🗞 What's New: Indie Hackers is indie again!

We've got some major news!

• Indie Hackers is back to being run as a standalone business, owned by the founders. Check out more on this below. We are excited for what's to come!
• If you're building an AI app (or planning to), consider these things before getting started. Hint: Combine AI and non-AI to help guard your app from becoming obsolete with the next GPT update.
• Founder Karthik is building LaunchPedia, a suite of tools and resources that helps founders launch their products. Here's how he hit over 13,000 unique visitors on the website in just 3 months!

Want to share something with nearly 120,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🛠 Indie Hackers is Indie Again!

by Courtland Allen

Exactly six years ago (to the day!), Stripe acquired Indie Hackers to help us grow, and inspire millions of people building online businesses.

Today, I'm happy to announce that Channing Allen and I are indie hackers again!

Specifically, this means that we're back to running Indie Hackers as a standalone business, owned by the founders. Although we're no longer part of Stripe, Stripe continues to be supportive of Indie Hackers as an investor to help us get going.

This has been about four months in the making. Branching out on our own is something we mutually decided on with Stripe, and we're excited about it!

It goes without saying that I'm incredibly grateful for Stripe believing in, and supporting, Indie Hackers over the years. It still blows my mind that Patrick Collison reached out and took a chance on us when we were just a tiny bootstrapped company ourselves.

We were able to run Indie Hackers freely and autonomously, despite being part of a much bigger company. We now have the chance to own Indie Hackers again, and Stripe couldn't have handled things any better! I want to personally thank Patrick and everyone else at Stripe for their support throughout the years.

So, what now?

Well, if we want to survive and thrive, we're going to have to generate revenue just like any other business! I'm an entrepreneur at heart, and always have been. In fact, working at Stripe was my first and only salaried job.

Right now, we're sitting at exactly $0 MRR, so the journey is just now (re)starting.

I'm fired up!!! 🔥🔥🔥

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko

🛑 OpenAI has temporarily stopped selling its Plus plan.

🤔 Does going viral help with SEO?

💻 31% of international websites contain hreflang errors.

🤖 Here's how AI is infiltrating influencer marketing.

👂 Is Clubhouse still a thing? Technically, yes.

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

📝 Consider This Before Building an AI App

by Wael

I've been running TopAI.tools for two months, and I am exposed to a decent number of AI apps every day. Below, I'm sharing some quick thoughts about building an AI app! Hope it helps other founders.

Replacement guard

Try to ensure that what you are building won't soon be replaced by a button in Google Suite or Microsoft Office.

It's only a matter of time before AI features become native in the apps that we use every day. For example, at the very least, basic email writing features will soon become part of Outlook or Gmail.

Therefore, make sure that your app provides something unique that wouldn't be disrupted by in-product features rolled out by tech giants.

Problem solving

Make sure that your product solves a real problem, then add AI features to enhance its value.

Instead of just building an AI app for the sake of FOMO, your app should be solving a real problem for a specific group of people. Add AI features into your app to make it even better, rather than creating them as the core of the app.

Avoid saturation

Try to avoid saturated niches. There are already somewhat saturated niches. If you check any AI tools directory these days, you will quickly see that there are niches with an overwhelming number of options. There are other niches with very limited options, or at least a limited number of good ones.

While it's not necessary to look for blue oceans, it's crucial to avoid building an app in a bloody red ocean market unless you have a real advantage that will make a group of users prioritize your app over others.

General copywriting and content creation are both quite saturated markets, for example. If you plan to launch in these areas, you need to have an advantage around something involving your product or pricing model.

Are you building an AI app? What has your experience been? Let's chat!

Discuss this story.

🔥 Landing Page Hot Tips

by Rob Hope

Strengthen your landing page with these design, development, and conversion tips:

Leverage your customer testimonials by highlighting features and answering doubts.

Round up all of your customer testimonials, and select only the ones that add real value.

Subscribe to Rob's One Page Love newsletter for his favorite UI, design, and development finds.

🚀 Karthik is Building LaunchPedia

by Karthik

Hey, indie hackers! I'm Karthik, and I'm building LaunchPedia, a suite of tools and resources that helps founders launch their products.

We set up the website in the last week of December, and have launched several products since January:

1. LaunchPedia Tools: 200+ handpicked tools for product launches.
2. Places to promote your startup: 60+ places to launch a startup and get initial traffic.
3. Product Hunt Launch Guide: A step-by-step guide on how to nail Product Hunt launches, featuring interviews from 15 founders.
4. Reddit e-book: A list of 30 viral post ideas to help you promote your product on Reddit.

Read on for more!

Our acquisition channels

Here's how we've been building traffic for our product:

1. Product Hunt launches.
2. Building in public on Indie Hackers and Twitter.
3. Sharing on Reddit.
4. Content distribution on social media platforms.
5. Engaging and plugging our products in Product Hunt discussions, on Indie Hackers, and in other communities.

Our website has been seeing some great numbers over the past three months!

• Unique visitors: 13K+.
• Website sessions: 22K+.
• Average session time: 1.4 minutes.

Our revenue

So far, we've generated $226 in total revenue.

All of our products are free, as we make money from sponsorships. We got our first sponsor in February, and our second in March.

In order to set our sponsorship pricing, we checked out other websites. We studied their traffic and sponsorship pricing, and that helped guide our own pricing. In my opinion, if you have 100 unique visitors per day, you're in a good place to start considering sponsorships!

Our mistakes

1. Not diversifying our traffic channels: We were far too dependent on one channel. Most of the traffic in the first two months came solely from Product hunt launches. Once we realized that, we started diversifying our channels.

2. Maintaining a tech stack that wasn't scalable: In order to launch faster, we initially used a tech stack that was easy to start. It was a good thing at first, because it helped us launch quickly, but not for when we started growing. We ended up having to spend way too much time on migration later. We should have started out with a tech stack that had room to grow from the beginning.

3. No monetization plan: We thought that we could keep LaunchPedia running with sponsorships and Buy Me a Coffee donations, but that is turning out to be tough. You need to keep getting consistent traffic every day to achieve that. We are still trying to figure this part out!

Our plans

So, how are we planning to improve upon our mistakes?

1. Increase our traffic sources: We are optimizing our website's SEO, and sharing our journey with other founders. We are also looking to build a side project for our target audience, to drive traffic to the LaunchPedia website.

2. Work on a paid product: We plan to build a paid product to cross-promote. That way, we can keep LaunchPedia free, while still bringing food to our table.

PS: If you want to promote your product or startup on LaunchPedia, check out our sponsorship page!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

Forward it to a friend, and let them know they can subscribe here.

Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.

Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Courtland Allen, Darko, Wael, Rob Hope, and Karthik for contributing posts. —Channing