🗞 What's New: Land media attention for your product

Effective PR strategies don't have to be expensive:

• Pitch compelling stories to relevant media outlets, including founder background, and unique aspects of your business. Use data and statistics.
• Are you seeking funding, but haven't made it past the MVP stage? Pitch your MVP by showing its value, and what your team brings to the table.
• From major failure to $16K+ MRR. Cofounder drama led to Rashid Khasanov's business shutting down, but an epic pivot led to success.

Want your product seen by over 90,000 founders and businesses? Sponsor an issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter. Choose between 3 affordable tiers that can fit almost any budget.

by Syed Balkhi

PR can play a crucial part in a startup's success! Check out the strategies below.

Getting media attention

One of the most effective ways to get media attention is to pitch stories to relevant media outlets.

• Local news publications are often interested in profiling new businesses opening up in their area. Send them a press release announcing your launch, along with some background on your founders, and unique aspects of your business. Emphasize any local connections you have, or contributions you're making to the community.

• Industry publications are key for establishing yourself as an expert in your field. Pitch journalists with story ideas related to trends in your niche, or advice based on your own experiences.

When pitching any media outlet, you need to tell a compelling story. Communicate what makes your startup interesting, different, and worth covering. Focus on problems you're solving, innovations you're bringing to the market, or how you're disrupting the status quo. Use data, statistics, and user stories to showcase traction and success.

Network and build relationships

• Attend industry events and conferences. Look for local meetups, networking events, trade shows, and conferences related to your field. Introduce yourself to attendees, connect on social media, collect business cards, and follow up after the event. The goal is to build authentic relationships, not just hand out business cards.

• Identify bloggers, journalists, industry experts, and thought leaders you'd like to connect with. Follow them on social media, comment on their content, send them a genuine personalized email, or meet them at an event. Establish rapport by providing value: Share their content, offer useful information, or pitch them a guest post.

• Offer value and build rapport. Don't just ask others for favors or promotions. Provide value by sharing useful insights, sending referrals, or connecting people in your network.

Use social media

• Share valuable content, like blog posts, infographics, and videos on your social platforms.

• Engage with your audience by responding to comments, questions, and messages. Social media is a two-way conversation, so be sure to interact.

• Use relevant hashtags and keywords in your posts.

• Run contests and giveaways to increase engagement and followers.

• Use images and videos in your social content, since they tend to perform better than text-only posts.

• Collaborate with influencers and other brands via guest posts, cross-promotions, and more.

• Share company news and announcements on social media to generate buzz and interest.

• Monitor conversations about your brand and industry to engage your audience and address any issues.

Generate word-of-mouth

When people hear positive things about your business from friends, family, or other trusted sources, it motivates them to try your product or service:

• The best way to get your customers talking about your business is to wow them. Provide an exceptional customer experience, deliver high-quality products, and go above and beyond to make them happy.

• Make it easy for happy customers to share about you on social media. Provide shareable content and hashtags, and thank customers publicly when they post reviews or testimonials. Consider creating a brand ambassador program to empower passionate customers. Reward brand advocates with discounts, free products, or VIP access.

• Identify customers who love your product and would be excited to tell others. Ask them to write online reviews and testimonials, request referrals to their networks, and ask them to participate in case studies, provide quotes, or speak on your behalf at events. Satisfied customers can become powerful evangelists!

Discuss this story.

from the Growth Trends newsletter

🚀 LinkedIn launches Premium Company Pages.

💻 Flowlu consolidates 35+ tools to run and grow your business. #ad

🤖 AI is coming for online freelance jobs.

🏛️ The US Justice Department is suing Adobe for "deceiving" subscriptions.

🍎 Apple is shutting down Apple Pay Later just months after its launch.

🧰 Here's what you can learn from people's love of Ace Hardware.

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

by Upsilon

Pitching a product to investors can feel like a fight. You either win their hearts and get the funding you need, or risk losing it (and, in the worst-case scenario, going out of business).

What can you do to stay on the winning side? How can you grab investors' attention and secure funds?

The secret sauce

Having an MVP with proven traction is one of the secret ingredients to the pitch success recipe.

Remember, investors are also human, and are reluctant to waste their hard-earned capital on unworthy ventures. So, the first thing you should focus on is your product.

Even if it's at the early MVP stage, make sure it solves an important problem for your users. Don't create a product without conducting thorough market research; otherwise, your business plan may never go beyond the conceptual stage.

