🗞 What's New: Staying motivated when the journey gets tough

The founder's journey can feel like a slog at times:

• How do you stay motivated to keep putting in the work? Founders weigh in below on how they find the focus and motivation to get through the hard times, and how they pull themselves out of a rut.
• Many businesses put profit above all, but with consumers becoming more conscious about company ethics, founders should consider social and environmental impacts as well. Dru Riley breaks down how B corps achieve this!
• Founder Katt went from 0 to 5,500 newsletter subscribers in 7 months. Here's how she leveraged the power of repurposing content and cross-promoting to deliver value to her readers and advertisers.

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

🏃‍♀️ Staying Motivated as a Founder

by IndieMau

During my 15 years journey as programmer, I've started companies with other teammates, with my wife, solo, and with relatives. I've had a couple of successes, and many failures. However, I've realized that when I go it alone, I often end up neglecting the product.

Here's how I focus on my current project, and pick myself up after a product fails. Would also love to hear from other founders on this!

Focus, focus, focus

These steps can help you to focus, and avoid neglecting another project:

• Invite a friend, sibling, or someone to your project, even if they are there a few hours per week, or are not skillful. That can be enough to help you get, and stay, motivated.

• Explain your project to someone new on a regular basis. It is more difficult to neglect things when someone else also knows that you are building something.

• Create clear goals and split them into chunks. This helps you measure progress.

• Build in public! This creates community.

Combat shiny object syndrome

Adam Berecz suffered from shiny object syndrome when he first started out:

When I was trying to build startups in my twenties, I dealt with this a lot. Now that I'm in my thirties, I realize how much pain it has caused me. I've wasted years by not actively working on sticking to a single project.

Find your "why," and remind yourself of it every day for the first couple of months until it sticks. Be clear about what is it that you want to achieve, and use that as your motivating factor.

Partner up

Pressillo Brassit left his full-time job one month ago:

"Screw the 9 to 5," I said. "I'm going to be a founder," I said.

One month later, I've managed to waste the entire month. All I did was read Manga, watch anime, and scroll Twitter.

I was so pissed at myself. I thought I was worse than trash.

I managed to get out of this situation by recently getting a part-time job, and by partnering up with a programmer for the project I've had in mind. Partnering up can help get you out of a rut, even if it's just working on something small!

Reexamine your connection

Bahauddin Aziz reminds founders of a very important piece to solving this puzzle:

Just remember that ideas don't matter. It's always about the problem you are solving.

Once you strongly connect yourself to the problem, disconnecting from the need to hop around between ideas becomes easier.

Things take time

Edmond Amaning reminds founders that good things take time:

Think about this: SEO takes about three months to kick in, and another couple of months to see traffic. That's if your content is good, and checks all of the SEO boxes, like keywords, user friendliness, usability, backlinks, etc.

Jut looking at it from an SEO strategy alone, things take time! When you give in too early, you don't give yourself the time to actually see where it can go.

How do you stay focused and motivated? Share your experience below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko

🚫 Montana has become the first US state to approve a full ban of TikTok.

🚪 OpenAI's CEO says that the age of giant AI models is already over.

📱 Twitter Blue subscribers now have 10K characters for tweets.

🤖 Microsoft is looking to ChatGPT to transform its digital ad business.

🧾 Here's what's behind Amazon's new return fee.

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

🌱 Trend Alert: B Corps

from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley

Problem

Many businesses put financial profit above all else.

Solution

B Corps consider social and environmental impact, as well as financial profit.

They rely on a triple bottom line that accounts for the planet, people, and profit. This is known as "the three P's."

Terms

B lab:

A global nonprofit that serves a movement of people using business as a force for good. B lab issues B corp certifications, administers impact management programs, and advocates for governance structures, like the benefit corporation.

B corp:

A for profit corporation that meets social, environmental, transparency, and accountability standards set by the B lab. B corps must re-certify every three years to maintain their status, and pay an annual fee ranging from $500 to $50K, depending on annual sales. There are over 3.3K certified B corps across 71 countries.

Benefit corporation:

Not to be confused with B corp certification, this legal designation commits companies to higher standards of purpose, accountability, and transparency. This protects a company's mission through capital raises and leadership changes. It creates flexibility when evaluating potential sale or liquidity options, and prepares businesses to lead a mission-driven life post-IPO. If this seems unnecessary, see why Ben and Jerry's was forced to take an offer and sell the company.

Players

B corps:

• Techstars.
• Kickstarter.
• Patagonia.
• Allbirds.
• Alter Eco.
• Goodr.

B corp founders:

• Jasmine Crowe.
• Yancey Strickler.
• Brad Feld.
• Ben Cohen.
• Shai Wininger.
• Daniel Schreiber.

Predictions

• B corps will use their status to attract talent. The B Corp and Open Startup movements double as marketing campaigns to attract customers and employees.
• Lots of B2C companies will seek B corp certifications. Consumer brands can weave this into storytelling for higher margins in price-elastic markets.

