🗞 What's New: Building and growing your personal brand

Establishing credibility and trust is key when it comes to growing your business:

• Building a solid personal brand goes a long way in strengthening trust with your users, and attracting new ones. Here's how to identify and grow your personal brand, and leverage the power of LinkedIn.
• Looking to get organic signups quickly? This step-by-step guide can give you tips on where to start, including effective platforms to target.
• Founder Luca Restagno validated his idea with a landing page and a lifetime deal, and collected $3,000 in the process. Below, he shares how he did it!

Want to share something with nearly 75,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🤩 Building Your Personal Brand

by Guillaume Moubeche

For people to buy from you, they need to trust you. How can you establish that trust quickly and start making money?

I’m the founder and CEO of lempire, a B2B SaaS company that I grew from $1K to $150M in valuation in less than four years, with zero funding.

A huge contributor to the success of my company and the rapidity of its growth was my personal brand. Here, I’m sharing my five step process for building a personal brand to accelerate growth!

Invest time into building your personal brand

Before diving deeper into the advantages of personal branding, let’s take a step back. Building trust with your prospect involves three major elements:

1. Targeting: You should have a deep understanding of your customer's needs, and the problem that you’re solving for them.
2. Credibility: This will help to convince your prospects that you’re an expert in the field.
3. Messaging: This is how you make them understand that you are the best solution to their problem, not your competitors.

As you might have guessed, personal branding is all about establishing your credibility as an expert in a specific field.

The process

Follow these five steps to get your personal brand going, and set your business up for faster growth:

1. Identify the framework of your personal brand:

The framework of your personal brand consists of the mission you’re trying to accomplish, the audience you want to reach, the topic you want to talk about, and your personal backstory.

You need to be as specific as possible about these elements, as they define the foundation of your brand.

For example, here's the framework of my personal brand: My mission is to help people and businesses grow. Therefore, my target audience consists of founders who want to start or grow their companies more efficiently.

To help them reach their goals, the topics that I focus on are entrepreneurship, finding your passion and purpose, building your business from scratch, and time management.

When it comes to creating your personal backstory, the best tip that I can give is to find a way for your audience to relate to you. Of course, everyone is different, but one thing is relatable to everyone: Overcoming an obstacle.

A good backstory consists of:

• Where you started.
• What people thought about it.
• What changed.
• Your struggles.
• Your achievement and change.

Your backstory will help you stay consistent in your posts when it comes to your storytelling and writing style, and provide inspiration for future content.

2. Build a LinkedIn profile that stands out:

I recommend building your personal brand on LinkedIn, particularly if you’re trying to build a B2B company. Why?

• LinkedIn is a business-oriented social media platform.
• Its audience is huge, with many different interests. Whatever your domain of expertise is, you can find your target audience.
• The LinkedIn algorithm allows you to very easily reach a lot of people outside of your connection network.
• 99% of LinkedIn users do not create any content. This means that you could be part of the 1% of creators on the platform, giving you vast potential to grow an influential audience.

The three most important components of your LinkedIn profile are your profile picture, your cover photo, and your headline.

Choose a professional, recent profile picture that showcases your personality. You should use a bright background to attract more attention. You can use Profile Picture Maker to turn any photo into a catchy profile picture.

As for your LinkedIn cover, here are the three most important things to keep in mind:

• Keep it simple. Don’t add too much text.
• Showcase your work and company.
• Add a clear call-to-action (CTA).

This will help your audience understand exactly who you are and what you can do for them, without having to scroll at all.

Check out these two examples for inspiration!

Brandshift:

lempire:

Lastly, create a catchy headline for your LinkedIn profile. Think of it as a mini sales pitch to your readers, showing them:

• This is who I am.
• This is what I do.
• This is what you can expect to hear about from me.

Make sure that your headline answers the question: What’s in it for my audience?

Check out these examples:

3. Write compelling posts:

You can follow many different copywriting structures, but I recommend starting out with a simple one.

For example, Justin Welsh uses the AIDA structure, which consists of four parts: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action.

Attention: Catch your reader’s attention in the first sentences of your post.

Interest: Make your reader interested in what you're saying.

Desire: Build desire by sharing your content’s value proposition.

Action: Inspire the reader to take action.

4. Engage with relevant content creators:

Engaging with content creators significantly boosts your visibility. Find existing content creators who post about your subject of choice, follow them, and engage with their content on a regular basis.

Focus on adding value to the posts you engage with. Spend 30 minutes per day engaging with 3-5 posts that are relevant to your audience.

5. Stay consistent:

Make building your personal brand a habit, and stick with it for at least six months.

Pro tip: Add a one hour slot to your calendar that repeats every day at the same time. Make it a habit to use that time to write your own content, and engage with relevant content of the creators that you’re following.

Focus on building your personal brand around something that you’re passionate about. Be patient, stay consistent, and don’t give up. Very soon, your results will speak for themselves!

Check out my free course for more information about building your personal brand.

Will you implement any of these tips? Let's chat below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko

💸 WordPress has dropped Twitter social sharing due to the API price hike.

🏦 Vice Media is reportedly preparing to file for bankruptcy.

🤖 AI is being used to create whole spam sites.

🔎 New ways to discover and personalize Facebook Reels.

🎞 Building awareness with YouTube Shorts.

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

📝 Landing Organic Signups Fast

by Nicolas Trésegnie

I find the concept of AI agents fascinating. After playing with tools like Auto-GPT and BabyAGI, I ended up building and launching AgentRunner.ai, a web-based AI agent builder.

Starting from zero, I grew it to 15 organic signups per day in just 10 days. Here's what I tried!

The platforms

• Indie Hackers: I created the product on Indie Hackers, and published one post. It did not get any upvotes or comments, but I still got five signups from it.
• Reddit: I posted in subreddits related to side projects, including r/SideProject, r/IMadeThis, and r/alphaandbetausers. Engagement was also low, but I still got five signups.
• Web directories: I posted in different SaaS directories and lists of AI tools, including BetaPage, BetaList, AlternativeTo, SaaSHub, and Uneed. Initially, I received no traffic, but they now represent around 40% of my organic signups.
• Google search: I set up the Google Search Console and added content to the landing page. Google search represents another 40% of my organic signups.
• Twitter: I tweeted twice about it from my account (NicolasTr11 with 50 followers), and from a new account dedicated to the project (AgentRunnerAI with no followers). This did not drive any signups because I don't have any reach.
• Product improvements: I added Google Authenticator and reduced the number of steps needed to complete the registration and onboarding process. This doubled the conversion rate.

Next up

Next, I'll try the following:

• Blog posts: I have ~350 followers on Medium. Publishing there might help.
• Twitter Ads and Google Ads experiments: I plan to run ads on both platforms.
• SEO: I'm starting to see keywords in the Google search console. I'll use them to add content to the website.
• Reddit: I'll post in popular subreddits related to ChatGPT and AI.
• Product Hunt: I might also launch on Product Hunt at some point.

I am not yet monetizing, but I'm considering it!

How did you land initial organic signups? Share your experience below!

Discuss this story.

🔥 Landing Page Hot Tips

by Rob Hope

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

Avoid center-aligned or justified paragraphs.

When applied to long paragraphs, these two alignments can be difficult to read, resulting in fatigue.

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

💡 Luca Restagno Successfully Validated His Idea

by Luca Restagno

Hi, indie hackers! I'm Luca Restagno, founder of Inboxs, a conversion-focused Twitter DMs inbox.

Creating a product and launching it online is a daunting process. Many founders fail to validate their product idea before taking the plunge. I had the experience of validating a product idea using a landing page and a lifetime deal (LTD).

I was able to sell 20 licenses in seven days, and 50 licenses in two months. Here's how I validated my idea and collected $3K in the process!

Creating the landing page

I created a landing page to showcase my product and offer a LTD. I used a combination of visuals and text to explain why my product was unique, and why customers should buy it. I was careful to make sure that the page was easy to understand and navigate:

Setting up the LTD

Initially, I thought that all I needed to do was to collect emails from people who were interested. However, I soon realized that I needed stronger validation: Payment.

So, I decided to offer an LTD for $69.99. This was an attractive offer, as customers would be able to use my product indefinitely without having to purchase a subscription. I also included a money-back guarantee to increase people's confidence in my product:

To collect the payments, I chose a payment platform called Paddle. Paddle allowed me to securely process payments and sell the deal.

I also set up an email sequence to inform customers of updates, and thank them for their purchases.

After setting up these systems, I was ready to pre-launch my product!

Leveraging Twitter

Once I had created my landing page, I turned my attention to leveraging social media to get the word out about my product. With a Twitter account that had ~4K followers, I was well-positioned to start promoting.

I tweeted about my product and provided customer support through Twitter, responding to people's questions and addressing their concerns.

These efforts allowed me to reach a wide audience and spread the word. Additionally, it provided me with valuable insights into what people were looking for, and allowed me to adjust my offering accordingly.

I tweeted every day for seven days.

The results

The strategy was a success. Within a week, I had sold 20 licenses. Within two months, I had sold 40 licenses.

In total, I collected $2.5K from these sales, with 2K unique visitors to the landing page:

Creating a public roadmap

When the product was ready to be used in private beta, I sent an invitation email to all of the LTD buyers.

To further engage with them and collect valuable feedback, I decided to create a public roadmap where users could contribute by adding feature requests and voting.

This allowed me to gain an understanding of what features my customers wanted, and prioritize my development efforts accordingly. I used a web-based platform called Canny to create the roadmap and track the progress of feature requests. I shared the link in my email sequence, giving early adopters an easy way to view and contribute to the roadmap:

Conclusion

Landing pages and LTDs are effective ways to validate a product idea. In my case, it allowed me to test out my product with real customers, and collect valuable feedback. It also allowed me to make a profit from my product before investing more time and money into it.

It’s important to highlight that, even if the pre-launch is successful, there is no guarantee that the product will succeed. However, it doesn't hurt to start with a solid validation base!

Recently, I converted my product to a subscription plan, with a seven day free trial. I'm eager to see how people will use the product, and to continue developing it according to their needs.

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 Guillaume Moubeche, Darko, Nicolas Trésegnie, Rob Hope, and Luca Restagno for contributing posts. —Channing