🗞 What's New: How to build and manage multiple products

Building and maintaining multiple products can be a challenge:

• Many indie hackers diversify their revenue streams by building several products. But how do you juggle them all? This guide will show you when, why, and how to build and run multiple products at the same time.
• Trying to grow a content-based business? The tips below can help! Hint: Always be launching, and leverage the power of interviews.
• Founder Bhanu Teja Pachipulusu hit $25,000 in annual revenue and 138 paying users in 8 months with Feather, his Notion-based blogging platform. Here's how he landed his first users, and what he would do differently in hindsight.

Want to share something with over 110,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

💪 Building Multiple Products

by James Fleischmann

Diversifying your revenue stream is always smart, particularly when there's talk of a recession.

Here's how indie hackers are expanding their offerings!

Why run multiple businesses?

I've seen folks arguing both for and against starting multiple companies. Some of the most common reasons for doing it include honing in on the love of building, diversifying revenue streams, learning more, and reaping the benefits of cross-promotion.

The most common reason among indie hackers for not running multiple businesses was that splitting focus means less time for each product. Your products may take longer to become successful than they would if you were to just focus on one.

That's why the right timing is important; it can actually help you mitigate that risk.

Running multiple businesses effectively

1. Be strategic about what you build:

The trick is to be very strategic about what you build. That means validating with a landing page before you build anything, then building an MVP and validating with that. Engage in step-by-step validation to minimize the risk of starting a new business.

Make sure that people will actually pay. You want each product to be in the same market and the same area of expertise. This will also help you grow your personal brand as an expert in that space.

Be sure to build low-maintenance products. SaaS products require a lot of upkeep, while downloadable apps and infoproducts are much easier. Consider launching just one SaaS, then a variety of other products.

In addition to maintenance, it's important to consider the length of time that it'll take to build in the first place. If it's helpful, here's a list of the fastest products to build!

2. Choose the right time to start:

Make sure the timing is right before you get started. It's generally best if your first product is already, at least partially, on autopilot. So, bring it to that point first. Stabilize your first business before building other products.

Of course, all of this assumes that you aren't doing something like a 12x12, in which case, the right time to launch a new product is right after launching the previous one.

3. Prioritize your work:

Okay, so you're now building multiple products simultaneously! At this stage, it's important to be strategic about your prioritization.

There are many methods for prioritizing. Let's break them down:

• DIE: My take is that the DIE method is best for indie hackers. Here, you measure demand, impact, and effort using this spreadsheet. It's set up so that you'll actually want the lowest number possible, which is created by high demand, high impact, and low effort.
• Value vs. effort quadrant: This is also known as value vs. cost or value vs. complexity. To use this, rate a feature's value to the business, and the difficulty to implement it. Plot the resulting point on a quadrant chart. The sweet spot is the highest value with the lowest effort. High effort with low value goes in the garbage.
• RICE: This is a very popular prioritization framework where you rate reach (how many people you'll impact within a certain timeframe), impact, confidence (that it will deliver a desired result), and effort. Then, figure out the total impact per time worked with this equation: Reach x impact x confidence / effort.
• Prioritize by constraints: If you're short on specific resources, prioritize based on what you do and don't have. If you can't afford something, it gets delayed and something else is prioritized. This can be used in tandem with other methods.

It's worth noting that, in general, it's best to prioritize one product over another. Have a primary product and a secondary product. Of course, priorities may shift as important tasks come and go.

4. Become crazy efficient:

It goes without saying that, when you're rocking multiple products, you're going to need to be hyper-efficient. A big part of efficiency is lifestyle. Take care of yourself! Eat healthy, sleep well, exercise, stay hydrated, limit caffeine and alcohol, meditate, relax, and spend time with loved ones.

Don't burn out! Be okay with doing less and saying no. Focus on results, not hours. Set realistic expectations.

Set up an environment that lends itself to efficiency. Remove distractions and clutter, organize your space to make it a pleasant place to spend your time, and play focus music.

Then, there's your workflow. Break tasks into smaller ones, batch similar tasks, and avoid multitasking. Set a timer: The Pomodoro technique is fantastic. Outsource when possible, and automate everything! Create a schedule that works for you.

5. Leverage the right tools:

Lastly, tools are your friend:

• Todoist is a solid to-do list app.
• TimeIvy tracks how much time you spend on apps and websites each day to keep you accountable.
• Focusmate gives you access to accountability buddies.
• ClickUp is an app that does it all; tasks, docs, chat, goals, etc. It boldly guarantees that it'll save you one day per week.
• Brain.fm provides music that improves focus.
• Focus is a website and app blocker.
• StayFocusd keeps track of what you do online, and blocks the sites that take up the most time.
• Toggl allows you to track your time.

If you need some advice on solid project management tools to keep you on track, here's a post that breaks down some of the best.

Wrapping up

As far as setting up business entities, I'd suggest waiting until you have some decent revenue.

If you already have an LLC, you can sell the new product under that. You can even create a DBA (doing business as), which allows you to set up a business bank account for your product and take payments. I wrote a post on this recently if you'd like to learn more!

How do you juggle multiple products? Share your experience below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko

📲 Twitter Blue is now on Android for $11 per month.

🚨 Five examples of newsjacking done right.

🌏 What you should know about international link building.

👩‍💻 LinkedIn has shared new data on engagement and ad performance.

🤝 101 professional networking tips.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

📈 Tips for Growing a Content Business

by Kyle Samera

I've built two newsletters: A crypto newsletter that grew to 14K subscribers, and my most recent passion project, Linkpunk, which just hit 777 subscribers. I wrote more about Linkpunk here.

Below, I'm sharing the lessons that I've learned about building a content business. Let's dive in!

Always be launching

You need to be launching consistently. If your content is targeted towards founders and makers, you need to be launching on all related platforms, including Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, Hacker News, etc. If your product is targeted towards other groups, you need to find where those readers exist and launch there. Reddit is a great place to find almost any community.

Here are places on Reddit where you can launch right now:

• r/SideProject.
• r/EntrepreneurRideAlong.
• r/WebDev (Show Off Saturday).

In r/SideProject and r/EntrepreneurRideAlong specifically, feel free to share your updates, too. If you just hit 1K subscribers, share that! These subreddits love learning about success and how it’s done. Just make sure to share the ups and the downs, along with your learnings.

Other communities may be less welcoming to your launch, but if you follow the next point, you’ll probably be in a good spot.

Don’t sell first

Don’t be a salesperson trying to get subscribers. The internet, especially Reddit, is good at sniffing out motives.

When you post to communities, you need to truly be authentic and offer value before asking for anyone’s email. Maybe you post a snippet of your content. Maybe you ask a question to spark a thoughtful discussion. Sometimes, you don’t even need to link directly to your content before someone will ask “Link?” Then, boom! You can plug your product without looking like a total slimeball.

Exclusive content is necessary

Gone are the days where you can simply curate news. You need to really convince people in one sentence why they should give you, a stranger over the internet, their email address, and allow you access to their inbox.

That’s why, to really fuel growth, you need to find content that is absolutely exclusive.

With Linkpunk, I’m doing the legwork of finding really cool, unregistered domains that founders can use for their projects.

In my crypto newsletter, I used interviews to get exclusive content.

Leverage your interviews

Starter Story, No-Code Exits, and Workspaces are perfect examples of newsletters that create a flywheel of growth from sharing subscriber stories.

If you are featured in a newsletter, you’re 100% likely to share that with your own followers or community.

Leverage that. Start creating content that spotlights others, even if it’s a little section, and give those subscribers a reason to share your work with the world.

Implement a referral program for autopilot growth

Give readers an incentive to invite others easily. Morning Brew and The Hustle are both notorious for growing to millions of subscribers via referral programs. Study them. Make the rewards amazing, and generate sustained growth through the most powerful method: Word-of-mouth.

There are lots of no-code services that do this for you, like SparkLoop or Viral Loops. Don't make it too complicated, especially in the beginning. In the early days of our crypto newsletter, we manually tracked referral counts with Google Sheets, then sorted by most referrals to reward those subscribers.

Launch giveaways for growth spurts

To grow fast, you need to up the ante sometimes. That’s why, in addition to your referral program, you should leverage giveaways.

