS companies to $400K ARR. You need to create a way for people to find you or your product, and realize that they want it.

The best part? It sounds like you've already found where your target users hang out. Now, all you have to do is change the way you post.

Try these conversation starters:

• Check out X that I built to fix Y problem.
• I got tired of Y so I built X, now I have Z number of users.
• My customer saved Y (time or money) using X.
• If I could solve X for you, would you buy Y?
• I built X to solve my problem with Y, would you like to try it for free?

If none of the above work, or you have no customers in general, try the following:

• Give your product away for free.
• Get on Zoom calls with customers to ask what they like or don't like.
• Build features that they like, and make them sticky.
• Ask for testimonials and dump logos onto your site.

Identify the true issue

Johannes Radig works with a lot of startups and founders on this:

To me, it sounds like you're conflating two different things:

1. Customer development: This is all about understanding your customer and revealing their true desires, pain points, concerns, and struggles. This is also understanding who the right customer is. This is not selling.
2. Sales: Once you've tackled customer development, you can then move to sales mode. This is where you communicate your proposition as briefly as possible, with the goal to win the person as a client.

Focus on those who are experiencing the problem you're solving the most frequently or most effectively. While your product might have broad appeal, it's important to start with the people who struggle a lot with this. They will be the ones who will be happy to give you feedback, and they'll turn into evangelists later, making sales easier for you.

There's a reason that Superhuman started focusing on VCs first. They get tons of cold emails, they have to read most of them (looking for new opportunities), and time is money for a VC (and they are happy to spend money to save time!).

You need to find your core audience, and that's what customer development is for.

Seven touch points

Shaun recalls how, a few years back, a salesperson that he respects explained that there’s an average of seven touch points to a sale:

A touch point might be an email, a call, a tweet, a landing page, a demo, etc.

With that in mind, rather than waiting to pounce with a pitch, you can go about interacting with people freely and confidently in a way that helps them. This may lead to your pitch either directly or indirectly. You see this often on social media, and when done well, it’s not a problem.

Perhaps just a slight change of process like this might make it more natural and comfortable, rather than trying to be sales-y and ready for a direct pitch.

What are your tips on customer growth? Let's chat below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

📺 Disney has outstreamed Netflix.

💸 More than $7T has been wiped out from the stock market this year.

👀 Facebook is already running out of money for its metaverse.

📡 Starlink internet is now available in 32 countries.

💁‍♀️ Women are signing up for sports betting apps faster than men.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🗓 Weekly Flat Rate > Hourly Rate

by Tyler Wanlass

If you've got a few years of experience and a few projects under your belt, skip the hourly rate or per project pricing, and start charging a flat weekly rate instead. Here's why!

Benefits

• No more proposals or complicated statements of work (SOWs).
• Clients will keep the project moving since the clock is ticking on their dime.
• Changes and revisions mid-project are easier since there are no scope or billing changes.
• Invoicing is much simpler. There are no deposits, mid-project payments, etc.

A few tips

• Charge for the week upfront. Stripe invoices are an easy way to get paid.
• Over-communicate throughout the week. This is great freelancing advice in general!
• End every week with a clear deliverable, and clarity on the next steps.
• Keep in mind that, for really large projects, it's nearly impossible to accurately estimate time and cost. Software is hard!
• Change requests, which are natural as a project evolves, increase with larger projects. Trying to stick to a schedule (and profitability on a project) becomes really challenging.
• Slow client feedback cycles can also kill a schedule.

Discovery Bonus

If a potential client isn't sold on a weekly rate, or isn't sure about the scope of their project and how many weeks they might need you, start with a fixed price discovery project.

Essentially, write up a simple proposal with your recommendations and suggestions, and deliver it as a nice PDF for ~$500. If they decide to move forward, you'll have a nice plan in hand.

On retainers

I'm not a huge fan of retainers, as they usually put control of the schedule in your client's hands. For example, they can drop a bunch of work or requests on you at any moment.

That said, I've used them in the past. I usually give the client two options:

1. Delay the tasks to the following month: This is especially useful if you don't have the bandwidth right now.
2. Renew the retainer now, complete the additional tasks, and allow any remainder of the retainer to roll over into the next month: This can work if there is a temporary spike, and the following month will be slower. If increased demand continues, increase your retainer!

