🗞 What's New: Create flywheels that drive your business forward

Flywheels can build momentum with each rotation:

• Turn your individual business activities into repeatable flywheels where each task flows smoothly into the next.
• Advanced AI spam bots are a huge problem in online communities. Courtland Allen weighs in on fighting bots, and the future of online spaces.
• $10K in 5 months. Jim H.'s one person design studio brought in his first online revenue. His advice? Don't fall into the build trap.

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by Nathan Barry

In his bestselling book, Good to Great, Jim Collins suggests that truly great companies are driven by flywheels. They turn their separate business activities into repeatable flywheels that drive their business forward with every rotation.

The three laws of a flywheel

For a flywheel to be effective, it needs to meet three criteria:

1. Activities flow smoothly from one to the next:

It's not enough to take random, disparate tasks and stack them next to each other. To function as an effective flywheel, each task needs to flow smoothly into the next.

For instance, when it comes to content, don't just guess which topics will resonate. Ask your users! They'll give you an endless stream of topics, and all you have to do is set up this simple flywheel:

• Lead magnet: Offer an opt-in incentive.
• Welcome email: At the end of the email, ask them to reply to a simple question.
• Capture responses in a spreadsheet.
• Create content: The next time you sit down to create content, simply check out your spreadsheet for ideas. Pay special attention to topics that multiple readers have mentioned.

2. Each rotation is easier than the previous rotation:

An ideal flywheel builds momentum and propels itself forward, spinning more easily each time. A good example of this is a video testimonial flywheel:

3. Each rotation produces more than the previous rotation:

Not only should each rotation be easier than the last, but it should also produce more results.

What if your newsletter grew itself? What if new subscribers referred a friend, you made money every time you sent an email, and acquiring new subscribers paid for itself?

More flywheels to learn from

ConvertKit's flywheel:

Podcast guest flywheel:

And, if you'd like to build your own flywheel, I'm thinking about creating a full course on the topic. While someone just starting their business might get value from it, the course would mostly be targeted to professional creators who are already earning hundreds of thousands per year.

If you're interested, join the waitlist!

Discuss this story.

from the Growth Trends newsletter

💻 Twitter's open source algorithm: What you need to know.

🖊 Important copywriting skills that you're probably overlooking.

💪 Microsoft's Performance Max is now in open beta.

📱 B2B brands need a mobile-first marketing strategy.

🔑 The key to growth strategies? Timing.

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

by James Fleischmann

Founders of online communities are having to respond to increasingly advanced AI spam bots.

Courtland Allen, founder of Indie Hackers, is here to shed light on the situation.

What are you seeing in the space?

Bot activity has always been a huge problem. GPT-4 only just became publicly available, and I’m already seeing it on Indie Hackers.

The vast majority of spam in the past consisted of links to buy Viagra, hacked bank accounts, and that sort of thing. But in just the past few months, that’s all been replaced by "GPT spam," which is soulless, impersonal comments written by LLMs, not humans.

Can you speak on verification?

Identity verification requires users to prove they’re a real person.

Of course, this doesn’t prevent them from subsequently using AI to post spam. But it does dramatically cut down on the number of fake accounts that can be created and deployed, which is a huge win since the primary advantages of automated spam are efficiency and scale.

It also disincentivizes bad behavior, since having one’s account banned is a much harsher punishment when it’s the only account they can create.

Social vouching requires users to vouch for each other’s reputation via invite codes. It’s simple enough for builders to create a tree showing who invited whom. It’s likely that the vast majority of spammers will be invited by a tiny minority of users, so they’re easy to find and root out.

The biggest downside to all of these solutions is that they add friction to the signup process, thus slowing down growth.

What about Indie Hackers specifically?

I want Indie Hackers to grow, but new user signups isn’t our bottleneck right now. Great content is.

We’ve done invite codes in the past, and they did an amazing job cutting down spam to pretty much zero.

We should probably go back to requiring them. We were at Stripe then, and our goal was to grow. Now that we’re no longer at Stripe, our goal is to generate enough revenue to keep Indie Hackers alive.

What will happen to platforms that don’t respond?

On the surface, GPT spam seems better than normal spam, because it often includes helpful content and is rarely offensive. But, it’s actually quite dangerous.

At least traditional automated spam can easily be differentiated from authentic content. But GPT spam is close enough to human that readers find themselves questioning whether it really is human, which causes them to begin questioning other content.

When users begin questioning an entire platform, they lose trust and stop participating. Since the value of a social network is proportional to the amount of engagement, this can easily create a death spiral if it’s not addressed.

Discuss this story.

⏳ Is it too late to build AI apps? Posted by Satvik Pendem.

📝 Best marketing tools to promote your product. Posted by Antoni Kozelski.

🤖 Generate cold emails with this ChatGPT prompt. Posted by Dan Kulkov.

🤹‍♀️ How do you manage domains? Posted by Tömő Viktor.

🏃‍♀️ On staying consistent. Posted by Cody Bontecou.

📹 Using YouTube to build in public. Posted by Alexander Q. Chen.

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.

by Jim H.

Five months ago, I launched Jim Designs, my one person subscription-based design studio for SaaS startups. This brought in my first online revenue!

The milestone

Today, I passed $10K in cumulative revenue. This may not be a significant amount to some founders, but it means a lot to me. It actually feels pretty surreal!

This was not an overnight success; I previously tried for years to make money online by building various tools, all with no success.

I don't have the secret sauce on how to make money online, but I wanted to share more about how it happened for me!

The lessons

1. Focus on what you’re really good at, and what you know best. Don't try to solve problems that you don’t have for an audience that you don’t know. In my case, as a product designer with over 10 years of experience designing SaaS products for startups, I didn’t have to look further.
2. Don’t fall into the build trap. In my case, a design studio only requires building a landing page, which means that the rest of the time can be focused on getting traction and completing client work.
3. Deliver outstanding value. That’s the only thing that matters to your customers. There is no shortcut here; your product or service either provides significant value or it doesn't. In my case, getting high-quality designs for your SaaS, at a fraction of the cost of hiring a designer, is very valuable.
4. Make your pricing a no-brainer when you’re getting started, as the initial goal is to learn and get traction, not to get rich.

The $10K is in total revenue, not MRR, but I'm still pumped to have generated my first five figures made online. My only regret is not starting earlier!

Discuss this story.

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 Nathan Barry, Darko, James Fleischmann, and Jim H. for contributing posts. —Channing