🗞 What's New: Lower your website's bounce rate

What does your website's bounce rate look like?

• When someone visits your site and leaves without interacting, it affects your bounce rate. To build strong SEO, improve your site's performance.
• Hiring the right person is crucial for growing your business. Don't just go with your gut instinct; create and define a measurable process.
• $255K MRR with a portfolio of 4 products. Ping He answers every support email himself to get product improvement ideas, and iterate.

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by Hüseyin Kara

Even if you create the perfect product that fits the market, it's all for nothing if your potential customers can't find your website. That's why being properly indexed is just as important as building a well-developed website.

If you're totally new to this concept, check out this Indie Hackers post first to go over the basics!

What is bounce rate?

As a junior frontend developer at Adsby, I have to focus on site performance just as much as UI/UX. The reason is simple: Reducing the bounce rate.

Bounce rate refers to when a visitor comes to your website and leaves without interacting. It's an important metric because search engines like Google analyze your website based on several factors, and one of them is bounce rate. When it comes to search engines, bounce rate helps determine if your website is relevant. You can lower your bounce rate by improving your website's performance.

Improve your website performance

There are various tools to analyze your website's performance and provide insights on what needs improvement. One of the most popular is Google Page Speed Tool. With this tool, you can check your website's performance separately for mobile and desktop.

You'll see some headings in the image above. All of them aim to direct your attention to the right areas for improving your website. Let's examine each of them separately:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric is about load speed. If your LCP score is low, visitors quickly understand that your website is responsive. For a good user experience, the LCP score should be 2.5 seconds or less.

• First Contentful Paint (FCP): This measures the time from when a user first navigates to the page, to when any part of the page's content is rendered on the screen. To learn how to improve FCP for a specific site, you can run a Lighthouse performance audit. Websites should have an FCP of 1.8 seconds or less.

• First Input Delay (FID): First impressions are lasting impressions. FID measures the time from a user's first interaction with your website. A good FID score is 100 or less.

• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): This metric is about user interactions. Good responsiveness means a page responds quickly to interactions. Sometimes, users interact with complex sections, which might take longer to process. In cases like this, it's important to show a loading indicator. That way, users understand that something is happening, and that they just need to wait. An INP of 200 milliseconds or less indicates good responsiveness.

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This helps quantify how often users experience unexpected layout shifts.

General tips

• Make sure your website has a robots.txt file and a sitemap.

• Check your website's performance separately for web and mobile.

• The Page Speed Tool usually explains where you can optimize your website. Follow its suggestions for improvements.

• Make sure your image format is .webp, and that the file sizes are not too large. If so, compress them.

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from the Growth Trends newsletter

🧵 Threads is seeing more daily users in the US than X.

📝 The 12 most valuable B2B SaaS marketing metrics.

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

📔 TikTok SEO: The ultimate guide.

💪 Repeat founders on starting over again.

👵 Young people are adopting geriatric hobbies.

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

by Martin Baun

One time, I hired the worst person for the job. Here's what I learned, and how you can avoid this mistake!

The "perfect" fit

In business, emotions and instincts can cloud your judgment and lead you to make poor decisions.

Early on, I made the mistake of believing that a perfect interviewee would be the right fit for my company. Some of my best employees had poor interviews, but instinct would lead you to go for the best interviewee.

People may be weird or poor in interviews, only to become the best hire you could make. Others may ace the interview, but are utterly incompetent. All that glitters is not gold. Take the interviews at face value, and examine other aspects they bring to the table.

Be thorough

The recruitment process is vital to hiring a new employee. Fine-tuning and streamlining this process will help you eliminate poor candidates.

I previously had a lax recruitment system, involving only a Google meeting and a takeaway task to complete. It’s safe to say there were many loopholes to exploit, and many did. One candidate had a friend coach them through the interview and complete the task for them. Our previous system did not account for this, and we hired the worst person for the job.

Trial period

As a part of the process, I always set up a trial period. I also instruct the candidate to perform certain tasks with me, just to gauge their way of thinking.

Conclusion

Numerous things need to go right to hire the right person. You should have a strict recruitment process, be level-headed, and not overly rely on the optics of the interview. It is a mixed bag process, and as founders, we also need to be sure to give ourselves extra grace as we go through this! Hiring the right person is not always easy.

For more thoughts, guides, and insights, visit my blog here!

Discuss this story.

💡 What do you use to collect and process ideas? Posted by L. Cale.

🛠 100 founders' products and tech stacks. Posted by Upen.

🔎 What you can learn from Marc Louvion. Posted by Elie Steinbock.

💨 What's the fastest you've launched a software product? Posted by Hec Sanchez.

📱 Implementing in-app messaging. Posted by Owl Maniac.

🚀 How to launch a SaaS in 10 simple steps. Posted by Mike Strives.

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 James Fleischmann

Ping He built four products that, combined, bring in ~$255K MRR. He landed his first success by ignoring traditional indie hacking wisdom.

Innovate in existing markets

There was no entrepreneurship culture in my family growing up, but I spent a summer with my uncle during high school. He's a street vendor who travels, and sells random things. I remember liking the freedom that he enjoyed.

In 2009, I was in Silicon Valley working in the semiconductor industry. I decided to build a side project, so I started with an e-commerce website.

I needed a logo, and I became really impressed with the logo contests at 99designs. I ended up starting my own logo contest website called 48hourslogo. It's important to build products that scratch your own itch.

I like to innovate in existing markets because you know exactly who your customers are, and which keywords to target to find them. I targeted the niche keyword "logo contest," and I differentiated by setting the contest starting price at half the price of 99designs. Traditional advice holds that competing on price is a race to the bottom, but 48hourslogo is now at $100K MRR.

First mover in AI

As 48hourslogo grew, I noticed that a lot of "custom logo designs" were basically the same templates being used over and over again by the designers. So, in 2018, I started LogoAI to automate the logo creation process. It's currently at $150K MRR.

I was pretty familiar with logo design, and I knew that replacing human designers with AI would be the next step. But there was no AI back then, so I generated the designs from templates. I will say that I got lucky with the LogoAI domain name!

Recently, I've been working on uBrand, an AI-assisted branding platform for founders. It's at $5K MRR.

Running things

I've never brought on any partners or investors, but I have a small team of eight people.

In the morning, I work on routine tasks in my home office. This includes answering support emails. I like to keep tabs on the support emails because I get lots of product improvement ideas from them.

I meet my team members in our co-working office around 2 PM on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to talk about the projects they are working on, and brainstorm new ideas. We have a super efficient team because we have been working together for years.

Marketing tips

I've grown my businesses mostly via organic SEO. It's a core expertise of mine.

I'm such an SEO advocate that I even launched linktopia.io, a link building community for SaaS founders. I'd recommend the following three basic steps to set up your website for SEO success:

1. Research the keywords you want to target, and work them into your webpage titles.

2. Set up a blog to write about related topics and create internal links.

3. Get backlinks. I like to get them from other founders.

I don't try to beat Google. It's better to simply tell Google about the product or service you provide using convincing landing pages, then mention them (via backlinks) whenever you have a chance.

Another thing that worked really well was incentivizing customers to share their logo designs. I gave them the design for free if they got 20 likes.

Advice for indie hackers

Indie hackers have limited bandwidth, so focusing on short-term gains is tempting. But it saves time in the long run to focus on long-term, cumulative results!

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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 Hüseyin Kara, Darko, Martin Baun, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing