🗞 What's New: Tips to drive sales this holiday season

Get creative to boost sales this holiday season:

• Create festive promotions, gift guides, and bundled deals. Also, consider releasing a limited edition or seasonal product to build urgency.
• What's trending in your niche? Stay on top of trends by using research tools and online communities, but don't wait too long to capitalize.
• $100K ARR from an AI tool. Pre.dev was initially created as an internal tool, then the team turned it into a standalone product.

Want your product seen by over 70,000 founders and businesses? Sponsor an issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter. Choose between 3 affordable tiers that can fit almost any budget.

by Thomas Griffin

The holiday season is a great time to boost sales. Here are 10 easy, effective ways to drive sales this season!

Create festive promotions

Take this opportunity to craft special discounts, deals, or limited time offers to entice your customers.

You should also consider incorporating holiday themes to generate excitement and urgency with your sales strategy. Example: A "12 Days of Christmas" promotion.

Gift guides and bundles

Make holiday shopping a breeze for your customers by curating gift guides and creating bundled products.

By offering pre-selected combinations at a discounted rate, you not only simplify the decision making process for shoppers, but also provide them with a value packed option.

Social media

Connect with your audience during the holidays by sharing festive content, running targeted ads, and engaging your community through giveaways or contests.

Email marketing campaigns

Utilize email marketing to stay top-of-mind with your customers.

Craft holiday themed newsletters with exclusive promotions, early access to sales, and personalized recommendations based on their preferences.

Optimize your website for the holidays

Your website is your digital storefront, so make it holiday ready!

Update it with festive visuals, banners, and easy navigation. You should also ensure a seamless, secure checkout process to enhance the overall shopping experience for your customers.

Mobile-friendly shopping

Be sure to optimize your website for mobile users. If feasible, consider developing a dedicated mobile app, and offer exclusive in-app discounts to incentivize downloads and purchases.

Limited edition or seasonal products

Create a sense of urgency and exclusivity by introducing limited edition or seasonal products, highlighting their availability for a short time to your audience.

This will help drive anticipation, and encourage customers to make a purchase before these unique items are gone.

Free or expedited shipping

Shipping options can significantly influence a customer's decision to purchase. If you have a physical product, consider offering free shipping, especially for orders over a certain amount.

Additionally, promote expedited shipping options for last minute shoppers who want to ensure that their gifts arrive on time.

Loyalty programs and rewards

Encourage customer loyalty by implementing holiday themed rewards programs.

Provide customers with points or discounts for every purchase, creating an incentive for them to return and make additional holiday season purchases.

Collaborate with influencers

Partnering with influencers can amplify your reach and credibility. Just make sure to identify influencers who align with your brand and have an engaged audience.

Influencers can create captivating content and share your holiday offerings with their followers, driving traffic and sales.

Here's to a prosperous, joyful holiday season for indie hackers!

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by Syed Balkhi

Staying on top of trends in your niche is crucial for maintaining relevance and fostering growth. Here's how to spot them.

Social engagement

Social media platforms are treasure troves for viral trends.

Keep an eye out for hashtags that are gaining popularity, or posts that have gone viral within your niche. These can give you valuable insight into what your audience is currently interested in.

Additionally, popular challenges and memes can also be great sources of inspiration for your content.

Online communities

Communities like Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn groups can be goldmines for trends.

These platforms allow you to connect with individuals from your niche, and gain insights into their interests and pain points.

On Quora or Reddit, you can just throw out a question related to your niche, then wait for the community to respond. Keep an eye out for discussions or questions that are getting a lot of attention. These can help you understand what's currently trending in your niche.

Utilize research tools

Platforms like Google Trends, Ubersuggest, and Semrush can provide you with data on search volumes, popular search terms, and keywords within your niche.

Engage with customers and industry experts

Respond to comments, or use forms or surveys to gather feedback from your audience.

Also, connect with industry experts and influencers within your niche by following and engaging with them. Years of experience, and a strong following, make them experts in spotting trends!

AnswerThePublic

Another great tool to use when looking for new trends is AnswerThePublic. You can type in a keyword, and it displays all the most popular questions, prepositions, and related searches around that keyword.

It also shows the most searched-for questions on Google. This can help you identify popular topics within your niche.

Keep in mind

When searching for trends in your niche, it's important to keep the following points in mind:

• Timing is crucial. Stay on top of trends, and don't wait too long to capitalize on them.
• Don't blindly follow trends. Make sure they align with your brand and audience.
• Keep an eye out for both short-term and long-term trends.
• Track the success of your trend-related content.

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from the Growth Trends newsletter

🖥 Zoom dropped an Apple TV version of its meetings app.

💰 Check out these proven social selling tools.

👀 The end of Elon?

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💼 Work trends expected to rise in 2024.

🕹 Saudi Arabia's plan to become the crown prince of gaming.

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

by Arjun

Prior to building pre.dev, my cofounder was running a freelance agency. He started to get fed up with the amount of time he was spending building out the statement of work and project scope for each client.

The background

My cofounder built out an MVP that allowed his clients to chat with an AI product expert that would ask them appropriate questions about what they wanted to build. Once the clients answered at least five questions, the conversation was then translated into a knowledge graph representing the idea.

This allowed him to have full context of what the client wanted to build before they even had their first call.

The product

Because of the internal success of the tool, we decided to build at a standalone service that could be used by:

• Software agencies: They embed our chat widget on their websites, and view the generated SoWs on their dashboard.

• Founders: They come to us to scope out projects, and can request a meeting to get development help.

• Hack-a-thon organizers: They embed our full interface to enable their hackers to scope out their projects.

The growth

Besides posts like this, and a few on LinkedIn, we haven't really generated much of a social media presence yet. This is definitely something we'll invest more effort into soon.

So far, our main sales funnel has been cold outreach via email, LinkedIn, and X, and our personal networks. We scraped the web for a bunch of potential clients, then started manually reaching out to them. We had a clear idea of who our ICP was, and targeted them one by one.

Also, for our SaaS offering, we're primarily targeting businesses that would be willing to pay $20K a year.

We have been relentless with reaching out to all sorts of potential clients, and will continue to do so. Getting feedback early on has been the key to our growth so far, as well as having an open mind about how our platform can best serve our users.

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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 Thomas Griffin, Darko, Syed Balkhi, and Arjun for contributing posts. —Channing