🗞 What's New: 5 thought-provoking questions for founders

Taking time out for contemplation is essential for founders:

• How often do you stop and really reflect on your company's progress, current state, and future? The questions below can be a starting point for reflecting on your core values, and what's working.
• If your product isn't solving a real problem, saving your users time or money, or bringing them joy, you're setting yourself up for failure. These tips can help you make sure you're building what your users want!
• Founder Shie Gabbai bought an abandoned AI project and grew it to $300,000 in revenue in 90 days. Here's how he found and acquired the project, fought his way back from near financial ruin, and grew a core user base quickly.

This issue is sponsored by Growth Hack Scale! Enroll in a course that will help you build a defensible go-to-market strategy for driving meaningful SaaS revenue. The first cohort starts on July 1, and will be limited to 100 people. Sign up using this link for 20% off, with a 10% revenue share for referring others.

Want to promote your business in front of over 75,000 indie hackers in a future issue of the newsletter? Reply to this email. —Channing

💭 Thought-Provoking Questions for Founders

by Dan Kulkov

Every Friday, I share seven fresh ideas for founders in my newsletter, Weekly Dan.

My favorite category includes sharing thought-provoking questions. So, here are five questions from recent issues that are still on my mind!

What areas don't require fixing?

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You improve the landing page, but accidentally change the perfect email sequence. You change the monetization model because one customer didn’t like it, when 99 customers had no problem.

Don't keep changing things that are working. Find three areas that work flawlessly right now, write them down, and then...leave them alone!

How responsible are you for the result?

It’s appealing to just provide the tools, then let people decide how to use them. But here's the trick: The higher your involvement is, the more likely people can achieve the promised transformation, and the more likely they will agree to start.

Skin in the game translates to money in your pocket.

What is your verb?

Your audience doesn’t want to be marketed to.

They want to be inspired, empowered, engaged, enlightened, surprised, understood, and thrilled.

Instead of just solving Jobs-To-Be-Done, make sure you're nailing Feelings-To-Be-Experienced.

What piece of advice are you ignoring?

Not every tip is worth listening to. Maybe it contradicts your ethics. Or, maybe you agree with it, but don’t have enough time for the execution.

The key trick is to understand why, and make sure your reasoning is based on something solid.

For example, here are three tips that I am ignoring these days:

• Launching a high-ticket human touch product: I know I can earn more money by going on Zoom calls with people, but I would hate the process.
• Writing content with AI: There are enough platitudes on the internet already. I don’t want to waste founders' time with another tool listicle.
• Audience building outside of Twitter: Creators are hype about LinkedIn, but not me.

What can you implement in one month?

MVPs are meant to be built in 30 days or less.

Pick one use case, create a minimalistic solution to nail it, and build a landing page with an excellent offer for early users.

It shouldn’t be more complicated than this. The same philosophy applies to side projects, marketing, and content products.

What questions are you currently reflecting on? Let's chat below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko

🎮 Twitch's new ad rules could affect creators, charities, and brands.

🏛 Google Ads is changing how it processes trademark complaints.

🧐 Academics have trained a machine learning algorithm to identify papers written with ChatGPT, with over 99% accuracy.

📝 LinkedIn has launched a new report on the state of B2B marketing.

🤗 Building a mentorship program for founders.

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

🛠 Build Products Your Users Want

by Sveta Bay

It's been a year since we got our first payment notification for our MakerBox products. Since then, we've launched 10 products, made over $67K, and sold one product.

I want to share a few helpful things we've learned about building products that people actually want!

The biggest lesson

Our first product was a collection of tools with great free plans for indie hackers.

We built it with Airtable, made a no-code landing page with Typedream, accepted payments through Gumroad, and launched it on Product Hunt. It wasn't a SaaS, wasn't revolutionary, and wasn't solving humanity's greatest problems, but it was a product that founders needed!

So, the biggest lesson is to focus on solving real problems that save your users either time or money, or bring people joy.

How to build products that people actually need

1. Your first product will likely fail:

Don't start with brainstorming problems and solutions. Instead, start with choosing your target audience. It's perfect if you're building for an audience that you're a part of.

Even if your first product fails, your knowledge about your audience's problems will stay with you. Plus, you'll already have some authority and connections.

2. Don't build a SaaS before validating the idea:

Validating your idea can bring in revenue.

If you already have an audience, launch an early bird option.

