🗞 What's New: Getting started with LinkedIn marketing

Have you unlocked the benefits of LinkedIn?

• LinkedIn can be a powerful acquisition channel, but getting started may seem intimidating. This crash course can help you get in the game! Hint: Treating your LinkedIn profile like a landing page is a great place to start.
• Backlinks are essential in the SEO long game. These quick tips can help you find your competitor's backlinks, replace them with your own, and rank higher in search engine results.
• Founder Bram Wiepjes took Baserow, an open source Airtable alternative, from a side project to over 20,000 signups and a full-time team of 10. Here's why he chose to go the open source route, and how he differentiates.

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

🔑 Unlocking the Power of LinkedIn

by Dhruv Bhatia

I know that LinkedIn can be a powerful acquisition channel, but my engagement has been suffering a lot recently.

Please share what's worked for you as a founder. How are you growing on LinkedIn?

Comments activated

Bart Hertog shares a small brain dump about his experience:

I write about a very technical topic, and it took me three months of spare time to write a tutorial to promote on LinkedIn. This is definitely an investment for the long-term!

Commenting on other people's posts gives me connections, especially when it's people from geographic regions that I am focused on.

I have better engagement posting in dedicated groups than posting directly to my network. I also noted that when I post the same thing both in a group and to my network, one of them will do almost nothing. Therefore, I now add in some time between the two posts.

Posts including an attractive image do much better than posts with solely text, which pretty much goes without saying.

Focus on small

Jeff Cole recommends keeping it small:

What works for me is commenting on posts from people with less than 3K followers. For people with more than that, I find a top comment to reply to.

Also, for people with a lot of followers, it can be helpful to click the bell on their profile so that you're alerted about their new posts. Being the first one to comment on a popular post can be a game changer, too.

Additionally, I'd recommend sending out 20 connection requests a day.

Daily engagement

Holger says that, if you play the posting and commenting game on LinkedIn daily, you'll likely get 5-10 leads every day:

• Do automated outreach to 40-50 leads daily.
• Comment on the 20 most popular posts in your niche every day.
• Write at least one post daily.
• Handle your profile page in the same way that you handle your landing page. Include a unique selling proposition, a call-to-action, testimonials, and best content features.

The commenting part is the tricky thing, so I wrote another Indie Hackers post going into more detail about that!

A game plan

Sara Vissante shares her LinkedIn game plan:

Here's a good plan of action:

• Creating a storytelling plan and defining three topics to talk about in your posts. My topics are my founder's journey, my legal expertise, and the challenges I'm facing in going from freelancer to startup founder.
• Writing posts with catchphrases that make people want to click on the "Read More" button. This move is worth more than every like or comment, actually!
• Creating a support group of people that want to grow on LinkedIn. LinkedIn tests your posts on your close connections first, and if they like and engage fast, the post will be proposed to a broader audience. A support group can help with that engagement.
• Staying consistent: This is the secret to effectively leveraging any social media platform!
• Engaging with other content creators.

What are your top tips for LinkedIn outreach? Share below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

🤑 75% of millennials prefer spending on in-person experiences rather than material goods.

🏛 A court has ruled that Tesla's dress code is against the law.

🧐 Android phones may soon get riddled with ads.

👀 Elon Musk revealed that these accusations were another reason that he cancelled the Twitter deal.

🌏 Where we'll end up living as the planet burns.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

💻 Using Your Competitor's Backlinks to Your Advantage

by Amin Memon

Need a quick way to steal your competitor's backlinks, make them your backlinks, and beat your competitor in the search engine result pages (SERPs)?

Keep reading!

The playbook

You need your competitors to lose the backlinks, so that you can gain those backlinks. This can allow your brand to rank higher in SERPs. In order to achieve this, you will need to find your competitor's backlinks, reach out to the authors via email, and convince them to add your link and remove your competitor's link. Try this:

1. Use Ubersuggest, Semrush, or Ahrefs to get lists of your competitor’s external backlinks.
2. Add all of those links to Prospectss Bulk Blog Author Finder to find their emails.
3. Send emails asking for backlinks using Mailchimp, LemList, or another email marketing tool.

