🗞 What's New: I have a landing page, now what?

Once you've set up your landing page, the next step is...

• Marketing. Talk to the people who have signed up, and let them in on your process. These tips will show you how!
• The US market for home services is $657 billion in 2022, up 10.9% from 2021. If you want in, without having to learn how to operate a table saw, check out these new opportunities below.
• Founder Victor Ponamariov experimented with launching a side project to grow his newsletter, and hit 40,000 visits and 1,000 new subscribers in 10 days. Here's how he created the right environment to go viral.

Want to share something with nearly 100,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

💻 My Landing Page is Done...What's Next?

by Albert Jo

I set up my landing page, and purchased Facebook and Instagram ads to collect email signups to validate my idea. I'm getting a conversion rate of about 2-3%, but I'm stuck on what to do next.

Help!

Customer chit chat

AmineAouragh says it's time to do more marketing:

And by that, I mean talk to people. Talking to people outperforms every kind of paid ad you can run.

But being totally honest, going with paid ads this early is a bad move, no matter how much money you can pour into them.

You can start with Twitter. There are so many genuine people to talk to on the platform, you just need to find them. Share more about your story and what you're building, and you can find people who are interested in what you're doing.

Lotanna Ezeike agrees:

I'd reach out to the people who have signed up. A lot of people may not actually share their real email address, so I would have some kind of email authentication to ensure that all of your leads are quality.

Also, email lists do not validate an idea. Don't fall into this trap, especially when it comes from ads. When people were organically search and find you, that's actually a better indication of where you stand.

Email the people who have signed up, and maybe try to jump on a call. Prepare key questions in advance to help you discover whether your product will actually solve their problem. Also, be sure to talk about pricing!

Brandon Crossley chimed in also:

I would start by talking to the people that signed up. Send them emails, surveys, or even schedule calls. Try to validate your assumptions about what you think they want. Show them what you're thinking of in terms of design, demos, etc., and try to assess whether you're on the right track.

Show me the money!

Satya Kalluri says that expression of interest is nowhere near securing payment:

Consider the number of people who subscribe to a person's YouTube channel vs. the ones who pay to subscribe to that YouTuber on Patreon.

In the former, respondents interact with the creator casually, and the feedback is more encouragement than it is constructive criticism.

In the latter, folks think 10 times and check for free options before signing up. This is a more significant form of validation.

Here are my suggestions:

1. Try to tun the offline model of your concept. For my new startup, FANsi, I have not written a line of code. Instead, I worked with four Instagram influencers to prove that my concept can improve their monetization. I took commission for my service, and now, I'm actually building the digital product to automate it.
2. Ask the respondents to pay. It could be only a fraction of what you'll eventually charge when the product is live. That could be a good incentive for them to get the service for a lower cost, and for you to categorize serious buyers vs. casual browsers and subscribers.

Optimize your landing page

Harsh Joshi always recommends creating a good funnel strategy:

Aside from that, conversion rates depend on a few very important factors, such as how your ads look, how good your copywriting is, how your landing page is attracting more customers, and how much time they are spending on your site.

This is where A/B testing comes into play. Whenever you design a landing page and start attracting potential users, you then should create different designs and different experiences for the customers. Next, analyze the differences, and use your findings to optimize your designs, ads, copywriting, UI, etc.

What are your tips for next steps after a landing page? Let's chat!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

📱 Instagram knows that you want it to be Instagram again, and is doing something about it.

🎵 Snapchat will pay indie musicians up to $100K per month.

📕 A new reality show is looking to find America’s next great author.

👥 Community is the new follower count for creators.

🃏 You can now earn Bitcoin by playing Solitaire and Sudoku.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🏠 Home Services Without the Sweat

from the Hustle Newsletter by Ethan Brooks

The Signal: A recent report from Angi Inc. (the merger of HomeAdvisor and Angie's List) estimates that the US market for home services is $657B in 2022, up 10.9% from 2021.

Want a piece of that pie?

You don't have to swing a hammer. Angi generated ~$1.7B in 2021 through a variety of sources, but more than half (~$897M) came from "consumer connection revenue." Basically, they sell leads to contractors.

*Source: Angi Inc.

Lots of other companies do the same on a smaller scale.

The business model is pretty simple: Contractors need work. If you can send them clients or even prospective clients, they'll pay you.

We talked to our friend Tim Stoddart, whose agency does lead gen in several industries, to bring you two key opportunities:

1. Selling phone calls:

While there are several types of leads you could sell (email address, mailing address, etc.) when it comes to home services, one of the most valuable is a live phone call.

Lead gen websites basically serve as traffic funnels, using SEO and PPC to capture qualified search traffic, prompting visitors to call for a quote, then using software to automatically route those calls straight to contractors who pay for them.