If you don't have an audience, launch a Coming Soon page and collect emails. But don't expect high conversions to paying customers; it'll likely be around 10-20%.

3. Create a content product around the problem you want to solve:

If it's a successful launch, start building a SaaS. Here are a few ways to validate your SaaS idea with a content product:

• Challenge.
• Checklist.
• Swipe file.
• Workbook.
• Curated list.
• Template.
• Newsletter.
• E-book.
• Email course.
• Closed community.
• One person agency.

4. Beta test to collect feedback:

There's a high chance your product won't be perfect from the first iteration. Your landing page probably won't, either.

So, spend some time to find beta testers. They will help you fix bugs and make your product better. Also, they will be the first testimonials for your product. It's a win-win!

Here are some places where you can find beta testers:

• Indie Hackers.
• Product Hunt discussions.
• Polywork.
• Yesramen.
• #BuildInPublic on Twitter.

In the year that I've been building indie products, I've seen a lot of people burn out. Most founders that I followed in the beginning have abandoned building in public, and later gave up on their products.

Don't get caught up in the trap of having a shiny idea, building for 3-6 months, landing zero paying customers, and shutting down!

What are some of the top learnings from your journey? Share below!

Discuss this story.

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

💻 What are you working on? Posted by Neo.

🔑 Using GPT-4 without bringing your own API key. Posted by Karan Parwani.

🤔 Which Chrome extensions can you not live without? Posted by Frank Sondors.

🚀 My startup is blowing up, and I don't know why. Posted by Antonio Carlos Filho.

👀 Should I build in public? Posted by Azfar.

🖼 21 websites for free illustrations. Posted by Koding Kitty.

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.

🛩 Shie Gabbai Hit $300K in Revenue in 90 Days

from The Deep Dive newsletter by Channing Allen

Over the last three months, an AI startup called Roam Around has done $300K in gross bookings, becoming one of the world's largest AI travel planners. A company that didn't even exist at the beginning of the year has now produced over 6M travel itineraries for its customers.

Indie Hackers reached out to Roam Around's CEO, Shie Gabbai, about his journey. From 21 hour workdays to unmanageable OpenAI API bills, here's the story of how Shie navigated through multiple crises, building a vision for the future of travel.

The sale tale

I’ve been in tech my entire career, mostly in customer experience. Prior to Roam Around, I managed a team of 50 support agents in the Bitcoin space. Before that, I was at Google for six years, supporting some of its largest advertisers.

In my previous role, I was trying to use ChatGPT for customer service, but I was running into issues. ChatGPT would make up answers to customer questions, shooting off nonsense responses alongside completely invented URLs.

This was disheartening until I came across Roam Around. The code was originally written by Nader Dabit, and he didn’t want to maintain the site. I was looking for my next project when we connected on Twitter. Ultimately, he sold it to me.

It was pretty seamless. I paid him 50% upfront via crypto to secure it. Next, he transferred over the GitHub repo and domain name, and signed an IP sale agreement. Then, I sent over the remaining 50%. The whole thing took maybe two hours.

He was very generous with his time during the first weekend that I took over. I was still getting used to the codebase, and things would constantly break. He helped me out, and I really appreciated that. Months later, as a token of goodwill, I awarded him advisor shares.

The product

Imagine your flight is delayed, and you’re in the air with no signal. You land, and receive a text from Roam Around:

Roam Around is an AI travel agent. At the moment, we leverage OpenAI to create bespoke itineraries for millions of people. In the not-too-distant future, we’ll automate any task of a dedicated personal travel agent.

Just as chauffeurs were reserved for the elite until Uber made them commonplace, we’re going to put a travel agent in every person’s pocket!

The challenges

Roam Around really hit close to home for me because I’m an avid traveler, but a terrible planner. I’m not the type to do hours of research before visiting a city, which often leaves me scrambling to find the best things to do upon arrival.

I saw Roam Around's potential as a business. During a recent visit to Barcelona, I realized that, with a few slight tweaks, we could make these itineraries actionable. Once we made those changes, we saw a meteoric spike in traffic. At one point, we generated 1M itineraries per day for three consecutive days.

The issue was that we weren’t monetizing. At the time, we were using Text-Davinci-003, and between OpenAI and Vercel costs, I had racked up $35K in credit card debt within a short 30 days. I was three days away from closing Roam Around and walking away financially ruined, when OpenAI announced 3.5-turbo, which was 10x cheaper.

