🗞 What's New: The pressure to stay active on social media

So many social media platforms, so little time:

• As founders, your user acquisition efforts may involve many different platforms. How do you juggle them all without becoming overwhelmed? This advice can help.
• With new privacy laws hitting the books globally, customer data is more important than ever before. These tips can help ensure that your customers, and your business, are on lock when it comes to protection.
• Founder Wilson Wilson hit $250 in monthly revenue after landing his first customer. Here's how he kickstarted growth, and the cold DM that landed him his first customer (who ultimately signed up for the premium tier)!

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

🤹‍♀️ Frustrated With Juggling Social Media Platforms

by Ahmed Saleh

Between Indie Hackers, Hacker News, Twitter, Reddit, Quora, TikTok, and others, there are so many platforms for tech founders to leverage. How do you juggle them all without it consuming all of your time? Is there any real benefit from joining and investing time into these communities?

Message > platform

Cherepukhin says that the most important thing here is not the platform, but your message:

You should try to develop an authentic perspective, voice, and insight. It will help you solidify why people should follow you. Once you've developed your voice, put some effort into the content that will deliver your message. Choose your first channel depending on the type of content that will best help get your message across, then repurpose your content to fit any additional platforms that you choose. Don't feel pressure to be on everything.

Curation station

Andrei Maguleanu says that the key is to avoid mindlessly scrolling:

If I'm mindlessly scrolling all day long, I ultimately get nothing done. To avoid this, I set social media goals for myself: At least once I day, I spend no more than an hour going through all the platforms that I want to check, including Indie Hackers, Reddit, Discord, and Slack.

I also try to carefully curate what I check. For some platforms, that might mean just the front page, or just the top posts of the day. My default mode is overconsumption, so if I didn't limit myself, I'd be wasting an unbelievable amount of time on social media!

See it as a net positive

Mustafa Ergisi sees being active online as a good thing, both personally and professionally:

Staying active on social media makes me feel more connected to other people, and helps me stay inspired when I'm working on projects.

Twitter is a great place to post your content, but you have to be really careful about the timing. If you post at the wrong time, no one will see it.

Reddit is a great option for getting more exposure and engagement on your content, but it can be tricky to find the right niche or subreddit. You'll want to do some research on what kinds of posts already get traction in that subreddit before posting!

Hacker News is also a good option for sharing your content. You should try posting at different times of day to see what works best for you.

Don't commit to them all at once

Stephen says that, if you're just starting out, you should choose just one:

Which one you choose will really depend on who you're targeting, but don't overexert yourself initially.

Reddit and Hacker News are not really into self-promotion, so be careful about being overly aggressive; it could backfire there. Twitter is good, but it can feel like shouting into a void until you get that initial traction.

Choose what's easiest

Luca Fedrizzi reminds founders that every platform has its own vocabulary and rules:

Some platforms require more energy than others. I bounce between them, but focus on Twitter. Since I had already been using it and became familiar with it for my personal account, it made using it for my business a bit easier and more intuitive.

My suggestion is to choose the platforms that are easiest for you to use, and invest the majority of your social media energy there.

How do you manage your social media platforms? Share your experience below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

📱 Twitter is planning to add a scrolling feed of videos.

📝 Ukraine has formally applied for NATO membership.

🍎 Apple's selloff has wiped out $120B in market value.

💁‍♀️ A Shark Tank investor says that most of his investment returns come from companies led by women.

🍝 TikTok is changing our encounters with food, and it's not a good thing.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🔒 Managing Customer Data Properly

from the Hustle Newsletter by The Trends Team

With new privacy laws hitting the books in the US, customer data is a bigger deal than ever before.

To steer clear of trouble, Trends by The Hustle asked startup founder and privacy consultant Ben Isaacson what every business needs to know. Check out his tips below!

Privacy, please

1. Take a privacy-by-design approach:

When it comes to privacy, there's a difference between what's required by law and what is just good practice. From Ben:

Think through the entire process of capturing, storing, using, and potentially sharing their information, and ask yourself:

• Where should we put guardrails in place?
• What do we need to notify people about or get consent for?

*Source: Know Your Meme

The EU's GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is the gold standard for privacy law. Its core principles include collecting as little data as possible, having good security, and keeping records of how data is handled. Here's Ben:

2. Don't be a cookie monster:

If you're going to collect those tasty cookies, it's best practice to proactively seek consent from website users first, Ben advised:

Check the laws in your jurisdiction. In the EU, users must opt in to cookies, whereas in California, users must have the opportunity to opt out.

There is no sugarcoating it: Cookie notifications and acceptance screens are a nuisance. But there are ways to make them more effective and user-friendly:

• Give users an option to decline or customize their cookie preferences, even if they click accept instead. People like having options!
• Let users know how cookies could improve their experience, i.e. through personalized content.
• Make the call to action clear: "Agree and continue" > "Okay"

The same principles apply to marketing emails. Always get consent, and make the opt-out process a breeze.

