🗞 What's New: Basics for building in public

Where do you start with building in public?

• Pick a channel (or two). Set a posting schedule. Use automated tools to make it easier. Comment on posts of others in your niche.
• So, you want to write a book? Start with an article or an anecdote, and focus on great storytelling. Be sure to read a lot, too.
• One year. $30K in total revenue. Jonathan Wilke's codebase has been on a steady path of growth, following a major setback.

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by Upendra Varma

After interviewing hundreds of founders on the B2B SaaS Podcast, I've compiled information about a generic approach that founders can use to build an audience.

Note: This is a generic approach based on patterns that SaaS founders use. You might have to experiment a bit to figure out the best approach for your niche!

Channel gaze

From my conversations, I’ve found that LinkedIn and X work best for most founders when it comes to building an audience.

LinkedIn typically seems to work very well for high-ticket sales, and X works very well for reaching out to other founders and users interested in startups and small businesses.

Pick a channel or two, and start being active.

Consistency works best

Once you've chosen your channel, maintain consistent activity. Here's what that means.

For X:

• Regularly tweet about what you're working on. What are your challenges? What are you excited about? Use an automation tool to pre-schedule tweets.

• Shortlist a bunch of people who have similar audiences to yours, and start regularly commenting on their tweets.

• Strive to provide value.

For LinkedIn:

• Regularly post content.

• Send cold connection requests to at least 20-30 people (relevant to your niche) every day. You can use automated tools if you are okay with some risk.

Growing your audience

Nurturing your budding audience on a regular, consistent basis with high-quality content will help you build credibility in their eyes. Within 6-8 months, you should have a decently-sized audience.

What can you do if you want immediate results, but you have absolutely no audience?

The best thing is to build in public in communities. Think Indie Hackers, X, Facebook Groups, Discord, etc. For more, check out my video: How building in public led to an audience of 20K.

Discuss this story.

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from The Hustle newsletter

So, you want to write a book? Trendsters Polina Marinova Pompliano and Simone Stolzoff actually did it.

Polina's book, Hidden Genius, reveals the mental framework shared by the world's most successful people. Simone's book, The Good Enough Job, provocatively examines our deeply personal relationships with work.

After devouring both books, we chatted with Polina and Simone about what they learned as first-time authors.

Small steps will propel you great distances

Polina caught the eye of a publisher who requested a one-paragraph summary of what her book would be about, if she decided to write one at all.

The publisher loved it, and asked for a sample table of contents, another simple task that Polina could quickly turn out.

Then, they asked for a sample section. Then, a sample chapter. And Polina was off to the races. She approached the book like writing a series of articles.

Simone took a similar piecemeal approach, dedicating each chapter of his book to an individual story, allowing the conceptual connections to form organically.

So, if writing a book feels daunting, start with an article, an anecdote, or a bulleted list of things you want to say. You'll never get to step 100 if you don't begin with step one.

Storytelling rules

Rather than preaching 10 step solutions, Simone leaned into his storytelling strengths. He held up a mirror to nuanced societal problems, allowing readers to discover themselves in the pages.

Similarly, Polina opens Hidden Genius by discussing how educators often "present information as facts to be remembered, not rich personal stories of triumph, failure, risk, and regret."

Her realization that "stories trigger emotion, and emotion triggers memory" was a defining moment for her.

So, how can you apply storytelling to your book idea?

Three-time WSJ bestselling author Carmine Gallo sat down with us to share a few key components:

• Embrace the three-act structure.
• Humanize data.
• Say more with less.

Just read

The best way to become a better writer is to read great writing. Read things that rouse you, and write things that rouse others!

Subscribe to The Hustle newsletter for more.

from the Growth Trends newsletter

🧵 Threads now shows view counts on all posts.

🎯 15 effective marketing tactics that anyone can use.

💲 Link to your product here. Our most affordable ad.

🔎 Broad targeting isn't always the answer.

🍪 Google confirms its schedule for disabling third-party cookies in Chrome.

📱 Tools and strategies for generating leads on TikTok.

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

by Jonathan Wilke

The code I wrote just crossed $30K in revenue!

The product

My SaaS starter kit, supastarter, is a codebase that comes with all the common SaaS functionalities, like auth, i18n, and payments already implemented.

In August 2022, I started building the initial Next.js starter kit for myself. This was to avoid having to repeat myself over and over again when starting new SaaS apps for my clients. Initially, I didn't have any intention to make real money from this, but I created a small landing page. I priced it at $49, which granted access to the repository and a Discord server for support.

I figured that if this thing made me $1K, it would be a huge success. But I didn't believe that could actually happen.

The growth

In the first three months, I made a total of $2K. This made me incredibly happy, and motivated me to invest more into it. I did more marketing, built more features into it, and tried growing my followers on X (my main marketing channel) to get more reach. Also, I sponsored a newsletter issue.

Later, I increased the price to $249. After six months, I was already at $15K in revenue.

The setback

Vercel released Next.js 13 with the app router, and my sales went down drastically. Why? My starter kit was built with the pages router, and it seemed outdated.

So, I spent the next couple of months completely rewriting my starter kit with the intention of making it more scalable, extensible, and appealing to a larger audience. After another six months, I released the new version (this was back in September). It's made nearly $10K since then!

What's next

I teamed up with the amazing Fabian Beer, an expert in Nuxt, to expand the starter kit from the React ecosystem to the Vue.js ecosystem. Last week, we finally launched the new version for Nuxt 3, and the outcome has been incredible. Over $7K in revenue within the first week!

The response and feedback we've gotten so far is really positive and helpful, and we are trying to make the product better every day.

I am incredibly thankful for all the support of this community, and am proud to call myself an indie hacker!

Discuss this story.

by Tweetmaster Flex

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

Forward it to a friend, and let them know they can subscribe here.

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 Upendra Varma, Darko, Kristin Egan, and Jonathan Wilke for contributing posts. —Channing