🗞 What's New: Cloudflare's making it easier to build new products

Software is usually built on top of other software:

• In the past several months, Cloudflare has released several products that can help you build complex products at a lower cost, and ship your MVP faster. Check out the new possibilities!
• The education niche was always ripe for unbundling, and TikTok is the platform to leverage this. Class is in session with these new opportunities below.
• Founder Paul Nitu built and sold his first Android app for 5 times its annual revenue. Here's why he builds before finding users, and why he believes that unique product ideas aren't necessary.

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

☁️ Cloudflare is Making it Easier to Build New Products

from the Growth & Acquisition Channels newsletter by Darko

Software is built on top of other software. When companies release a new feature, it opens up a whole new world of opportunities for users to do things that they couldn't before.

The same is true for the software that powers software. When something new is released, it opens up a whole world of possibilities for building something that was previously expensive or inconvenient to build.

In the past two months, Cloudflare has released several products that make it easier to build. This is fantastic for bootstrapped founders! Rather than hiring a team of expensive infrastructure engineers, you can now simply build on top of Cloudflare products and ship your MVP faster.

Let's take a closer look!

Build real-time video and audio apps

There are several types of real-time apps, including those that do:

• One-to-one broadcasting: This is about connecting two separate individuals on a one-to-one basis.
• One-to-many broadcasting: This broadcasts a live or recorded video to multiple viewers.
• Many-to-many broadcasting: This connects many people at the same time. Think Zoom.

Cloudflare recently made it incredibly convenient and cheap to build these kinds of apps. Here's how:

1. One-to-one and one-to-many:

On September 21, Cloudflare announced that its Stream Live service is available to everyone. This is a feature that allows developers to build live video features in websites and native apps.

What this allows you to create:

• An app that enables people to create online TV stations.
• A platform to connect artists to their fans for live concerts.
• Webinar software.

Google, and other third-party software, already have livestreaming APIs, but the pricing is quite expensive when compared to Cloudflare.

Cloudflare charges $1 per 1K minutes delivered, no matter the resolution, etc. In comparison, other services charge $6 per 100 minutes of video, just for transcoding:

If your livestreaming SaaS gets some traction, you can easily imagine how costs could skyrocket. With Cloudflare, you can likely stay bootstrapped for much longer as you grow.

2. Real-time livestreaming:

Here's a fact about real-time video: It's not exactly real time.

Providers like YouTube and Facebook constantly face latency issues. This means that it there could be up to 20+ seconds between the time you stream your video and the time your viewers see it.

On September 27, Cloudflare announced livestreaming with sub-second latency, which is a huge deal if you want to build something like:

• Live sports betting.
• Live video auctions.
• Live viewer Q&As.
• Real-time collaboration and interaction of all sorts.

All of this just became possible thanks to this feature. According to Cloudflare:

3. Many-to-many:

Cloudflare announced Cloudflare Calls, a set of APIs where you can build things like:

• A video conferencing app with a custom UI.
• An interactive conversation where the moderators can invite select audience members onstage as speakers.
• A privacy-first group workout app where only the instructor can view all of the participants, while the participants can only view the instructor.
• Remote fireside chats, where one or multiple people can have a video call with an audience of 10K+ people in real time.
• Interactive webinar software where audience members can join for live Q&As.

Currently, Cloudflare Calls is in closed beta, but with the ways things are going, I expect it to be open beta or general availability by mid-2023.

Bootstrappers can now build real-time apps. With this kind of pricing, you could build a whole range of B2B or B2C tools that previously required a large amount of capital to build.

Host files without worrying about bandwidth

On September 29, Cloudflare announced that its R2 service is available.

R2 is like Amazon S3, but without bandwidth costs. This has prompted developers to wonder whether this is too good to be true. So far, nobody has reported that their account was disabled for maxing out bandwidth. Cloudflare does have a pretty decent reputation when it comes to reliability.

What this allows you to create:

• An image hosting service where you don't have to fear a specific customer going viral and consuming lots of bandwidth.
• A file hosting service with competitive pricing.
• A competitively-priced backup tool.

Website popularity tools

Cloudflare announced Radar Domain Rankings, a list of the most popular domains on the web.

Amazon had a service called Alexa, which it shut down at the end of 2021. Alexa provided a "top million" list of the most popular domains on the web.

Cloudflare's list has a different format, allowing you to access the top 200, 500, 1K, 2K, etc. domains:

What this allows you to create: Businesses want to know how they compare to competitors in overall popularity. You could build a tool around that.

Another idea is to create a service that will discover trending websites that have a rapid increase in traffic. You could also analyze the reason behind the growth.

Tools to play with incoming email

Receiving individual emails is not as easy as you think. You need to worry about servers, uptime, programming logic, etc.

Cloudflare announced that its email routing service is leaving beta. You can also use email routing via an API.

What this allows you to create:

• Email forwarding services.
• A way for people to communicate via email in a marketplace.
• Anonymized communication.

Managed, cheap databases

Back in May, Cloudflare announced its plans for D1, a managed SQLite database. Four months later, it announced a queue database without the bandwidth fees.

What this allows you to create: This is more about how easy it is to get up and running. Services like DigitalOcean made it easy to have a managed database, and Cloudflare should make it even easier.

Which Cloudflare feature would you build around? Share your thoughts!

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Growth & Acquisition Channels for more.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

📱 Here's the app people are flocking to after leaving Twitter.

🙅‍♀️ Anime fans are displeased with AI-generated manga in Japan.

🪙 78% of Bitcoin has not been used in the past six months.

🌤 Permanent daylight savings time could harm your health.

