🗞 What's New: Founders love (and hate) Threads

Threads has 70M users:

• But its home feed sucks. The good news is that small accounts can get decent engagement...for now.
• Don't choose a new marketing channel and abandon it too fast. Give it at least 3 months to see results.
• From bankruptcy to $100K ARR. When Maciej Cupial stopped offering a free tier, he started acquiring paying, non-annoying users.

Want to grow your business? Try running a promo in the Indie Hackers newsletter to get in front of 75,000+ founders.

by Channing Allen

It's been a couple days since Meta launched Threads, its Twitter competitor.

And by "competitor," I actually just mean "clone." The two apps are so similar that Musk immediately threatened to sue for misappropriation of intellectual property. Zuck himself all but acknowledged the accusation by coming out of an 11 year Twitter hiatus to post the meme equivalent of a middle finger:

Clone or not, 70M users have already signed up! And that includes a lot of indie hackers.

More than 50 founders replied to an Indie Hackers post asking for people's usernames on Threads. And, because I deeply, deeply care about how I spend my time, I spent two hours clicking through every single link on that post to see what indie hackers think of Threads so far.

Two things stood out to me.

1. The home feed sucks

You can't access a following-only feed. Instead, the home feed is filled with a bunch of celebrity gossip and influencer content.

Indie hackers don't love this.

2. Small accounts get relatively good engagement

On the flipside, the majority of the accounts I looked at were getting at least some engagements on their posts, even tiny accounts with ~5–20 followers. That's a big difference from Twitter. On Twitter, small accounts have been known to tweet into the void for months before getting any likes or retweets.

This is probably because signing up for Threads means connecting it to your Instagram account, where you have access to plenty of your IRL friends.

Problem is, for most of the indie hackers I know, this is like mixing work with play:

Discuss this story.

from the Growth Trends newsletter

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📝 A non-cringey five year plan template for business growth.

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

by John Doherty

I’ve built multiple six figure ARR companies (most recently EditorNinja) from scratch, and I've seen many founders struggle with choosing a marketing channel. Let's turn that around.

How to choose your first marketing channel

Ask yourself:

• What are your goals and your timeline? Some channels take longer than others to see results.
• Who is your ideal customer, where do they hang out online, and what content do they respond to?

After you’ve answered these questions, it’s time to do your research and figure out the investment of time and money that you think will be needed to achieve your goals. The likelihood of a marketing channel working for your business comes down to:

• Having the skillset to run your account, or hiring someone who does.
• Allocating the necessary budget to properly test the channel based on the amount you're willing to pay to acquire a customer.

When and how to test

Many founders try too many channels at once, instead of trying to fully optimize the channel they're already on. This leads to having two channels that are kind of working, but not really. Nothing’s been fully leveraged.

What's needed is a commitment to see a channel through. Only start testing new channels if the first one stops working enough to justify investing in the new channel.

Starting a new marketing channel

When it comes to an inbound channel, like content marketing, founders usually don’t commit for long enough. If we’re talking about an ads channel, they usually don’t give it enough budget. Try this instead:

1. Give yourself at least three months to see any results at all.
2. Properly resource the channel: Give it the budget it requires, inasmuch as you can. Determine how much it will cost to acquire one customer, and plan your strategy around that. From there, dial your budget up or down as needed.

Once you’re hitting the needed metrics, scale that channel. Always optimize a channel that is working before investing in a new one!

Discuss this story.

🚀 Where to launch your startup. Posted by Bogdan Alexandru Militaru.

💡 Determining whether your startup idea is good. Posted by Pepepreneur.

🤔 How do you stay productive? Posted by Damszaf.

💻 Launching on Product Hunt. Posted by Jack.

🔒 Is a locked Twitter account the way to go? Posted by Cyril Gupta.

🛠 Working on developer tooling. Posted by Ed.

Want a shoutout 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.

by Maciej Cupial

My SaaS project, Calendesk, just hit the $100K ARR milestone! But the journey wasn't easy.

The problem

In the beginning, we didn't have a clear understanding of who our ideal customer was. Our initial target audience was essentially a guess, and as it turned out, I was mistaken. We quickly shifted our focus from the initial group to a different set of customers.

We began with a straightforward approach: Creating a landing page with a clear CTA, and launching a Google Ads campaign. This strategy brought in some customers, but it wasn't really profitable. However, it did help us better understand the needs of our users, and map out product improvements.

The bankruptcy

Early on, as we struggled to acquire users, I was panicking. My plan was to try to win more clients to cover all of the expenses.

I burned through my savings, went bankrupt, and even had to work for others again. It was a challenging two-and-a-half years! But I still had my credit cards, and I realized that there was no other way for me to proceed if I wanted to have a SaaS product. I knew that if I gave up, I would have to wait years for another opportunity. I was convinced that I was making the right choice, even when we were barely hanging on.

The turnaround

Deciding not to offer free accounts turned out to be a great move for us. We had too many users who were reluctant to pay, and this became extremely frustrating. These users were consuming our time, particularly during onboarding, without contributing financially.

Also, when we stopped offering free accounts, we noticed that the quality of our customer base improved significantly, and we stopped attracting annoying customers.

Now, I seem to be able to panic less, and look at where we can reduce costs, delay payments, advance invoices, etc. We also have a really good CFO who joins our monthly management meetings and whips me into shape. We recently switched from focusing on project work to focusing on MRR.

We started modestly, pricing our product at $29, and have since made only one increase. I never intended to offer a cheap product, so it's likely that we'll be implementing more price hikes in the near future.

From conceptualization to execution, I've been part of every process along this rollercoaster ride!

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by Tweetmaster Flex

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

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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 Darko, John Doherty, and Maciej Cupial for contributing posts. —Channing