We lowered our Vercel bill by 90% through Edge Functions, and added a monetization layer. I still think back to how incredible the timing was. We were three days away from death, but the universe refused to let that happen.

In a world ever more divided, travel is the antidote that connects people of different cultures, making the world feel a bit smaller. Anything that enhances, promotes, or accelerates this connection is good. Roam Around, by way of saving people dozens of hours of planning, is bringing people together by reducing the barrier to travel.

Going full-time

The current version of Roam Around was built by an army of contract developers found on Upwork.

For the entire first month of building, I was working 18–21 hours each day, because I was also juggling part-time work as a customer relations consultant.

I’d wake up at 7 AM to catch up with the devs in Pakistan and India as they were finishing their shifts, then I’d meet with the devs in Europe. In the afternoon, I’d shift to partnership and fundraising meetings with people based in the US, and by nighttime, Asia would come online, so I’d work with them until 4 AM.

Going to bed, my mind would race about the millions of things I wanted to accomplish the next day. Then, I’d get a restless three hours of sleep and begin the cycle all over again. It was incredibly exhilarating and exhausting at the same time, which drove me to take a leap of faith to tackle Roam Around full-time.

The features we build today are primarily dictated by customer feedback and my own personal experiences while traveling abroad. I read every single feedback email.

Financially, our original funding was my personal American Express account. As I mentioned, I maxed out every personal credit card I had, in an effort to bring this dream to fruition. Once we gained and sustained traction, we received a $100K pre-seed check from Jason Calacanis’s Launch accelerator. That kept the lights on, and bolstered our credibility with other partners and investors.

What's your tech stack?

Our main tech stack consists of OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 and GPT 4, various point of interest APIs, NextJS, Vercel, and Firebase.

Initially, we used Serverless functions, but transitioned to Edge functions due to the significantly higher cost of Serverless.

Our main struggle has always been balancing quality with speed. Obviously, quality is important, but each itinerary initially took 45 seconds to generate, and we were seeing really high bounce rates. This remains a big focus area, and we’ve worked hard to figure out workarounds that allow us to provide high-quality content at acceptable speeds.

Marketing and user growth

Our initial traction came as a result of going viral in Indian WhatsApp groups. Though we’ve tried, we were never able to trace back exactly how that happened. Our best guess is that it was a combination of AI hype, plus people realizing how useful this tool could be.

Interestingly, we believe people were excited that Roam Around put their hometowns on the map, so to speak. We've been able to create detailed itineraries for cities that wouldn't be covered by major publications. Travel is also an inherently social activity, so we’re seeing that a large percentage of our generated itineraries are also shared via WhatsApp or email. This obviously fueled our growth.

Aside from that, we:

• Replied to numerous Reddit posts about itineraries for City X with a custom built Roam Around itinerary for that city.
• Landed a few interviews, and even a couple VC pitches, through DMing hundreds of people on Twitter.
• Studied some of the great growth hackers to create content that is shareable and has social hooks.
• Definitely rode the wave of AI threadbois sharing us in their daily “13 AI tools that will blow your mind.”
• Focused on SEO from the very beginning.

Business model and revenue

Local businesses pay us to connect travelers with their activities, and we compensate influencers for any activities booked as a result of their marketing.

On our end, we recommend activities and hotels that link out to Viator and Kayak, respectively. We’re adding in more sources of activities so that we can better serve our users, especially those in Asia and Latin America. We get paid anywhere between 8-10% of each activity booking, with the average package ranging around $250. In the 90 days since we began monetizing, we’ve generated $300K in gross bookings.

Our unit economics are pretty strong, and are only getting better. 50K OpenAI requests costs us about $15, and given our median booking price, our break even is 0.5 bookings per 50K requests. We’re actually seeing about 20x that.

Despite our viral growth and substantial success, fundraising has been difficult. After the Web3 boom and bust of the last two years, VCs are wary of jumping head first into AI. We’re constantly facing questions about moat and defensibility, which I think will be the case for any AI startup.

Every week, another seemingly mind-blowing, world-changing AI announcement is made, and it’s hard to not want to drop everything and build on that. It can be challenging to continue on our path and stay laser-focused on creating a great experience!

However, if I had to do it again, I’d do everything exactly the same, except I’d take the leap of faith even sooner!

Discuss this story, or subscribe to The Deep Dive for more.

🐦 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 Dan Kulkov, Darko, and Sveta Bay for contributing posts. —Channing