Many successful B2C companies have this in common: - **Early adopters turned out to be different people than they initially** targeted, and the willingness to embrace this led to major success. Try targeting a super specific group of early adopters t
Many successful B2C companies have this in common:
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Early adopters turned out to be different people than they initially targeted, and the willingness to embrace this led to major success. Try targeting a super specific group of early adopters to maximize your growth!
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The average size of a newly built studio apartment decreased by 14%, a trend that is unfolding around the world. Here's how the small living trend can rake in big opportunities for founders.
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Founder Bruce McLachlan recently hit $2,500 in monthly revenue with Cloakist, his $60,000 MicroAcquire acquisition. Below, he shares his current stats, why his churn rate increased, and how a small change improved his onboarding process.
Want to share something with over 95,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
👥 B2C Founders: Narrow Your Audience
by Darko
Lenny Rachitsky argues that B2C businesses should target a narrow set of early adopters to achieve success. He writes:
Nearly every successful consumer company nailed their super-specific who (though not always right away). Here are a bunch of examples:
*Source: Lenny Rachitsky
We talk a lot about finding early adopters. Those first 100 or 1K users, beta users, etc., can make all the difference. In studying wildly successful startups, Lenny found that many times, their early adopters weren't who they thought they would be. But the willingness to lean into the uncertainty is what gave these companies the boost to skyrocket growth. What are your thoughts on these findings? Did your group of early adopters surprise you?
Stay curious
Fleur notes that your product will fluctuate, and the best thing to do is adapt:
I think that's one of the coolest parts of indie hacking. Each project becomes like a living organism, often growing (or not) in unexpected ways, having unexpected use cases, and attracting people that are surprising, even to the creator of the product.
I think that's why staying really curious in the beginning is so important. I ended up finding a very niche group of people who I didn't even realize existed, and they are now paid subscribers to my newsletter. I'm so happy that I stayed curious and kept my ear to the ground.
Change your audience without changing your product
Bobby Burch was struck by the way that Pinterest was able to find a new audience, pivoting from targeting techies to targeting women bloggers:
It just goes to show that our assumptions are exactly that. We can get hit hard with our curse of knowledge in these situations by assuming that a certain group will love our product. Then, that group may not give a crap...but who will? It's all about finding that group.
In Pinterest's case, it turned out that the group who cared about the product were those that were interested in curating their regular lives and the things that they liked. These women were the company's early adopters, and led to its explosive growth.
Who will represent?
Jacob H. believes it's a good idea to target early adopters based on the tone that you want to set:
In the article, Lenny says:
Instagram went after designers interested in photography with a large Twitter following, because those are the people they wanted to set the tone for the platform.
So, you've definitely got to find the niche of people who actually want your product. But, in some cases, you've also got to find the people who you want to represent your product, and focus on them. It's sort of a niche within a niche!
How have you found your early adopters? Share your experience!
Discuss this story.
📰 In the News
🌊 OpenSea has laid off 20% of its staff, saying that we have entered crypto winter.
🔍 TikTok's chief security officer has resigned amid increased scrutiny from US officials.
📱 Twitter is using its most powerful weapon against Elon Musk: His own tweets.
🚔 Amazon Ring and Echo Dot both provide a way for police to access your data without consent or a warrant.
💔 Dating apps have worse customer satisfaction than airlines and cable providers...new opportunities for founders?
🏡 Small Living Could Bring Big Opportunities
from the Hustle Newsletter by Julia Janks
The Signal: Small living is getting even smaller.
The average size of a newly built studio apartment in the US decreased ~14% from 600 square feet in 2009 to 514 square feet in 2018.
*Source: RentCafe
This doesn't even hold a candle to studio apartments in Japan, which can be as tiny as 290 square feet.
Mini living spaces are driving demand for mini appliances. Sellers on Amazon are making bank, according to Jungle Scout data. For example:
*Relative Global Google search interest, six-month rolling average. Source: Google Trends.
There is still room for founders to compete, especially because the trend will likely be propelled by the global boom in tiny modular homes and other Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs).
You could target groups like digital nomads and snowbirds with a bundled product offering that is easy to pack up and go when the next destination calls. You could even offer a rental option, like Grover, but for mini appliances.
*This Comfee countertop dishwasher is a bestseller on Amazon.
The Signal: Hold on to your hats, because NFTs are coming to life (and they're taking our jobs).