*Software like CallTrackingMetrics, CallRail, and DialogTech auto-route calls to lead gen clients (Source: Tallahassee Concrete Work)

It's common to charge a flat fee for each call, regardless of whether they convert. But clients don't want to pay for spam calls, so many lead gen sites set a minimum time threshold (commonly between 30 seconds and two minutes) and only charge for calls that run longer than that.

You could approach this in a few ways, driving leads for:

• Hardest-to-find contractors: According to Angi, the industries with the fewest available contractors are landscape architecture, insulation, cement and concrete, pest control, and tree trimming.

• Most competitive fields: The industries that are most crowded (where contractors might be looking for an edge) are construction, maids and housekeeping, carpentry, electrical work, and painting.

• Areas that spend most: According to the report, the regions where residents spend the most on home services are Washington, DC, Massachusetts, New York, Washington state, and Colorado.

Lead prices vary by industry and location, but one way to estimate the value of a call is to look at the price of PPC ads for high-intent terms, then estimate how many clicks you'd need to get one call.

You can also spy on competitors, like ConXPros, which charges ~$50-$85 per lead:

*Source: ConXPros

2. Building online directories:

Similar to the yellow pages, lead gen companies build local directories to help visitors find vetted contractors in their area. Contractors pay to be listed, and sometimes pay for each click their listing gets. Tim said:

*Sample directory. Clients pay to be listed, and sometimes for individual clicks as well (Source: Procore)

Operators of directories have a problem: They have to build their listings manually because many of the plug-ins available don't follow SEO best practices.

So, in addition to building your own directory, you could also build a SaaS that solves this issue for the thousands of lead gen sites around the world.

Keys to success:

Tim laid out a few tips that set winners apart in the lead gen space:

• Conversion rate optimization: You must make sure the "Call Now" button is highly visible at all times, especially on mobile.
• SEO: Make sure your H1 tags, cornerstone pages, and URL structures follow SEO best practices.
• Your blog: Write great industry content. This is where you win all of your long-tail search traffic.

Would you enter the home services space? Share your thoughts below!

Subscribe to the Hustle Newsletter for more.

👥 10M Users, Zero Funding

by Aytekin Tank

Staying happy and healthy:

Know the difference between profile and platform.

A platform enables you to authentically share and promote your business, while public notoriety is often quite empty...and it’s almost always temporary.

Discuss this story.

🔥 Victor Ponamariov Went Viral and Hit 1K Subscribers

by Victor Ponamariov

Hello, indie hackers! I'm Victor Ponamariov, and for the past year, I've been focused on writing content related to UI/UX.

In this post, I will share how I got 1K subscribers to my newsletter by launching a side project. I was gradually growing my Twitter audience, and now I do the same with LinkedIn (feel free to connect with me!). Apart from social networks, I'm trying to grow my newsletter.

Let's dive in!

The side project

One of the tactics that worked very well for me was to launch a side project that might be interesting to the Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, Hacker News, and Reddit audiences.

So, I decided to create a site about the history of UI, and launch it on all major social networks. The result was a bit surprising!

Product Hunt launch

The Product Hunt launch wasn't as successful as my previous launches, but I still was able to get ~400 upvotes and fifth place at the end of the day.

It brought in 2.8K visitors, but the conversion to subscribers was a bit low. In total, I got ~150 new subscribers. I actually expected to get ~2K new subscribers, because the last time I launched a product there, I got about 1K new subscribers.

Reddit launch

On Reddit, I was able to get 50K views on my post, but the number of visitors was only 234, according to my analytics. Not sure how many subscribers I got from Reddit, but it was obviously not very many.

Hacker News launch

I find Hacker News to be one of the most difficult networks to promote your content. All of my submissions were blocked. Even though I've studied the way Hacker News works, I still wasn't able to post my site there.

However, I woke up to a traffic spike. It turned out that somebody else had posted my site. It got to the front page, and it was somewhere in the top five.

And here's where the magic happened: Not only did I get almost 7K visitors directly from Hacker News, it turned out that people started sharing my site on Twitter. One of the tweets got more than 100 retweets, and was going viral across several sites.

Let me share with you some useful analytics. Here is the overall traffic:

And here are the different sources of traffic:

So, getting to the top of Hacker News set off a ripple effect of people sharing the site. Even 10 days out from the Product Hunt launch, I still got ~1K unique visitors per day.

Even now, I get small, random traffic spikes from time to time, and I don't always know where people come from.

Here is the overall number of new subscribers (via three forms):

What is the conclusion?

This is my first time getting traffic from general virality. For the first time, I'm seeing many different sources of traffic, which motivates me to create other projects that might be interesting to a wide set of audiences. Chances are, they will get shared. Exposure matters!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

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

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

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Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.

Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Albert Jo, Priyanka Vazirani, Ethan Brooks, Aytekin Tank, and Victor Ponamariov for contributing posts. —Channing