🗞 What's New: Feeling less isolated as a solo founder

The solo founder path can be a lonely one:

• Remember, you are not alone. The tips below can help you connect with others to beat the loneliness that can arise on your founder's journey.
• Looking to level up your marketing? These marketing hacks can help you increase your margins by using bounce-back flows and automating your TikTok content.
• Founder Chris Pattison increased organic search traffic by 19x overnight for his customer experience platform, Squeaky. Here's the tiny, simple update that he implemented to achieve this!

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

🤗 Feeling Less Isolated as a Solo Founder

by James Fleischmann

The solo founder path can be a lonely one. I did a little digging into what indie hackers can do to feel less isolated and more supported. Read on for more!

Find community online

• Indie Hackers: This is the most obvious place to start. We're all here, we all understand the ups and downs of indie hacking, and we're all pretty supportive. Since you're here, you're doing something right.
• Digital meetups: There are lots of digital meetups happening. Check out Indie Hackers meetups, or head to Meetup.
• Remote co-working: A surprising number of indie hackers use these. A good example is Ramen Club.
• Accountability buddies: Find someone you can report to, and vice versa. FocusMate is one community for this.
• Start a newsletter: This may be an unexpected one, but since starting my newsletter, I've had a ton of people reach out to me to discuss interesting things. It feels like I'm building a little community.

Find community IRL

• In-person meetups: Indie Hackers has IRL meetups happening all the time.
• Coffee shops: For me, getting out of the house and heading to a coffee shop is super helpful. The baristas know my name and order, and we have a friendly chat each time I see them. It's not much, but I really enjoy it. Try frequenting the same place, and getting to know the staff and other patrons.
• Hack-a-thons: This is a great way to meet new developers and geek out together. Here are a few places to find them.
• Volunteer: This one’s a little different from the rest, but it might be one of the most impactful. To find places to volunteer, check out VolunteerMatch.
• Chamber of Commerce: Here's a cool one for folks in the US. Get involved with your local Chamber of Commerce. Here's how to join.
• Groups: When I moved to town, I started a men's group. I just put it out in the local bulletin, and a group of eight guys came together. Start and join local groups!
• Classes: No matter what the subject, classes are a great way to meet people.
• Gyms and exercise groups: I have a friend who joined a trail running group, and loved it. Gyms can be communities, too.

A few tips to beat loneliness

• Try random acts of kindness: You probably won't get to know anyone doing this, but you'll likely feel less lonely.
• Take advantage of your flexibility: Indie hackers tend to have much more flexible schedules than most folks. Make the most of it. Meet up when others can meet up, go to that mid-afternoon class, etc.
• Focus on relationships: Spending time with friends and family is huge. Share your journey with them, even if they don't understand it. Rekindling old friendships can be helpful, too. You could also get a furry friend. They're great for company, and dogs are particularly good at meeting new people!

Wrapping up

A lot of this is easier said than done. It feels weird, and it can be hard to make new friends as an adult. But you've just got to bite the bullet. It'll be worth it in the end!

Remember, you are not alone.

How do you connect with others as a solo founder? Let's chat below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

📱 Salesforce is coming to TikTok.

🚀 Jack Dorsey is launching a new social network.

🎬 Disney has unveiled its first plus-size heroine.

🤮 Investors detest Mark Zuckerberg.

🌋 Hawaii residents have been warned that the world's largest active volcano could erupt.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

📈 Marketing Hacks: Increasing Margins

from the Hustle Newsletter by Shân Osborn

Bounce-back flow

Thanks to high acquisition costs, most e-commerce brands are lucky to break even on a first purchase. So, it's vital to turn first-time buyers into second-time buyers.

One way to do this: Capture your customers in their most excited state via a bounce-back flow. Trendster Michael Galvin takes us through the process.

What is a bounce-back flow?

It's a pop-up or email that fires off within five minutes of a first purchase. It attracts high open and placed order rates because:

• The customer is still in their most engaged phase: They just bought something.
• It has a deadline (urgency).
• It has a discount (incentive).

*Example of bounce-back flow from The Jelly Bee

Your flow must show the customer specific products that are:

• Bestsellers. You already know that these products move.
• Low cost. This allows customers to easily take action.
• High margin.

In summary: Relevant offer + well-timed pitch + definite deadline = boost in repeat sales.