👩‍❤️‍👨 Inflation is making cheap dates trendy.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🎶 The Unbundling of TikTok

from the Hustle Newsletter by Julia Janks

The unbundling of TikTok

Revyze is a French startup cashing in on the short-form video craze. The company recently raised ~$2M to build the TikTok of education.

Its app, which attracted 35K downloads in a few weeks, is focused solely on high school educational content. In particular, it caters to France's baccalauréat curriculum, which is the national qualification that students obtain in their final year.

*Source: Trends and TikTok

The company plans to expand to the US in the next 12 months.

The concept works because students would rather learn from their peers than teachers. The issue with TikTok is that it's generalist, whereas Revyze filters out any noneducational content.

What's more, TikTok is horrible for anyone with privacy concerns, and many creators are saying that virality on the platform is dying off.

The education niche was always ripe for unbundling. The #LearnOnTikTok hashtag has 422B views, and #TeachersOfTikTok exploded from 475M in March 2020 to 35B+ today.

You could break the niche down even further by creating "The TikTok of [X] educational content." For example, the #history hashtag, which already had 807M views in March 2020, now has a whopping 56B+ views.

AI-generated Facebook Ads

It's no secret that AI is already disrupting the content and digital marketing space. Two weeks ago, we wrote about how Trends members are using AI tools to assist with writing all sorts of projects.

AI has long been used in copy creation, but it's only fairly recently that the technology advanced into visuals.

Now, platforms like Omneky, which raised $3M last year, are using the technology to offer a turnkey SaaS solution for social media ads that uses AI to:

• Generate ad copy.
• Create ad visuals.
• Analyze best-performing ads and create new, optimized ones based on results.

The software, which integrates with Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Snapchat accounts, is designed to make digital ads more effective, efficient, and affordable to create.

*Omneky dashboard. Source: Omneky

Founders could replicate the Omneky AI model for different digital marketing offerings, like landing page creation and optimization.

While there are plenty of sites that already use AI to generate landing page copy, the Omneky differentiator is that the AI tests performance of landing pages overall, and suggests upgrades.

Or, take a page out of Jim Huffman's book and create a niche AI digital marketing SaaS for a particular channel. Not to drone on about TikTok, but we already know that marketers are desperate for help, and looking to automate TikTok content. Your niche platform could create content and ads.

What are your thoughts on the unbundling of TikTok? Let's chat below!

Subscribe to the Hustle Newsletter for more.

🧠 Harry's Growth Tip

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

The power of three:

• Two specifics: “One click. No passwords.”
• One punchline: “The world's fastest...”

Go here for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.

🛠 Paul Nitu Built and Sold His First Android App

by Paul Nitu

Hi, indie hackers! I'm Paul Nitu, founder of Carena, an app that gives you quick access to any car's specifications. I just launched Carena on Product Hunt!

My background is a little different than others in the technical field, but that didn’t stop me from learning how to code. I used to be a lawyer, but I decided to learn how to code because I saw much more potential in this field. I really liked the idea of building something that others can use, so I learned Android development. After several months, I got a job as an Android developer.

Read on for more about my journey!

The app

While it’s okay for some app ideas to be unique, generally you should stick to what already works. Avoid trying to reinvent the wheel. I got my idea by checking out existing apps in the Play Store, and stumbling upon a cool customization app that allowed users to apply different styles to their phone’s volume sliders. I decided to try to build something similar.

This wasn’t the first idea that popped into my head. Most of my previous app ideas were abandoned after a short while because new ideas always seemed more shiny. Looking back, I should have invested more diligence into the research phase.

Is it necessary to have an original idea? Definitely not. If you see apps that are already successful, it means that consumers want those apps, so you can try to replicate their success. The goal is to build something better than those competitors, not copy their apps.

The launch

I built the app in a few months and launched it in the Play Store. I know that most people work to get customers before actually building an app, but I’m not sure if that is always the best strategy.

In my case, who would sign up for a customization app that hadn't been built yet, when they could already access alternative apps in the Play Store? It made more sense for me to build first before trying to find customers.

After launching the app, I posted about it on Reddit (r/androidapps) and on Product Hunt. A few days laters, my app got featured in a couple of tech blog posts. This resulted in a few hundred downloads. The app design was really simple and pleasing, which was probably the reason that the authors included the app in their posts in the first place.

These sort of promotions kept happening over time. I found out that my app was included in all sorts of YouTube videos, TikTok videos, and a few other blog posts.

Build it and they will come?

Well, not entirely, but you should focus on building something that’s simple, useful, and has great UI. It’s more likely that people will share your app if they enjoy its functionality and UI, which will help you get more organic downloads.

Listen to user feedback. It’s important to have an app that works well, so try to fix reported bugs or crashes. Otherwise, you will end up getting bad reviews. Some users will give your app one star reviews even if it works perfectly, but don’t waste time worrying about them.

Avoid feature creep. You don’t have to build every feature that is requested by users. Try to keep the app as simple as possible.

The offer

Roughly one year after I launched the app, I got an email from someone who was interested in an acquisition.

At first, I didn’t want to sell because I didn't think it had reached its full potential yet. At this point, my app had been downloaded about 300K times, while two competitor apps had around 5M-10M total downloads. I figured that I still had a lot of room for growth.

After thinking about it for a while, though, I decided to sell. I wanted to spend my time building other projects instead of focusing on growing this app further. Their initial plan was to offer me 2-3x my app’s ARR, but after some negotiation, we agreed on my ARR times five.

A few takeaways:

• Spend more time on the research phase.
• Focus on product quality and design, as it’s easier to get organic traffic when your product is in good shape.
• Don’t agree to the first offer that you receive.

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 Darko, Priyanka Vazirani, Julia Janks, Harry Dry, and Paul Nitu for contributing posts. —Channing