The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is one of the most popular digital art collections in the world. DroppTV, a livestream shopping platform, is cashing in on the fact that BAYC NFT owners have exclusive licensing and commercial rights to their apes.
They're rolling out a number of solutions to help BAYC collectors monetize their NFTs before resale.
To start, they've partnered with the anonymous owner of Ape #7792 and brought the 2D monkey to life as a 4D animation with a personality, mannerisms, and voice.
Ape #7792 has already landed a gig as a host on droppTV. Nice.
*Source: Victoria Advocate.
Ape #7792 is not the only NFT influencer. Animation studio Toonstar has launched a new series called The Gimmicks, starring animated washed-up wrestler NFTs.
The Gimmicks is a collection of randomly generated NFTs, each with their own unique characteristics and personalities. NFT holders can participate in the creative process by voting on choose-your-own-adventure style decisions at the end of each episode.
*Episodes are already live on their website. Source: The Gimmicks.
Last month, we wrote about NFT rental platforms that enable investors to generate income by renting out their NFTs, the large majority of which are currently sitting unused in wallets.
If animated NFT influencers like Ape #7792 are here to stay, owners and artists will need help managing their "talent." There's an opportunity to create content and courses around NFT talent agreements for owners and the companies hiring them.
Would you enter the small appliance or NFT talent space? Share below!
Subscribe to the Hustle Newsletter for more.
🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week
💯 The 100 Users in 100 Days Challenge is underway. Posted by Anthony Castrio.
😵💫 I was burned out. Posted by Bree.
🛍 How to launch a Shopify app. Posted by Darko.
🧐 What do Europe's leading founders have in common? Posted by Maaike.
📈 Improving your landing page conversion rate. Posted by Malena Ohl.
🛠 What tools do you use to organize your startup? Posted by Maximilian.
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.
💻 Bruce McLachlan Hit $2.5K MRR With Cloakist
by Bruce McLachlan
Hi all! I'm Bruce McLachlan, founder of Cloakist, a tool that allows you to re-host any webpage on your own domain. Two months ago, I wrote about how I closed the acquisition for $60K on MicroAcquire back in February, and people have been wondering how things are going.
Well, we recently hit $2.5K MRR, which is a major milestone for us! Some other stats:
- MRR: Increased by 8.4%.
- Subscriptions: Increased by 7.6%.
- Churn: Increased by 38.5%.
When the business was listed for sale on MicroAcquire, the MRR was at ~$2K. 161 recent signups resulted in 13 new subscriptions, an 8% conversion. There were some particularly good months, and some not so good. Last month was flat, so I'm still trying to figure out what works in terms of marketing and features. I'm learning as I go!
It's the first month that I'm actually calculating the conversion rate, and I'm quite happy with it. I'm also making some tweaks to improve this.
It's not all good news, though. Most of the churned accounts were legacy customers, and I still believe that the new onboarding will yield higher quality subscriptions in the long run.
We've got a couple of notable improvements:
- Custom JS support for Notion.
- Custom CSS for JotForm.
- Twice as many blog posts published than before.
Objectives for next quarter include hitting revenue growth of 8% MoM, and keeping churn below 5%. Cloakist also has a dedicated Notion app called Sotion. I just rolled out a feature that lets you create a member email signup for Notion pages.
The Sotion site has not been updated yet, but if you sign up, you'll then have the option available.
AMA!
How have you acquired users so far?
It’s mostly from organic search reaching the content on the site. The second channel has been traffic from some product-specific forums.
My goals are to add more valuable content to the site, and work on getting quality backlinks. I've not done any paid ads.
How did you improve the onboarding process?
The biggest improvement was removing the credit card requirement upfront. I also updated the trial period to only start once a site is live.
These changes led to attracting only people that have correctly configured their sites to start the trial, thus creating a higher quality funnel.
What made you buy Cloakist?
I came across Cloakist for the first time on MicroAcquire. For 10 months prior, I was sourcing deals from there, and going through due diligence with some of them until I found Cloakist.
I wrote about this whole process on Twitter if you want a more detailed version.
During this time, I evaluated many products and businesses. Here's why I ultimately decided on Cloakist:
- Validated product with an established customer base.
- Core product was good from a tech perspective.
- Proven way(s) to get new customers.
- Lots of room for improvement.
Although I had another business (a domain name marketplace) before this, Cloakist is not really related to it in that sense. But having a good understanding of how DNS records and SSL Certificates work does help!
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 Darko, Julia Janks, and Bruce McLachlan for contributing posts. —Channing
