🗞 What's New: 51 random startup lessons for founders

What are your top learnings as a founder?

• Here's a list of startup lessons, ranging from informative, to funny, to reflective. Hint: The benefits, not the features, are what sell a product.
• UX/UI skills are important, but it ultimately comes down to taste. These tips can help you cultivate your design taste to create your best user flow yet!
• Founder Rahul Pandey uses his YouTube channel as his main user acquisition tool to grow Taro, his mentorship community. Below, he shares how he funnels YouTube subscribers to his business, and gives tips on starting a YouTube channel from scratch.

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

👩‍🏫 51 Random Startup Lessons

by Justin Alb

It’s been more than a decade since I started building tech products, some with large teams, others with just a few people. Some of them succeeded, others failed for good. However, they all taught me many valuable lessons.

I'm sharing them below. Hope they're helpful for you!

The startup chronicles

1. Testing is key: You might think you have the best idea ever, but in the end, only the user will tell you what works and what doesn’t.
2. Don’t dwell on mistakes or misfortunes. Learn your lesson and do better next time.
3. Influencer marketing is a gamble.
4. Users have high expectations, even for a free product.
5. Work vacations are the best form of team building.
6. People will call everything they don’t understand a scam.
7. A little praise for a job well done can go a long way.
8. Coffee, sweets, beer, and wine: These are four things that boost employee motivation and morale.
9. Users are very set in their ways, and it’s hard to change their habits. This makes it very challenging to break into any market with a new product. You will need to prove that your product is worth their attention in a minute or less.
10. Higher seniority hires don't necessarily make for a better team.
11. When working with influencers or bloggers, check to see if any other brands have been working with them long term.
12. Hiring people with varied skillsets, rather than focusing on what’s required for the position, improves overall workplace agility.
13. Morning stand-ups (15 minute meetings) to catch up can be an amazing thing for smaller teams.
14. An in-house team is usually better than an outsourced one.
15. You will have to knock on a million doors until you get one to open.
16. Prices for hotels vary depending on whether you’re viewing the website on a computer or a mobile device.
17. Whatever you’re inquiring for, follow up two to three times. To some, it’s spammy, but to others, it might be the reminder that they needed. Bet on the latter.
18. Change blog headlines every once in a while and note the traffic. You’ll see what performs and what doesn’t.
19. Explain your product to potential customers as if they were four years old.
20. Satisfied workers are those who have their freedom and feel trusted.
21. Test, test, test: Just because something worked once doesn’t mean that it will work again, and vice versa.
22. Make your copy as short as possible, unless it’s a blog post or Indie Hackers post.
23. Give ChatGPT a try if you’re stuck on something. What do you have to lose? Maybe it will offer something you haven’t thought of.
24. Know when to pivot if something’s not working, and when to give up. Don’t keep trying to improve something that has low value.
25. Sharing your successes publicly will motivate you to keep going.
26. An animal-friendly office is a good idea!
27. Try out TikTok: If you don’t find your audience there, at least you’ll have fun.
28. Sell and advertise your product everywhere you go.
29. The free Slack version is enough for most of the functions you might need. Don’t overpay.
30. Utilize Facebook Groups, but don’t be too straightforward. A few roundabouts will do the job (and not get you thrown out!).
31. When it comes to press, sell your knowledge, not your product. You’ll get coverage, and sometimes, even do-follow links.
32. Putting all your eggs in one basket is a mistake. Even when one thing works very well, don’t quit on others. You never know when it’s going to change.
33. Marketing will never sell a product if it’s not filling in a certain gap in the market.
34. It's essential to jump on trends on time. This is especially true when it comes to social media and blogs. The sooner you cover it, the higher you come up in Google searches.
35. Share your struggles with like-minded people. Sometimes one comment can give you the needed answers and new ideas that will push you forward.
36. Try out OnePitch, a free platform that finds the perfect journalists according to your pitch.
37. Get your tracking right: If you don’t know where your installs are coming from, you don’t know what you're doing well.
38. It’s crucial to send an accurate product message. You might lose potential clients by emphasizing the parts of your product that are not as important.
39. To grow your Twitter audience, follow people who follow the brands that you're competing with. Let them know you’re there, and that you have more to offer.
40. Top notch customer support is one of the very first steps to a successful product. Invest in it.
41. Personalize everything you do. No one is interested in communication that seems to be written by a bot.
42. Getting bored with your own product happens every once in a while.
43. The benefits, not the features, are what sell a product.
44. Re-share everything you write on Medium.
45. Be transparent. Even the smallest lie may ruin what you’ve built later, and it’s not worth it.
46. Sharing your behind-the-scenes puts any product closer to its current or potential user.
47. No problem is unsolvable. All of them are temporary.
48. The product won’t die without you. Take time off or burnout will eventually set in.
49. Sometimes, the problem is not your product. It could simply be bad timing...like launching a travel product in the middle of a pandemic (me!).
50. Doing everything by yourself is almost never the best option.
51. If your audience is worldwide, work on adding as many languages as you can at some point. It will add a touch of care.