Opportunities

• Build a list or directory of B corps. The current directory is slow, with limited filtering options.
• Create a niche job board to help B corps that are hiring. Use job listings from another site, then merge based on company names.
• Aggregate a list of deals for B corps. Some companies, such as Manoverboard, have exclusive discounts aimed at B corps.
• Create a newsletter to share the stories behind newly certified B corps. The B Lab directory lets you sort by certification date.

Haters

"How is Ben and Jerry's a B corp?"

It's ice cream, sure. Would it be better if it wasn't a B corp? Other companies do less to address social and environmental issues. Plus, we need some fun. Loosen up!

Links

1. Making a Sustainable Difference: Sasha Kramer transitioned SOIL from nonprofit to for profit to make the mission sustainable. She shares valuable insight into human nature, and managing incentives.
2. How to B a Force for Good: Anthea Kelsick talks about the importance of systems change, and how companies use their B corp status as a marketing tool.
3. From Nonprofit to Social Enterprise: Insights and Lessons Learned on a 15 Year Entrepreneurial Journey: Rahama Wright talks about the ups and downs of being a founder. She's a great storyteller!

More reports

Go here to get the Trends Pro report. It contains 200% more insights. You also get access to the entire back catalog and the next 52 Pro Reports.

Subscribe to Trends.vc for more.

🧠 Harry's Growth Tip

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

Mother's Day. Kid's drawing. It just works.

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

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.

📰 Katt Hit 5.5K Newsletter Subscribers

by Sveta Bay

Hey, indie hackers! Every week, I send a marketing case study from a profitable founder. Today, I want to share with you the recent issue, featuring Katt!

Explain your product to an 11 year old

My mind has always been full of business ideas, but I couldn’t code. After discovering no-code, I could finally build and launch my solutions. One of them was acquired, and my tweets about that blew up my DMs every time.

This inspired me to start No-Code Exits, a newsletter to inspire other non-technical makers with real stories from products made with no-code, and how they got acquired.

Who’s your ideal reader, and how do they find you?

My ideal customer persona is a non-technical person who wants to earn money by building products with no-code. Where are the real products made with no-code? With the interviews in No-Code Exits, I hope to inspire people by answering this question.

My main acquisition channels are Twitter and communities where non-technical people interested in starting a business hang out.

How do you monetize your newsletter?

For the first five months, I focused on getting new subscribers.

Once I hit 1K subscribers, I started doing ads. I also created a small ($10) infoproduct for my readers. But this month, I have become more serious about monetization.

I have been working on my ads by adding packages, improving my clickthrough rate, reaching out to brands that I think are a good fit, and improving my partnership page with testimonials.

I've added a higher-priced infoproduct ($50) based on questions that I received from my audience, and I've also launched the No-Code Exits Club this month. This is a paid challenge that helps you go from zero to exit with no-code.

The power of a niche newsletter is that you can spot problems that your audience struggles with, validate product ideas, and build distribution.

How did you get your first 10 customers?

I first validated my newsletter idea by tweeting to my 600 Twitter followers that the first story would go out in 12 hours. Then, I went to bed.

People reacted with great enthusiasm, and I woke up to 200+ subscribers. That was enough for me to start writing.

I did the same thing to find my first sponsors. I’m building in public, so many of my followers are fellow founders. This, combined with a reasonable price, helped sell the 10 first ad spots.

My readers enjoy the classified ad part. They even rave about it in reviews! It also brings good results for the founders that are advertising. I should probably raise my prices, but I want it to stay accessible for smaller businesses. It’s a win-win. My readers enjoy discovering small indie products, which shows in the results: A good click rate, no ad blindness, and enjoying the content.

I recommend upselling with packages. Instead of one ad, you can book four or six at a time, with a discount. I did this from the beginning, and it gives me some breathing room. It's a pretty good deal for the advertiser, because the newsletter has been growing nicely every month.

What’s been your best marketing decision, and why?

I tried a lot of things, and I’m still trying a lot. Here's what's been helpful:

• Most of my growth was thanks to Twitter. I repurpose content from my newsletter to tweets.
• Being active in communities where non-technical people hang out.
• Doing no-code webinars and interviews for visibility.
• Partnering up with other no-code businesses and cross-promoting each other.
• Launching on Product Hunt when I already had 3K subscribers. The day my product went live on Product Hunt, I immediately sent my weekly newsletter to ask for support from my readers. This gave a great initial boost, and resulted in 1K+ new subscribers.
• Building my newsletter in public helped build a strong brand. Whenever a project gets acquired, I get tagged. People reach out to me for partnerships or sponsorships, recommend my newsletter, etc.

If you could do one thing differently, what would it be?

A few months ago, I decided to become active on LinkedIn and Medium to cross-post my content from the newsletter. I did it for a few weeks, and now I’m very inconsistent.

I was just copy-pasting, not tailoring the content to be perfect and interesting for each platform. I just did it so I could cross it off of my to-do list. Now, I try to focus more on what works, and do that with great care and quality!

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 IndieMau, Darko, Dru Riley, Harry Dry, and Sveta Bay for contributing posts. —Channing