You need to find something that resonates with your audience. Morning Brew used to give out MacBook Pros to its audience, which was comprised of mostly college students at the time.

If you cannot afford to buy giveaway gifts yourself, try partnering with a company. With our crypto newsletter, we would partner with dev teams to give away tokens, hardware wallets, etc. It’s a win-win situation because they got eyeballs on their product, and we got growth from new subscribers.

You may have some strong churn after these subscribers come, but that’s okay. If you’re offering valuable content, many will stay.

Build your own landing page

I realize that there are tons of Substacks currently crushing it. However, if you want to stand out from the bunch, you should build your own landing page. It’s simple, to the point, and can be built quickly. Shell out the couple of bucks for a domain, and start collecting subscribers there. If you do it correctly, your conversion rate will go up!

What are your tips for growing a content business? Share below!

Discuss this story.

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

🧐 What SaaS products can you not live without? Posted by Ayush Jangra.

🤖 Here's how I believe AI will replace my job. Posted by Londoner.

👀 Who to follow for SaaS marketing inspiration. Posted by Kai.

📖 What do you use for your landing page and blog? Posted by Harsh Vardhan.

📝 Programmatic SEO: Creating hundreds of blog posts in one day. Posted by Jan-Philipp Peters.

😆 Things they didn't teach you about software engineering. 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.

💻 Bhanu Teja Pachipulusu Hit $25K ARR in Eight Months

by Bhanu Teja Pachipulusu

Hi, everyone! I'm Bhanu Teja Pachipulusu, and I launched Feather, a blogging platform that uses Notion as the CMS, on Twitter back in May. You write all of your articles in Notion, and Feather automatically publishes them to a SEO-friendly blog.

I've grown it to $25K ARR and 138 paid customers in eight months!

My main customer acquisition channels are Twitter and word-of-mouth. I had 3.2K+ Twitter followers when I launched, and I've also been getting a few customers recently through Google.

AMA!

How did you come up with the idea?

The first year after I quit my job, I was working on building an entire product from scratch for the first time ever. I learned a lot that year.

I started blogging about the process. My workflow for publishing posts at that time was:

• Write everything on Notion.
• Export it to Markdown.
• Upload it to the blog platform.
• Add images separately.

I created Feather to simplify this process, using Notion as the editor. The idea came from me scratching my own itch! It took me about three months to build the MVP.

What's your tech stack?

I am using Remix and Cloudflare Workers.

Since I built for my own use case, I did not do any kind of validation. I just put up a waiting list and started building in public.

Can you share your Twitter marketing strategy?

To be honest, there is no strategy.

I just share what I do every day in the form of tweets, and people like them and visit the website. They discover that Feather is a blogging platform, and that they can create blogs with it.

Then, when they actually have a need for a blog, they remember me and go sign up.

It's all been quite organic so far. I am now trying to be more intentional about getting visitors to my site by focusing on SEO. I haven't done any optimizations yet. My visitor-to-trial conversion rate is currently terrible: 0.3%.

Would you consider offering a free trial?

I tried offering free plans before, and had a very bad experience with them. Same with free trials without a credit card.

Now, the only thing I want to do is a free trial with a credit card. That's how it was for Feather right from the start.

That way, I only get signups from those who really have a need for a blog. My trial-to-paid conversion rate is ~40-60%!

How did you get your first users?

I got interest from many WordPress users wanting to migrate to Feather, and they said the only thing stopping them was that they had so many posts to move to Notion.

So, I spent hours just copy-pasting each post from their WordPress to Notion, and creating blogs for them. The first few customers were a lot of hard work, but it all paid off in the end!

I spoke more about this in another AMA that I did a few months back, if you want to check it out.

What would you do differently in hindsight?

I would start monetizing sooner. After I got my first customer for Feather, everything became simpler. Instead of building blindly, I started to build things that my first user needed. Then came the second user, the third, and so on.

So, if I had to start over, I would focus on quickly landing my first paying user, someone who actually wanted to use the product. That way, I could get feedback to help me build with direction.

Eventually, I have plans to add a complete newsletter functionality where people can send emails through Notion itself. That’s the logical next step for Feather!

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, Darko, Kyle Samera, and Bhanu Teja Pachipulusu for contributing posts. —Channing