🗞 What's New: Proven tactics to land 100 users

Looking to hit your first 100 users?

• These proven tactics from SaaS companies can help: Mass follow people, launch an email newsletter, and include keywords in your domain name.
• 27% of smartphone owners use voice search regularly. Optimize for voice search by reducing load times and adding scheme markups.
• 40K users for a side project. Once Postli went viral, Iuliia Shnai turned it into a full LinkedIn app, and now has over 500K impressions.

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by Alexander Isora

Hitting your first 100 users is one of the hardest indie hacking milestones to reach. I gathered the tactics of notable SaaS companies to bring you a list of concrete actions to take in order to get there!

Mass follow people on X

This tactic helped kickstart analytics tool, Mixpanel.

Suhail wrote an X script to follow a person's followers, and acquired hundreds of customers that way.

Start with an email newsletter

10 years ago, Ryan Hoover began sending a daily email newsletter listing interesting startups that he'd found.

Soon, he'd built a list of 170 highly engaged people. This is how he came up with the idea to build a product, so he launched Product Hunt. With the help of this small initial audience, his new website quickly took off.

The Collinson Installation

Put your product in people's hands, literally. Paul Graham writes:

Product forums

Zapier's CEO used to go to the product forums of companies like Dropbox, Salesforce, and Evernote, and find posts asking for integrations. Then, he offered his solution.

Targeted outreach is the way to go. You don't need a thousand customers to get started. You just need the right 10.

Direct sales

Perform diligent research before reaching out to a potential client, in order to craft a relevant offer.

Nathan Barry, founder of ConvertKit, recommends addressing their biggest objection in your offer, and making it as easy as possible for them to switch.

Keyword in domain name

DoorDash launched a landing page to validate the need for speedy food delivery.

They decided to target people from Palo Alto who were Googling "food delivery." They chose the domain name PaloAltoDelivery.com to appear in the top search positions in Google for the keywords "Palo Alto delivery." So, the keyword is actually the domain name. And, it worked!

For more, check out my full YouTube video!

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from the Growth Trends newsletter

🤖 OpenAI's API and ChatGPT errors are increasing.

💻 Google is about to start purging inactive accounts.

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

🤗 "Thank you" page examples to improve your users' experience.

👀 Reddit refreshes its logo as IPO speculation swirls.

🎄 Holiday decorating is reaching new heights.

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

by Syed Balkhi

Optimizing your site for voice may be one of the most important things you do going into 2024.

The stats

• ~30% of all searches are conducted without a screen.

• ~60% of US shoppers report using voice chat.

• One in six households own a smart speaker device.

Optimize for mobile

27% of all smartphone owners claim to use voice search regularly.

Here are a few rapid fire tips for making sure your site is working its best on smartphone devices:

• Use a mobile template to save time.

• Reduce loading times: Long loading times can cause users to leave without taking action. Google admits that speed plays a significant role in its rankings.

• Streamline navigation: You want people to find what they need without going through a bunch of unnecessary steps. Improve your navigation menu and add a search bar for a boost in mobile-friendliness.

• Host videos offsite: Videos can slow down your site, which leads to a poor user experience. We like to host our videos on YouTube, and embed videos directly onto our website.

• Test often: After every update, test your website on different mobile devices so you can be sure everything looks and functions as it should. Go through the steps a customer might go through, like completing forms and browsing blog posts.

If your site loads quickly and looks great, there's a good chance it will appear in the voice results.

Add schema markup

Schema markup helps search engines better understand the context behind what you're writing, which makes it easier for them to match the content to relevant voice searches.

It also enables search engines to display rich snippets, which is important because rich snippets are highly visible in voice search results. Adding schema markup to different parts of your site is fairly simple. Taking this step will help you offer a better user experience, and improve the odds that your site will show up in the results!

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from the One Page Love newsletter

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

Strategically position testimonials.

Start by positioning your best testimonial, preferably from an opinion leader in your industry, above the fold. This will strengthen your intro pitch and lower bounce rates. Then, position other testimonials relevant to the landing page topic.

Example: If you are showcasing a specific product feature, try to position a testimonial mentioning that feature alongside it.

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

by Iuliia Shnai

Postli started as a micro-project: A LinkedIn post generator. It was my first coding project, which I built in April 2023.

Choosing a channel

I initially started building Postli as micro-tool using open source. I was building it just for myself, and it was a fun project for me.

Then, Postli went viral. It garnered a ton of views and feedback. That was validation, so I continued working on it.

I think LinkedIn is a very underused platform, mainly because some people think it is cringe. But there are 1B LinkedIn users, and only a very small percentage of them post consistently.

Also, LinkedIn users have higher incomes on average than X users, or users on any other platform. So, there are many potential customers there. There is a chance to share high-quality content and connect with people organically.

I think it's especially useful for founders who have niches in product marketing or product-led growth. There are creators there bringing real value with their content.

Continued growth

I continued improving Postli, and writing about it. I'm still currently building in public on LinkedIn.

Here are my current stats:

• 25 customers: I added a payment option a month ago.
• 40K users.
• 100K posts generated.
• 500K impressions.

Check out my Product Hunt launch if you're interested in supporting!

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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 Alexander Isora, Darko, Syed Balkhi, Rob Hope, and Iuliia Shnai for contributing posts. —Channing