A bounce-back flow is distinct from other post-purchase upsells. You can also tweak them to suit your brand, like offering first time buyers a personalized micro-store if your brand stocks numerous SKUs.

*Drop any questions on Michael's post here.

Automating TikTok content

Trendster JJ Skarzynski is blowing up our Facebook group (again). Back in June, he blew our minds with his strategy for automating Reddit to find micro-influencers, with a 70% response rate.

Now, he's talking TikTok. JJ noticed that videos of Reddit posts are popular on TikTok. Why?

Here's how it works:

• TikTokers put a video of some interesting gameplay in the background (usually Minecraft parkour, or something like that).
• On top of that, they put a screenshot of a Reddit post.
• Then, they put a robot text-to-speech audio, reading the post.

Sounds crazy, but posts like these get millions of views.

So, JJ figured out how to use Zapier to automate these posts for a TikTok account that he manages for Daily Idea. Some of his videos have thousands of views.

*Source: TikTok

The possibilities are endless here.

Per JJ:

Will you add these hacks to your marketing strategy? Share below!

Subscribe to the Hustle Newsletter for more.

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

📝 15 best directories to post your startup. Posted by Xavier Coiffard.

💭 What's your biggest problem as a founder? Posted by TonikeKH.

👀 Share your product and ideal customer profile. Posted by Brandon Strellis.

🤔 What growth tactic have you been wanting to try? Posted by John Ryan.

🔎 Twitter search is more powerful than you think. Posted by Zilvinas Kucinskas.

📚 How did you learn to code? Posted by Zach Ang.

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.

💻 Chris Pattison Increased Organic Search Traffic Overnight

by Chris Pattison

Hi, indie hackers! I'm Chris Pattison, founder of Squeaky, a privacy-first customer experience platform. We increased our organic search traffic by 19x overnight, and it's stabilized at the new level. Here's the trick we used!

One simple hack

I know this sounds like clickbait, but it's actually comically easy how we did it.

Our blog only has eight articles so far, but it occurred to me that it was enough content to have a "Latest Articles" carousel at the bottom of each post. We added one on October 13, and overnight, our organic search traffic went from ~130 a month to ~2.5K. And it's stayed there!

Although this may not be the exact cause, the odds of the improvement happening immediately after one of the only changes we've made to our blog structure in 7-8 months are vanishingly small.

Ultimately, adding a scalable option that increases internal linking between pages is undoubtedly good advice. After we made that change, our search performance spiked. But, as with all things SEO, there's a lot of ambiguity.

Building backlinks

~90% of our backlinks came from our first article exploding on Hacker News, then big domains linked to it from their own posts. Our article was about why we don't use a staging environment. Then, newsletters and websites would write their own articles, like "Should you use a staging environment?" In it, they'd mention that they were inspired by our article to cover the topic. The steady stream of people that still read that article seven months later helped our other articles get discovered and shared.

The remaining 10% came from creating interesting long-form content and sharing it in the right places (i.e. appropriate subreddits). We tend to notice that it then gets added to other people's newsletters, blogs, and websites.

We've also tried reaching out to sites and asking if they'd include our platform in their articles. That sometimes works, but it's not very efficient since many don't reply. We also haven't paid for links.

tl;dr: We got lucky that our first post was somewhat controversial (it wasn't meant to be), and that put us at an advantage from day one. Naturally, some of those backlinks gradually faded away, but we've stabilized and grown after that, mostly by writing great content and sharing it with the right audiences.

Our blog content

We're new entrants in a very established market, including companies like Hotjar, which has teams of writers pumping out endless content. We actually knew there was no hope of Squeaky competing on core topics around the domain.

With that in mind, we took a somewhat different approach: We decided to just write about topics that we're interested in. We took the view that, as a designer and a developer, we have similar interests as our audience. Therefore, we decided to write content for our audience, not necessarily around our product. I actually mentioned it on Indie Hackers at the time.

So, we write about things related to design, engineering, and product development. People who like those topics also need products like ours, and we're much more able to compete for keywords since we're discussing hot topics. It's great for us to write about random topics that we are interested in, rather than churning out generic feature-related content.

We also include product updates in the blog. This is content that we'd write anyway, and it's a nice way to add some product specific content to the blog without selling our features. We're instead just highlighting that we're moving incredibly fast to bring new value to our users!

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 James Fleischmann, Priyanka Vazirani, Shân Osborn, and Chris Pattison for contributing posts. —Channing