One last note: I often sold hosting and maintenance packages at the end of projects. These were simple monthly retainers that included a few hours of updates, bug fixes, etc. They were auto-billed at the start of the month, and did not roll over. This made it easier for me since there was nothing to keep track of.

The background story

When I first started freelancing, I would simply charge per project. I only had about two years of self-taught experience, and would charge $1K-$3K to build simple websites or web apps.

I was still learning, making a ton of mistakes, and I was super slow. Charging hourly didn't seem right. With a little more experience, though, I moved to hourly rates. This was mostly because I was getting stuck in endless revisions with fixed-price project clients.

Here's what people don't tell you: The cheaper the project, the more revisions and feedback you can expect.

I made the jump to building more complex web apps and mobile prototypes, and went back to per project pricing. This time, I set the base project price at $10K+ (I then had 3-5 years of experience).

Higher prices meant much better clients and way less revisions. Of course, you can only command decent rates once you've successfully completed some projects, gained client testimonials, and nailed your processes and workflows.

Over the last several years, I've completely moved away from hourly or project based pricing. Instead, I simply charge a flat weekly rate, usually in the range of $3k-$5K per week (I now have 15+ years experience).

Would you consider implementing weekly flat rate pricing? Share below!

Discuss this story.

🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week

🧐 Maker Twitter is useless. Posted by Yasin Kavakli.

🆓 Why don't SaaS boilerplates have free trials? Posted by Iain Cambridge.

😵‍💫 Anything that starts now will have a difficult time scaling. Posted by Usama A.

💻 Do you use static site generators? Posted by Darko.

⏰ Daily micro-reviews are a system for personal accountability. Posted by Kevkav.

🤔 What are you working on? Posted by Alucard Vania.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

📱 How Ayush Chaturvedi Used Twitter to Validate His Course

by Ayush Chaturvedi

Hey folks! I'm Ayush Chaturvedi, and my writing course crossed $500 in sales one recent morning.

I thought it would be useful to share how I used Twitter to validate the idea and pre-sell the course. The biggest challenge with launching anything on Twitter is getting eyeballs on your landing page.

Even if you have a decent audience, the moment you share a link in your tweet, the algorithm penalizes those posts and doesn't show it to most of your followers. This happens even if you post the link in the second or third tweet, not just the first.

I suffered with this problem before with other projects, and I wanted to avoid it this time. Read on for more!

The challenge

Broadly, I faced three challenges:

1. Getting as many eyeballs on the landing page as possible.
2. Validating the need before building the actual product.
3. Figuring out the right pricing for the product. This is tough if you have a small audience.

I made a basic outline of the course in Notion based on what I wanted to build, and set up a Gumroad page for the course with the course outline.

Then, I tweeted out a screenshot of the outline. I offered the course for free to a few people on Twitter if they replied to the tweet.

I wanted to make it a no-brainer for people to check out the landing page.

The response

That tweet got 35K impressions. There were 90+ replies within six hours, and my landing page got 400+ views.

Initially, I DMed everyone who replied. Once I got tired, I posted the link to the course. The first five people got the course for free. After that, I kept raising the price as more people kept buying. This gave me a sense of what people were willing to pay for a course like this.

Within 48 hours, I had made $247 through 49 sales. Then, I started working on building the course. I wanted to increase sales through building in public. I knew that I wasn't going to get a traffic spike like this again, but I had to bring in some traffic regularly. Otherwise, sales would dry up.

I had set the course launch date for April 17, and I made a plan to build the whole thing by then. Every couple of days, I tweeted out progress updates on the course.

This nudged people who were on the fence to check it out, and maybe buy it. I even sent initial chapters to the pre-sale buyers as I was completing them. Folks loved it, and shared initial testimonials.

I used these testimonials on the landing page and in my tweets.

Rising sales

After about five weeks, the course had crossed $500 in sales. I've already launched the e-book version, and a community for the course. I'm working on the video version now.

I'm planning to continue to raise prices, as this course is not a one-off project. I plan to create a community of writers, and possibly, a job board for creators.

For the next couple of weeks, I'm focused on the video course and community. If you're interested, you can check out Make Money With Words here!

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 Joe Kaiser, Priyanka Vazirani, Tyler Wanlass, and Ayush Chaturvedi for contributing posts. —Channing