Bonus: No one uses that ping pong table that’s shown in every startup work announcement.

What would you add to this list? Share with other founders below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko

🔑 13 key SEO metrics to track in 2023.

🎙 Fewer people are creating podcasts these days.

🤖 Techniques to improve GPT-3 reliability.

👋 Half of Android apps are uninstalled within 30 days after download.

👶 TikTok ads are increasingly driving kids' product requests and purchases.

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

🛠 UX/UI Tips for Developers

by Truji

Any other founders feel completely lost when it comes to product design? I understand the importance of having a good-looking product that's easy to navigate, but UX/UI are not my strengths.

Where do I even start?

It's all in the taste

Hackape's advice is to work on your taste rather than on your skills:

Skills are important, but if you've never used design tools before, it’s unrealistic to expect to pick them up in a short period of time. However, I highly recommend Tailwind. It is both a decent design system, and a very handy CSS to build things well and fast. Totally next level stuff.

Now, back to taste. Taste can be cultivated by simply viewing good works from others. You just need to know where to land your eyes.

Start with CRAP: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity. Seriously, spend time recognizing these elements. This is the single most valuable mindset to learn.

Here’s how you can cultivate your taste: Once you learn the rules, just go look at websites and apps that you admire. Analyze them by spotting how CRAP rules are applied in their design.

Yes, it’s that simple. This allows you to bring your instinct for beauty into your conscious brain, and create a mindset that will guide you to make decisions about what good and bad design both look like. This is what taste really is; it’s the mindset that guides you.

Still, you need to learn by copying or stealing from others. Build things. If you're unsure, just build a personal website. It’s the perfect project to experiment with. You need to get your hands dirty so you can internalize what you’ve learned.

I personally have never had good experiences with templates, since they often come with too many things. They're hard to customize, and I ended up wrestling with the tool a lot. To me, it’s easier to copy good ideas from templates, but I still prefer building from the ground up.

Boilerplates for the win

Stevie cautions against trying to reinvent the wheel:

• Keep it simple.
• Use no more than two fonts, and keep the weights and variations to a minimum.
• Consistency is key for UI and interactions.
• Copy is incredibly important. Say as much as you can in as few words as possible.
• Keep a limited color palette (a primary and secondary that work together), and think carefully about usage.

There are lots of free design system templates on Figma. Use a boilerplate to get going. I have a good list of free ones here.

Use expected interaction patterns, and don't get in the way of people investigating or using your product.

Treat it as code

Denis Anisimov recommends that you leverage your mindset as a coder:

• Reuse when possible: Consistency in the UI makes a huge difference.
• Custom build when needed: Add a few nice touches here and there to delight users.
• Document unless obvious: Communicate liberally what each element does, and what will happen next.
• Use a standard library: Platform-provided buttons, forms, and other elements are already built with the proper UX and accessibility right out of the box.
• Adopt best practices: Limited color palettes, consistent spacing, typographic scale, contrast ratio, etc.

Looking good is subjective, but working well is pretty much a technical task. Design is mostly about helping people achieve what they need to do with your product!

How do you approach UX/UI? Share your tips in the comments below!

Discuss this story.

🧠 Harry's Growth Tip

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

Show, don't tell.

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

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.

💻 Rahul Pandey Talks YouTube for User Acquisition

by Rahul Pandey

Hi, indie hackers! I'm Rahul Pandey, and my medium-sized YouTube channel helped me start a semi-successful business.

I believe that this pattern of YouTubers using their distribution to build companies will become increasingly common, so I hope this is a helpful data point!

The channel

I run a channel designed to help software engineers grow their careers. I went into 2022 with 26K subscribers, and ended with 71K. Here's a graph of my subscribers and revenue each year (I started three years ago):

The highlights

Here are some highlights from 2022:

• I made $9K+ with a CPM of $12+ and RPM of $3.60.
• I had 2.6M views across all my videos.
• My best month was November. I made $100+ per day for several weeks.
• My worst month was July, when I made less than $10 per day.

YouTube has been instrumental in growing Taro, a community and mentorship business that I started mid-2022. The vast majority of paying customers initially discovered us through YouTube, and this income stream is how I'm able to make a livable income ($100K+ in four months).

YouTube as an acquisition channel

For those of you who are thinking about something similar, here's why I'm bullish on YouTube as the basis for many consumer products:

• You don't need to spend (waste?) time vetting sponsors and haggling over terms.
• You can build a much deeper relationship with your audience when you bring them off of YouTube.
• Depending on your audience, their willingness to pay can be very high if you deliver a unique product.

I try very hard to make my videos very dense with information. And thumbnails are effective, assuming you deliver the value you promise.

The best way to get better at YouTube is to crank out videos. Focus on quantity over quality to start. I definitely think that YouTube is far more valuable than TikTok, Twitter, or LinkedIn when it comes to educating your potential 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 Justin Alb, Darko, Truji, Harry Dry, and Rahul Pandey for contributing posts. —Channing