The secret sauce

Here is how to convince the author or blog owner to add your link and remove your competitor's link. In the email, mention the following things:

• How updating the article would help the article rank higher in SERP. Show them that your domain authority score is growing since you are getting loads of new backlinks.
• Give them your top three points (pricing, feature one, and feature two) to show how you are better than your competitors.
• Ask if they have signed up for your competitor's affiliate program. If so, offer a better percentage than your competitor does for them to join your affiliate program. You need to convince them that your brand can generate more affiliate income for them than your competitor's can!

If you can convince the author or blog owner to sign up for your affiliate program, it's a win for them. You will then have more leverage to get them to remove the competitor link and replace it with yours.

Keep in mind that if the article is a listicle, the author likely won't remove your competitor's link entirely. In that case, the goal is to have them put your link higher, which they will if they know they can generate more income from it. Still a win-win!

Will you give this method a try? Let's chat in the comments below!

Discuss this story.

👥 10M Users, Zero Funding

by Aytekin Tank

Define your own vision of success.

No one else can (or should) tell you what success looks like. Don’t waste time worrying about other founders or what your MBA classmates have done. If you’ve gained even a little traction, that’s success. A handful of customers or a few sales means you’re on the right track. Don’t rush. Get the core product right and keep going.

Discuss this story.

📈 Bram Wiepjes Hit 20K+ Signups With Baserow

by Bram Wiepjes

Hi indie hackers! I'm Bram Wiepjes, and I started Baserow as a side project early 2019. I publicly launched the first version of Baserow in May 2020, and people loved the idea. At that time, I switched to part-time freelancing in order to invest more time into the product.

In January 2021, I started working on Baserow full-time. I also hired the first team members. Currently, Baserow is a team of more than 10 people, has raised a $5M+ seed round, was featured on TechCrunch, made number one on Hacker News, and hit over 20K signups in the hosted version.

AMA!

Why is Baserow open source?

I believe that using an open development model helps us create more stable, secure technologies. If you use no-code databases like Airtable, you will notice that most of them do not offer extensibility and scalability. You may argue that many no-code tools have an app store with API extensions or pre-integrated apps, which is true. However, the real extensibility comes from the ability to modify the source code and build the specific plugins that your team needs. That requires full, developer-friendly transparency. Baserow is able to offer this by being open source.

Overall, here are the benefits of being open source:

• For us: Having a collaborative effort of multiple developers and communities helping us to find a solution a lot faster.
• For our clients: Having an open source model prevents vendor lock-in because they have access to the source code and can host on their own servers. This is something that's increasingly important, as the no-code tools that we create are built to scale.

What exactly is a no-code database?

A no-code database allows anyone to create a relational database in a simple way. The interface looks a bit like a spreadsheet because some people are already familiar with those kind of tools. Every column can only support a specific type, for instance, "A number with two decimal places." This makes it more structured.

You can construct queries by creating filters and sorts on your data.

How do you attract developers to hire?

Every developer on the team is being paid to work full-time on Baserow. Currently, we're a team of 6.5 developers. I'm the 0.5 because I'm spending half of my time on writing code. We're not recruiting for "free" open source contributors.

The contributions that are being made are usually small, and are from users who are solving a problem that they're having while using Baserow themselves. In return, we sometimes give them free access to the premium version. Every contribution is reviewed by a team member to ensure the quality.

How do you differentiate from NocoDB?

Baserow and NocoDB both position themselves as an open source Airtable alternative, but there are many differences. Baserow is a turnkey solution that can be used by tech and non-tech people alike, where no-code is more focused on technical users. On the other hand, NocoDB was created to connect to an existing technical relational database engine. Both have a different software license.

I usually recommend that users try out both tools, then make a decision. I've answered this question in more detail here!

What's your free to paying user ratio?

It's difficult to say what the ratio is between free and paying users because most of our users are self-hosting. We're not sending any telemetry about self-hosted users to our servers because of privacy reasons. Our enterprise plan is not live yet, but we're speaking with several companies at the moment. Some reached out to us, and we also contacted active hosted users and paying users.

Was it hard to raise money?

To be honest, it was not difficult. I originally wanted to bootstrap, so I built the project and gained visible traction. After that, investors just started reaching out.

There are still lots of investors actively investing at the moment. I would recommend finding investors that have invested in other open source projects if that's the path you want take. Ideally, you create enough traction to cause investors to reach out to you.

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 Dhruv Bhatia, Priyanka Vazirani, Amin Memon, Aytekin Tank, and Bram Wiepjes for contributing posts. —Channing