🗞 What's New: Essential lessons from building in public

Building in public can be a crash course:

• Find a successful idea and iterate. Don't build out complex payment and onboarding solutions. A Google Sheet and Venmo can be an MVP!
• Startup advice is not one-size-fits-all. Take care not to follow advice that doesn't serve you, and be sure to still trust your own instincts.
• A LinkedIn DM brought in Pexmotion's first client, which led to $4K MRR. The company niched down by making product videos for startups.

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by Adam Wright

Check out these learnings from building 12 startups in 12 months, in public!

Google Forms as landing pages

When you have an idea, create a form and promote it on Reddit and Facebook. Get a bunch out in the first month. They can slowly work in the background, and you can gauge traction without building.

If you launch 24 landing pages and promote them in month one, you'll have a better idea of what to build in months 2-12.

Find your customers first

Use Facebook Groups, Meetup, Reddit, Twitter, Quora, etc.

Maybe they are offline. Maybe in another state or country. Find your users where they hang out.

Rethink MVP

Nomad List started out as a Google Sheet that anyone could edit.

Don't think: "What can I code?" Think: "What can I scrape together in three days and sell for $20, or get feedback on?"

Go manual

Before you code out payment solutions and complex logins, consider just asking for users to Venmo or PayPal you $20, then okay their login.

Before you build user onboarding, do the onboarding manually in the database.

Focus on B2B, finance, and devs

Those three categories have the highest hit rate for success.

• B2C: "Why can't this be free?"

• B2B: "If it helps me make money or saves me time, I'll pay for it."

Mom test

Before you code, ask: "How are you solving this problem now, and how much do you pay for the solution?"

Make it easy

There are dozens of off-the-shelf SaaS solutions that you can download and customize for free. Don't invest a lot of time building something that won't get traction.

If you must code, use tools you know first. Don't adopt new frameworks or fancy languages.

Copy and iterate

A lot of successful ideas are copies of already successful businesses. Find a successful idea and iterate. Research the beginnings of what made the idea a hit.

Pro tip: Sell before you build. If you can get 5-10 people to buy your solution before you build it, that's a great indicator of market demand.

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from the Growth Trends newsletter

🔎 X will soon let you search user posts based on engagement.

💡 How successful B2B startups came up with their ideas.

🪙 PayPal's new stablecoin is pegged to the US dollar.

📢 Using Facebook Ads for lead generation.

🤖 CAPTCHAs get weirder as AI gets smarter.

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

by Channing Allen

Most startup advice isn't good, bad, or neutral. Don't chase other people's ace cards.

Learn from babies

The following passage from Alicia Juarrero's Dynamics in Action helps explain why:

The experiment

Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine that both of the infants from the excerpt above returned home afterwards to blog about the experience of learning to reach for objects. Imagine that Hannah wrote a post entitled "How to reach for an object," and that Gabriel also wrote a post with that title. (I know this is a lot to imagine. Just humor me.)

Would their posts have contained the same step-by-step instructions? Nope. Gabriel's instructions might have even contradicted Hannah's instructions. After all, Gabriel had a habit of flailing wildly, so his instructions might reasonably have begun with: "First, calm yourself down and stop swinging your arms." Whereas the more passive Hannah might have begun with: "First, rile yourself up and start swinging your arms." Yet, neither of their posts would have been "wrong."

This is what startup advice is like. Ditto advice on productivity, health, sports, finance, and so on.

Society is a pack of cards with multiple suits, and there's an ace in each suit. Before you go chasing after somebody else's ace card, check to see if they belong to the same suit as you.

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from the One Page Love newsletter

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

Add a splash of color.

A burst of color on a landing page can command attention and add excitement. And, when people are excited, they tend to try new things.

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

by Chetan

I've been editing videos for five years. I've created over 200 videos for enterprise, real estate, software, and B2B companies.

A month ago, I was watching a YouTube video about a guy who productized his design services, and I became inspired.

Link me in

I went on LinkedIn and reached out to 10 people who had "growth marketing" in their job titles.

Out of 10, one replied saying that they were looking for one minute product videos for marketing purposes. I replied back, went over everything with them, and included my pricing.

They wanted to test with one single video, then set up a subscription if they were satisfied with it.

The video was a hit! They liked the quality and the output, and I billed them ~$1.2K.

Bringing in the MRR

I've now hit $4K MRR, thanks to that DM.

I am scaling up my business, as I am sure there are many startup SaaS companies who need similar product videos. I'm offering motion ad videos regularly for a flat monthly fee. The pricing includes unlimited videos and unlimited revisions.

I am calling it Pexmotion. Launching soon!

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 Adam Wright, Darko, Rob Hope, and Chetan for contributing posts. —Channing