How many indie hackers have done cold outreach? - **Many people see cold outreach as being spammy at best, obsolete** at worst. Can a business be successful without it, though? Founders weigh in below! - **The average website conversion rate is 2-3%.
How many indie hackers have done cold outreach?
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Many people see cold outreach as being spammy at best, obsolete at worst. Can a business be successful without it, though? Founders weigh in below!
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The average website conversion rate is 2-3%. If your rate is below average, you're losing sales. Dru Riley explains how to optimize your website to boost the percentage of people who convert.
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Founder Etiene Dalcol hit 20,000 downloads with Polygloss, her language learning app, without spending a dime on ads. Here's what's been working so far, and what she plans to implement going forward.
Want to share something with over 100,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
☠️ Is Cold Outreach Dead?
by Sam Hartmann
How many indie hackers do cold outreach? There are so many ways to do it, including:
- Twitter DMs.
- Email.
- Phone calls.
- Knocking on doors.
- Talking to strangers.
Can any business be successful without cold outreach? Interested in hearing from other founders on this!
Be clear on who you're serving
RJ Youngling believes that cold outreach absolutely works, but you have to be clear on your ideal customer:
When people say that cold outreach doesn't work, it's usually coming from engineers who look at marketing with disdain, then wonder why it doesn't work. The single most important thing with cold outreach is something that everyone skips: Your positioning! If you're sending emails out willy-nilly, don't be surprised at a lack of results. You won't sell your amazing beef burgers at a vegan conference!
What very specific problem do you solve for which very specific audience? After determining that, you need to make sure that your solution comes at a price point that's either lower than the value gained, or lower than the cost of leaving the problem unsolved.
Once you have those elements, the next step is to simply start talking to your target segment in your target market. Make your messaging clear and attractive. Here's more on nailing your positioning.
Of course, cold outreach isn't going to work for everyone; that's just how marketing goes. Tactics are simply tools! Some tactics will work for some founders and not others. That being said, I suspect that a good majority of people who say that cold outreach doesn't work can make it work by implementing the elements above, in order.
Cold outreach...in 2022?
Ash Rahman thinks that cold outreach is obsolete:
For indie hackers, cold outreach should be a last resort.
Why? This is 2022! Nobody wants to talk to a salesperson. People like to discover things themselves, and purchase when they think it makes sense for them.
Cold outreach is not scalable, and also consider the mental toll it takes to see all of the rejections. Angry prospects threatening litigation doesn't sound fun to me! I also believe that cold outreach has become too saturated to be a viable marketing tool anymore.
I think that founders should only consider cold outreach when everything else has been exhausted. Go out into the wild and network with people in a meaningful way. Help your target users discover you organically. They should feel like they found you, not the other way around, and you certainly don't want them feeling like you've tricked them just to sell your product or service.
Keep in mind that it's different if you have a dedicated sales team. Getting a "no" is part of the job for a sales team, but for a founder, it can ruin productive hours and motivation. Founders need to be creative with their time.
Slam dunk
Many founders swear by cold outreach! Onur Genes says that it has been one of keys to success for his business:
I have sent more than 50K emails so far, and I've been able to close a lot of deals that way. I know that many indie hackers may see cold outreach as being spammy, but it doesn't have to be. You are sending those emails for a real purpose, and if your tool is helpful, you've improved the trajectory of that business!
A quick guide:
- Narrow down your ideal customer profile.
- Gather emails. There are services you can use to scrape business databases for the email addresses that you need.
- Add a good icebreaker. (Nureply can help with this!)
- Keep it short and sweet, and gauge interest.
Cold outreach is also a powerful validation method!
Heleana Tiburca agrees:
Cold outreach can be pretty addicting when it actually works! I think that some of the most pivotal points in my career have cold outreach at their roots. It's helped me to meet amazing advisors and partners, and also land clients.
My quick hack for cold outreach? Find the community manager, not the CEO. Read more on that here!
Has cold outreach worked for you? Share your experience below!
Discuss this story.
📰 In the News
from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
📱 Twitter is currently testing an edit feature, and a "Twitter Circle" feature.
💲 The UK has slipped down to the world's sixth largest economy, dropping behind India.
🚲 People who bought Pelotons early in the pandemic are now trying to unload them.
📉 Amazon's cost-cutting is a warning.
😶🌫️ Tired of Zoom meetings? Get ready for hologram meetings.
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
💻 Trend Alert: Conversion Rate Optimization
from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley
Why it matters
You can get more sales without getting more traffic.
Problem
The average website conversion rate is 2-3%. You're losing customers with a below average conversion rate.
Solution
Optimize your website to boost the percentage of people who convert. A 1% to 2% conversion rate change is a 100% increase in sales.
Players
Conversion rate optimization experiments:
Conversion rate optimization tools:
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Unbounce: Build your landing pages with AI.
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Zonka: Get live feedback from website visitors.
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Proof: Show live social proof stats on your website.
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Pricery.io: Optimize your pricing for international sales.
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ParityDeals: Offer customers a discount based on their location.
Predictions
- Brands will use interactive site experiences to boost conversions and adapt to rising customer acquisition costs. The New York Times uses the Wordle game to collect email addresses. Austin Belcak with Cultivated Culture uses a spin-to-win popup to capture email addresses.
- Companies will use branded chatbots to build trust with site visitors. Optimizely has an Optibot to assist visitors. Dominos Pizza launched "Dom," a pizza ordering assistant.
- More brands will invest in augmented reality to take products from websites into homes. Apple lets you see a MacBook in your workspace. The IKEA Place app lets you place true-to-scale furniture in your home.
Opportunities
- Use personal videos and GIFs on your landing pages to boost engagement. Marie Ng uses screen recorded GIFs of her Llama Life productivity app in action. Miss Excel uses a special video trailer to promote each of her courses.
- Pick a form of social proof and feature it prominently next to your products. Secret Lab created an entire page dedicated to the awards that its gaming chairs have won. Julian Cole features his Trust Pilot rating in the header of his course landing page.
- Use descriptive, contextual call-to-action buttons. On Deck uses "Find Your Community." Carmax uses "Find Your Car." Airbnb uses "Try Hosting."
- Use tiered pricing to give buyers more options. Appeal to different budgets by offering multiple packages. Launch House offers two tiers for its membership, with one requiring an application. Arvid Kahl offers two tiers for his Find Your Following Twitter course: A $19 quick start option and a $49 deep dive.
Risks
- Sample size: Your data can be skewed without enough traffic. The more traffic you have, the sooner you'll have reliable results.
- Lead quality: Reducing fields and removing friction will get more leads, but lower quality leads.
Key lessons
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Make sure that your page speed loads in three seconds or less. Slow websites aren't just annoying, they prevent sales.
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Make your headline clear and convincing. Up to 80% of visitors never make it past the fold.
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Know which levers to pull. Optimize these variables on your landing pages:
- Images that draw interest.
- Headlines that hook the reader.
- Social proof that builds authority.
- Page speed that doesn't cause them to bounce.
- A call-to-action that feels natural and conversational.
- A value proposition that solves a clear problem.
Hot takes
- Machine learning will be used to personalize each website visit. Landing page copy will change based on a visitor's interests.
- There will be a surge in demand for conversion rate optimization strategists, outpacing roles like paid ads specialists.
Haters
"I don't know where to start optimizing. I don't want to fix something that isn't broken."
Growth often requires risk. Your landing page might not be broken, but it can always be better. Experimentation is the price we pay for improvements.
"Won't the law of diminishing returns come into play?"
Maybe. But the same applies to pay-per-click advertising. At least conversion rate optimization does not lead to marginal costs for diminishing returns.
"Conversion rate optimization tools are too expensive."
Google Analytics is free. Start somewhere. Knowing something is better than knowing nothing.
"Doesn't conversion rate optimization require an understanding of almost everything? Copy, design, analytics, etc."
Start small. Change your copy. Add FAQs. Include testimonials. You don't have to boil the ocean or be a designer to improve your landing page.
Links
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What's your favorite conversion optimization tip? The tweet behind this report.
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Google Optimize: A free tool to test landing page changes with no coding required.
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Demand Curve Landing Page Tear-downs: See the methods used by the highest-converting pages.
Related reports
More reports
Go here to get the Trends Pro report. It contains 200% more insights. You also get access to the entire back catalog and the next 52 Pro Reports.
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Trends.vc for more.
🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week
🤏 In one sentence, what is your product? Posted by Wolfeleven.
💸 I spent $2K on Facebook ads. Posted by Andrew Kamphey.
📝 50 top subreddits to share your infoproduct. Posted by Leon.
🧐 Do you write tests? Posted by Fredrik.
🗓 I delayed launch seven times. Posted by Miguel Lima.
💭 What do wish you'd known when you launched? Posted by AllOutNerdClan.
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.
🤩 Etiene Dalcol Hit 20K Downloads With No Ad Spend
by Etiene Dalcol
Hi, indie hackers! I'm Etiene Dalcol, founder of Polygloss, a language learning app. We've just broken our previous record of downloads for the fifth month in a row! We've hit nearly 20K downloads without spending a single cent on ads. Also, all of our downloads are organic:
If you're learning a language, the way our app works is very simple: You pick an image and write a short message about it to another player. It's recommended for intermediate speakers or very brave beginners!
Here's some data from the last 28 days:
- 4.3K+ downloads on Android and 506 downloads on iOS.
- $465 in total revenue, with $67 MRR.
- 37K+ texts written by players.
- 77 languages included. The top language learned is Welsh, followed by English, then French.
Read on for more!
Taking off
Things really started taking off back in April. Here's a few things that made it happen:
- It was the end of the tests on our iOS app, and its launch into the App Store. The Android app was made first.
- It was when our junior developer started updating our website from the ugly placeholder that it was before.
- Among other places, I announced the launch on Reddit, and it got over 1K upvotes. This generated a lot of downloads.
- The download spike generated lots of good reviews. Our app rating is 4.9 stars, which is excellent in comparison to our competitors.
- I paid a freelancer video producer to make us an app trailer, which I added to the Play Store page.
I'm not sure which of these factors influenced our growth, or if it was a combination, but after that, the Play Store started recommending our app to users who were casually browsing. As of today, the majority of our Android downloads come from Google Play Explore. I have not been blessed by the algorithms like this on iOS yet, but the downloads there are increasing!
August changes
Here's what I did in August to keep progressing in my business:
- Programmed new features, fixed lots of bugs, and published a new version of the app.
- Added lifetime subscriptions to the app.
- Wrote a newsletter to our list of ~18K subscribers.
- Posted about the app in different communities with relevant data. For example, when I noticed that Welsh players had the highest average of texts per player, I posted about it in Welsh communities on Facebook and Reddit, which resulted in the app taking off within those spaces. Targeted content behaves a lot better than randomly spamming places.
- Shared every win whenever I could both on my personal Twitter (4.5K followers) and LinkedIn (1K followers), and on the Polygloss Twitter and Instagram (2.3K and1.2K followers, respectively).
- Interacted with every single person who engaged with me on Twitter.
- Made stickers and flyers that I spread across my neighborhood. That didn't really impact downloads at all, but it made me feel good because the materials were pretty! It also means that I had stickers to give as gifts, so I added them to the prize package for the winners of our testimonial contest.
- Kept mentoring a junior developer who's now developing a Python program to reprocess some of our data.
Plans for September
- Even though we have been somewhat successful without it so far, I do plan to spend some money on ads! I have some budget saved for this (~$800), and given the impact that the lifetime licenses made this month, I feel that it's a great time to try this.
- I also paid copywriters for three blog posts last month, and will start publishing them in September for some SEO.
- Keep mentoring the junior developer.
- Do some more coding, and look into raising capital.
- Publish some of the data for open science research. The players can choose to donate their texts, and I really want to share the ones involving minority languages. It would be pretty cool to get a public grant for that, but so far I haven't found any to apply to.
- Take more time off.
To pay my bills and stay afloat so far, I have been freelancing as a senior software engineer. The contracting gets me about $2K per month. This is a significant salary cut from the six figures that I made in the past, but I usually don't exceed 10 hours per week of contracting. Honestly, even if I didn't have my own projects to pursue, I couldn't see myself working full-time for others again. So, this is a pretty sweet deal for me, given my needs!
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 Sam Hartmann, Priyanka Vazirani, Dru Riley, and Etiene Dalcol for contributing posts. —Channing