*Source: The Guardian

3. People actually read privacy notices:

Privacy policies have an important legal function, and some customers care a lot about them. Ben said:

Make it really easy for customers to find out if that's what you're doing, and opt out if they don't want that. You can also add an index, a video, or a quick summary to help users navigate the legalese.

*Source: The Guardian

4. Don't skimp on storage:

As we've mentioned before, a data breach costs a company $4.3M on average. Use reputable providers for storage and security. At the very least, check the sale page to ensure that providers are ISO or SOC2 certified.

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

Subscribe to the Hustle Newsletter for more.

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

🚀 SaaS growth tips that actually work. Posted by GregariousHermit.

🛠 Your tech stack does matter. Posted by Volkan Kaya.

💻 Why you shouldn't use a website builder. Posted by Zach Ang.

🗓 I built my MVP in seven days. Posted by Milan Mot.

🥺 Is it time to give up on my idea? Posted by Gui Latrova.

🗣 A game changer for effective marketing. Posted by Denizcan Sanlav.

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.

🤑 Wilson Wilson Hit $250 MRR With His First Customer

by Wilson Wilson

Hi, everyone! I'm Wilson Wilson, and I recently hit $250 MRR with Senja, a tool for collecting, aggregating, managing, and sharing customer reviews and comments. I started building it on January 2 as a direct competitor to products like Endorsal and Testimonial.

I worked on my product for six months with no customers and no recurring revenue. Here, I'm sharing what it took to break out of zero revenue. Hopefully, this will give other founders inspiration to do the same!

The background

The popular tools used to collect and manage testimonials were either slow, expensive, or ugly. I wanted to do things in a more fun, exciting way than the competition, so I gave it a shot. I had really high expectations when we first started, thinking I'd get to $5K MRR within six months, but alas, that was not the case!

I spent January and February building the first version of my product. At launch, I gained 65 users. But guess what? None of them became paying customers, and only one of them was actively using my product. After that, signups were sporadic.

From April to the first half of June, I got around 20 signups per month, all of them usually coming from Twitter. Up until this point, I had earned $350 from two lifetime deal (LTD) sales, and had $0 MRR.

Everything started changing for the better at the end of June.

Kickstarting growth

Here's what helped things turn around for me:

1. Building a unique, valuable product:

Up until June, I had no real vision for Senja. I had solved my own problem by embedding a fast wall of positive comments, but I didn’t know what else the market wanted. I didn’t know how to innovate.

So, I just copied a lot from the competitors that I was trying to replace. In doing that, I wasn't bringing anything new to the table.

That’s where Olly came in. Towards the end of June, Oliver Meakings joined me as Senja’s cofounder. He knew the market, and had felt the pain of collecting and managing testimonials firsthand. He knew we needed to build something that people actually found valuable. After he joined, he immediately started dumping ideas that would shape Senja’s future.

Building a faster or more beautiful product usually isn’t enough to get people to pick you over the competition. You need to have unique selling points and a vision of your own to actually succeed. Some things that we would eventually start to do better than the competition include:

• Richer review management.
• Multiple forms for collecting different kinds of testimonials.
• More ways to embed and customize your testimonials.
• Automatic image generation from your testimonials.

These few features have already begun to give us an edge over our competition. In trying to determine what needed to be done first, we decided to start with onboarding.

2. Fixing our nonexistent onboarding:

When we first started, our onboarding was absolute garbage. We'd drop users into our app and expect them to explore until they found what they wanted.

Getting traffic and signups was never a problem for us. We were getting up to 3K visitors to our site every single month, but none of our users activated. They'd sign up, look around for a moment or two, then abandon the app and never return. There were no clear instructions on what to do when they got on. The two of us got to work, and with a few changes, our activation rate more than doubled!

Here’s a video breakdown of everything that we did. To summarize:

• We made sure that our users completed one primary action when they signed up, giving them value from the get-go. For us, this was creating their form.
• We artificially reduced the time to magical moments with dummy data and automation.
• We cut out the dead ends in our app, giving our users something to do on each screen.
• We improved the playfulness of our onboarding.

Once we did all of these things, our activation more than doubled, and we started getting a steady stream of customers.

3. Acquiring more users:

Up until September, our top acquisition channel was Twitter. In August, we started experimenting with more marketing methods.

We experimented with talking about our product on Indie Hackers, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Twitter:

70% of our customers came from Twitter. All I do is write about what I’m learning and the interesting things that happen to me. Somehow, it’s attracting the right crowd.

As for diversification, we’re starting to see the results of our efforts. This is what September looks like so far:

Twitter is still our number one channel, but we’ve started seeing more diversity in our analytics. BetaList also brought us 10-15 signups, and a lot of exposure.

4. Cold outreach:

I landed our first customer with cold DMs a few days ago. I found him using a Reddit audience research tool called GummySearch.

To start, I looked for people who were talking about collecting testimonials, and I found someone who was using screenshots as reviews on their website. Then, I sent this cold DM:

We talked for a bit, then he signed up and upgraded. I’m definitely going to try more cold outreach in the future!

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 Ahmed Saleh, Priyanka Vazirani, The Trends Team, and Wilson Wilson for contributing posts. —Channing