🗞 What's New: Increase revenue with a free digital product

Is your user acquisition strategy currently working?

• Great! Now, experiment. Try launching a free digital product that users can adopt and share. Connections, created. Conversions, increased.
• What can founders learn from screenplays? Use the three act structure to tell your brand's story: Share the setup, the conflict, and the (re)solution.
• Tripling the number of total signups took one month for Florin Pop. The secret? Collaborating with creators to market his platform.

Want to grow your business? Try running a promo in the Indie Hackers newsletter to get in front of 80,000+ founders.

by Sveta Bay

Sometimes you don't need to launch more. You just need to try something different.

Here's how we doubled our revenue by launching a free product.

Freebie fun

We've been collecting emails through free content products for six months. The funnel worked well enough; we collected 5.4K+ emails.

Then, we launched User Persona Generator, a free digital product. Users can generate a persona for their business, and get nine marketing ideas in exchange for the email.

The result: 4K emails in just two weeks. More emails mean more revenue, since we have an upsell funnel that leads to our core paid product.

Why did this work?

With our content freebies, it would have taken 135 days to collect this number of emails. Our one digital product is collecting emails ten times faster than eight content freebies. Why?

Content freebies have zero potential to go viral. You give your email, you get a product. There's nothing to share.

But our digital product went viral. Users got the result instantly, and they shared it!

First, we launched it on Product Hunt, and we got featured in AI newsletters (free). Then, people started sharing the results on socials (free). Now, we're seeing viral TikToks and Reels from creators, and SEO already gives some traffic (free).

All of this happened in just two weeks!

Summing it all up

Experiments > doing the same thing over and over again.

Even if what you're currently doing is working well enough, don't be afraid to experiment with new things!

Discuss this story.

from the Growth Trends newsletter

🤖 X’s privacy policy says the company will use public data to train AI models.

📝 Google's AI can now write your emails for you.

🍔 Burger King will soon have to defend its Whopper in court.

🛍 Run these tests before publishing your new e-commerce website.

👿 Today's tourists are on their worst behavior.

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

from The Hustle newsletter

Melanie Perkins, founder of Canva, uses a time-tested formula to tell her brand's story: The quintessential three act structure. Here's how to leverage it.

Act one: The setup

The first act sets the scene. Characters are introduced, and the story's setting is established.

In startups, it highlights the story's key figures, and introduces an inciting incident that moves them to take action.

For example, when two friends sharing a San Francisco apartment couldn't pay the bills, they decided to rent air mattresses to strangers who came to town for a conference. Thus, Airbnb was born.

Here are some things to consider when crafting your setup:

• What's your origin story?

• What are the unique, relatable aspects of your background?

• What questions can you plant in the mind of the audience?

Act two: The conflict

The second act is where the action happens. The hero is tested, and must overcome challenges to achieve their goal.

In business, act two explains why your idea should exist. If you provide a strong enough "why," your audience will anticipate act three: The "how."

Before Steve Jobs revealed the first iPhone in 2007, he explained the problem: Smartphones had fixed keyboards that took up screen space. When discussing Apple's competitors, Steve called them "the usual suspects." They were making your life harder. What jerks.

Act two is critical in a startup because it explains why customers need the product. If you offer a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, nobody will care.

Act three: The resolution

In the third and final act, the hero finds a solution to the problem, achieves their dream, and (this is critical) transforms the world for the better.

This is the time to focus on specific benefits of your product, service, or idea, while walking the audience through the details.

For Melanie, painting a picture of people who were frustrated by the complexity of software served as a universal pain point:

You might have a great product or idea, but if you can't tell the story, no one will listen.

The three act structure ensures that the power of your story will match the power of your idea.

Subscribe to The Hustle newsletter for more.

🚀 75+ places to launch your startup. Posted by Nithin Jawahar.

🧐 Why are people using GPT to write comments on Indie Hackers? Posted by Michael Shaimerden.

💲 Pricing your SaaS using the Pareto power law. Posted by Darko.

📱 Let's follow each other on X. Posted by Yash Chandra.

💡 Learnings from my first idea, which never launched. Posted by Johnyeocx.

👀 A peek at an indie hacker's finances. Posted by James Fleischmann.

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 Florin Pop

I hit $9K in revenue in August with iCodeThis! This was a record-breaking month for me.

Revenue history

• August: $9.2K.
• July: $5.1K.
• June: $4.2K.
• May: $3.7K.
• April: $1.9K.
• March: $344.

Behind the scenes

We tripled our number of signups in one month, going from 2.8K in July to 8.9K in August. We hit $24K in total revenue, and 22K total members.

One of the key factors that helped us massively was collaborating with other creators to help us spread the news about the platform. (Thanks to Kevin Powell for his amazing video!)

I was more active on Twitter, and had several tweets go semi-viral, which I used to send more traffic to our platform.

I also started streaming on YouTube again to engage with the community and provide more value.

Last, but definitely not least, we had a three day sale to celebrate 20K members. This sale alone brought in over $4.5K in revenue at the end of the month!

What's next

In September, I'm going to double down on content creation, while the team focuses on improving the platform. We aim to provide even more value to our members!

Also, today, Adrian Lica is joining the team as a full-time frontend developer! Woo-hoo!

Things are looking great, and I'm super excited for the future of iCodeThis.

The revenue goal for September is $4K, or about two sales per day.

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 Sveta Bay, Darko, Carmine Gallo, and Florin Pop for contributing posts. —Channing