The pitch

Here are a few tips for a successful MVP pitch:

• Create a tangible product that meets your customers' needs, and solves their problems.

• Prove traction by showing performance metrics, feedback, and other proof validating the product's feasibility.

• Prepare financial calculations that verify the financial viability of your product, and illustrate how you plan to spend the money that investors give you.

• Showcase your team's expertise, outlining what each person is bringing to the table. Investors are typically unwilling to invest in a dodgy business run by a group of amateurs.

• Demonstrate scalability by providing a detailed plan for the product's development.

As you can see, any MVP pitch requires careful preparation. The time you invest in it will eventually pay off when you obtain funding.

For more tips, including how to create an MVP pitch deck, click here!

Discuss this story.

by Rob Hope

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

Add a hint to scroll, to show that there is more information further down. Here are four solutions:

1. Add a subtle down arrow, positioned at the bottom of the introduction.

2. Add a "Learn More" CTA button that kicks off the page scroll.

3. Avoid a 100% window height introduction section, bringing the second section up.

4. Allow the hero elements to flow into the second section, suggesting storytelling.

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

by James Fleischmann

Rashid Khasanov started his indie hacking career with the goal of making fintech more accessible. It left him broke, but it also gave him his next idea.

So, he built another business, and...it failed. But, he used it as a template for his next business. That one worked! Now he has built four businesses from the same template, and his portfolio is bringing in $16K+ MRR.

Beginning the journey

I've always wanted to work for myself. As a teenager, I built and sold kites, bicycles, and petards. I even tried my hand at breeding and selling parrots.

After graduating university with a degree in finance, I worked odd jobs to maintain my freedom: Driving for Uber, delivering groceries, selling cars, and long haul trucking. Say what you will about odd jobs, but they gave me the flexibility to pursue indie hacking.

The businesses

Back in 2016, I teamed up with another finance student to build a social investing app for millennials. We found investing boring and wanted to gamify it, so Richie Invest was born.

Turns out, Richie was a very challenging business to build. The industry is highly regulated by SEC and FINRA, which means lots of laws to abide by. Plus, barriers to entry were very high, so it required lots of capital to build, run, and grow.

We raised a family-and-friends round of $90K, and I personally invested another $50K of my savings. We hired three full-time developers overseas to build the app, which took eight months. We built it, got our Series 63 licenses, and registered with the SEC, but we were running out of money.

I burned through $130K of personal money and maxed out my credit cards, ruining my credit. Plus, 90% of the capital we raised was from my own friends and family. So, deciding to quit was really hard.

But that's the name of the game. I figured if I could lose money with a startup, I could make it back with a startup.

Pivoting towards success

We built Investor Hunt, a categorized database of angels and VCs that helps founders raise seed rounds. We make revenue through subscriptions, as we do with all our products.

We launched it on Product Hunt, and made $2K+ in the first week. Everything was working well for the first month or so, but then we started having cofounder issues.

The person with Stripe admin access decided not to share profits, and cut us out. I owned the domain, so I shut it down. In the middle of this drama, I decided to build it myself.

I built Angel Match from scratch and launched on Product Hunt, and it started generating revenue from day one. Then, we used Angel Match's investor database to restore Investor Hunt, since I owned the domain name. That's how I ended up running two similar investor database products.

Currently, Angel Match is at $11K+ MRR, and Investor Hunt is at $4K MRR.

Continually testing new products

Pitch Deck Database, a complementary tool to Angel Match, was initially built as a free resource to generate leads. It performed really well, and after a year, we decided to turn it into a small SaaS within Angel Match. It's currently at $753 MRR.

Then, we built Journalist Hunt. The hardest part was building the database. It's currently at zero, but it has a lot of potential for growth, so I'm still working on it.

Complementary products for the win

Making products that were similar wasn't intentional, but it was beneficial in many ways:

• Being founders ourselves, we understand the hardships and challenges of other founders, so we have a decent understanding of our target audience.

• Our team members are experienced in working with, updating, and enriching data sets, so it made sense to us to focus on our area of expertise.

• We know how to create programmatic SEO, which puts the marketing on autopilot over time.

• We don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. Instead, we can use the same technical structure for every other database app that we develop!

Discuss this story.

by Tweetmaster Flex

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

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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 Syed Balkhi, Darko, Upsilon, Rob Hope, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing