🗞 What's New: Do this instead of building a landing page

Looking for a simple SaaS idea that can get you ranking in Google SERPs quickly?

• Instead of first building a landing page to validate, target low difficulty, high search volume keywords. Then, build around that.
• There are tons of productivity tips out there, but here's a few actionable ones: Prime your workspace, use checklists, and rest when you need to.
• $40K MRR after a failed business. Cecilia Razak honed in on mission, alignment, and communication to launch a second startup.

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by Tony

Validating ideas is hard. When most founders have a great idea, they either build it straight away, or create a landing page to capture leads for a waitlist.

This can lead to a huge amount of time wasted. There's a better way!

The framework

• Focus on micro ideas: These will take the least time to build, and you can always add more features later.

• Target keywords: You're looking for those with low difficulty, meaning that it's easy to rank high on Google, and high average monthly search volumes, meaning that people are currently searching for them on Google.

The idea example

Consider an Airbnb safety and security checklist. This would be a micro-SaaS tool that provides the ability to create comprehensive safety and security checklists for Airbnb hosts to ensure their properties meet safety standards and regulations, providing peace of mind to both hosts and guests.

The keyword difficulty here is really low, which means it will be pretty easy to start ranking high on Google for this. We have one main keyword and two long tail keywords that you can target, all with a low difficulty of 11.

The main keyword has 1K people searching for it on Google every month, while the other long tail keywords have upwards of 200 people searching for them. You could potentially gain some traffic by targeting these long tail keywords in articles on your website (see how you can do that here).

Here are the keywords: "Airbnb checklist," "starting an Airbnb checklist," and "first time Airbnb checklist." Remember that those search volumes are for the US alone, so the potential for worldwide traffic is huge.

Check out this article for more on the SEO potential!

The features

Main:

• Checklist creation: Build the ability for hosts to create, customize, and manage safety and security checklists.
• Template library: Build predefined checklist templates that comply with various regulations and common safety standards.

Nice-to-haves:

• Progress tracking: Functionality for hosts to track the completion of each checklist item.
• Notifications and reminders: Alerts for pending items, updates, and periodic safety reviews.
• Reporting: The ability to generate and share safety compliance reports.
• Educational content: Articles, videos, and best practice guides for hosts.

I share micro-SaaS ideas like this one in my newsletter every week, so join me!

Discuss this story.

from the Growth Trends newsletter

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

📙 All business strategies fall into four categories.

🧠 Top knowledge base examples that get results.

👾 The best tiny games on the internet.

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

by Martin Baun

Here are practical tips for productivity!

Prime your environment

Your environment determines how productive you can be. Prime your environment by removing any potential distractions from your workspace.

Eliminating all distractions will help you get the best output you can achieve!

Use checklists

Checklists are like to-do lists, but better. They fully break down a task into specific deliverables, ensuring that every aspect of a task is accomplished. They help you maximize your time, and get more done efficiently and correctly.

Checklists keep you focused on the most important things, saving time and energy.

Proper time management

Pick the most important task from your checklist to accomplish, and make it your top adventure for the day. Then, decide which smaller tasks can fit into your workday.

You want to organize your workday in a way that allows you to spend less time deciding what to do. You will automatically know what's urgent and what isn't. Try grouping similar tasks and handling them in one go!

Maintain physical health

A healthy mind and body are essential to maintaining your productivity. You cannot produce optimally when you're not at your best.

Keep your body healthy with movement and healthy foods, and keep your mind healthy by ingesting helpful, productive content.

Rest

Take time to rest and let your systems recharge. Take breaks and rest when you feel tired, slow, or overwhelmed. It is counterproductive to keep going when you are feeling this way.

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

Discuss this story.

by Rob Hope

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

Only A/B test high traffic pages:

A/B testing (split-testing) with low data will lead to inconclusive, even misleading, results.

A more effective use of your time is to optimize and market your primary landing page until your traffic increases.

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

by James Fleischmann

Cecilia Razak's first startup grew to a team of 100 people...then, COVID-19 hit and the company went under. But during that period, a new idea emerged.

Now, her team of two is bringing in $40K MRR!

The background

I quit my job at an advertising agency over 10 years ago to launch a tech startup with my cofounder, now-husband, Mason Hipp. It was a tech platform that connected pet care providers with pet owners.

Within a matter of months after the pandemic hit, our revenue had decreased by almost 70%. It wasn't just a lack of demand that killed our startup. As we grew, communication started to break down, and the service itself suffered.

It was so bad that we actually stopped everything at one point and did a concerted push on company mission, communication, and alignment. Then, we changed our orientation process to speak to all those things, and re-onboarded everyone.

The pivot

Slides With Friends, an interactive presentation builder, was born out of necessity. We needed to continue running onboarding sessions and trainings when everything had suddenly gone remote. We also wanted to enable social fun and gatherings during quarantine.

The upside of our startup troubles was that we suddenly had time to work on something else. So, we built Slides With Friends for ourselves. Eventually, we went full-time with it.

Freemium

Freemium was the right choice for us because the product is inherently self-marketing. Users are launching events for their audiences with our brand on them. Upgrades are available to free users for larger use cases, in the form of annual subscriptions.

Don't just go with a freemium model blindly. Look at what you're getting out of offering a free account, then look at how much you're spending.

Determine if it makes sense for your product based on this information. Calculate it carefully, and test it!

The right SEO keywords

Our main conversion driver is content marketing. SEO has paid off a great deal, and word-of-mouth is important for us, too.

Our SEO process took a few years to set up. We currently have a team of writers. We do in-house keyword research that is tightly targeted towards our ideal customer profiles (ICPs). We're careful to aim low on the search funnel.

In other words, we avoid keywords like "what is an all-hands meeting," because people who are asking that question are still too far away from purchasing. Instead, we go with something like "the best all-hands meeting software."

Selecting the right keywords is probably the most important part of the SEO process, and it comes from a deep understanding of your audience.

As far as what's next, our goal is to double in size in the next few years!

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 Tony, Darko, Martin Baun, Rob Hope, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing