🗞 What's New: Cold emails are your secret weapon

Cold email is one of most effective acquisition strategies for early-stage startups:

• With cold emails, you are starting a conversation with every single user, and you're choosing exactly who you talk to. Leverage these superpowers.
• AI can supercharge your marketing. This list of AI marketing tools covers SEO, writing, keyword research, social media, and more!
• $15K MRR from a privacy-focused survey tool. Wilson Bright is overcoming the challenges of building in Web3 to scale.

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 SolarFlare

I scaled PressPulse to $6K MRR in under six months by using cold email. Here's how!

Mastering cold emails

Build an AI-powered pipeline to research leads and write your email copy. You can throw 5K names and website URLs at this pipeline, and you'll automatically have 5K personalized emails ready to fire, all in 30 minutes.

Beyond being extremely accessible to developers who are already proficient in AI, cold email's got three superpowers that no other distribution channel can offer:

1. You start a conversation with every user: Every. Single. User. This is incredibly powerful in the early stages, as it helps you establish rapport, bounce ideas off of one another, offer 1:1 support, understand their needs, build personal relationships, and convert users into long-term fans.

2. You choose exactly who you talk to: Unlike other distribution channels, you have 100% control over who you talk to. You can target for everything, including a prospect's company, their job title, their number of employees, etc.

3. Complete stealth mode: Unlike other channels, where competitors can easily reverse engineer (or even abuse) your marketing strategies, cold email operates in complete stealth mode. Every aspect is concealed from end to end!

The superpowers

By combining the three superpowers outlined above, you can reach product-market fit quickly, and scale.

This is a replicable strategy for any startup. The blueprint is actually straightforward:

• Engage with a handful of customers at the start.

• Validate your idea.

• Build your AI-powered pipeline to reach, and engage with, numerous customers.

• Scale!

Leverage cold emails as your first distribution channel. It's a game changer!

For more, check out my Cold Start Blueprint newsletter, where I break down every aspect of my cold email system.

Discuss this story.

from the Trendy Software Ideas newsletter

📖 Big Tech's playbook for swallowing the AI industry.

🎯 Revelance is the new personalization for marketers.

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

💻 All web "content" is freeware.

🔊 The best portable speakers for summer 2024.

🤔 What exactly is branding? Here's what you need to know.

Check out Trendy Software Ideas to discover more software ideas inspired by recent news.

by Stephen Flanders

Last week, we broke down how AI can accelerate your coding. This week, we're breaking down how AI can supercharge your marketing.

The tools

For SEO, these AI tools can help build domain authority:

• ListingBott: Uses AI agents to list your website on 100 directories.

• QuickListing: Gets you into 200+ directories.

• PressPulse: Uses GPT-4 to source personalized HARO inquiries.

Keyword research:

• Keyword Insights: Turns a seed keyword into thousands of curated keywords.

• Rankify: Generates keywords based on a description of your business and what you want to rank for.

• Swiftbrief: Handles your keyword research, keyword clustering, and content briefs.

Writing content:

• Cuppa: Writes a range of articles using information from the web, top SERPs, and Perplexity.

• Koala: Writes SEO-optimized content using GPT-4o and real-time data.

• Keyword Hero: Crafts content with the express goal of outranking your competitors.

Social media:

• AutoShorts: Fully automates your faceless video channel.

• BoostBot: Finds, and reaches out to, hundreds of influencers.

• CustomerPing: Lets you know when people are talking about a problem your business can solve.

• Vidyo: Makes short clips from your long videos.

• CopyCopter: Turns your articles into short videos.

• Olly: Generates posts in real-time as you scroll through social media.

Ads:

• Bestever: Creates visual ads in your brand's voice.

• AdGen AI: Generates hundreds of ads in just a few clicks.

• Creatify: Turns product links into video ads.

• Glato: Creates video ads with digital creator clones.

Outreach:

• La Growth Machine: Personalizes your voice messages at scale.

• Humanlinker: Provides personalized prospecting.

• Openmart: Finds niche retail leads based on custom criteria.

• Meetz: Personalizes your outreach, sends automated follow-ups, and books meetings.

Opportunities for indie hackers

The demand for these tools isn't slowing down anytime soon, so keep in mind that there will be plenty of opportunities to improve on these incumbents as the technology gets better.

If you're looking to build in AI, keep up with the curve!

Discuss this story.

by Rob Hope

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

Boost confidence with payment method logos.

We’ve come a long way with online transaction confidence, but some demographics are more hesitant than others. An SSL certificate for your landing page is non-negotiable.

You can further improve your visitor confidence by adding all accepted payment methods near your pricing tables, main CTA buttons, and landing page footer.

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

by James Fleischmann

Wilson Bright took an established product idea that had already been validated by a crowded market, and built it for privacy-focused Web3 companies.

Since this niche was completely unserved, he was able to grow BlockSurvey to $15K MRR!

The idea

I started my indie hacking journey in 2020 by participating in a hack-a-thon called "Can't Be Evil," by Stacks Blockchain. This sparked my passion for privacy and data security, and I created BlockSurvey. BlockSurvey helps companies run surveys that need user data protection and privacy, without any ads, trackers, or cookies.

Since it was built during the hack-a-thon, BlockSurvey was a lean, focused effort that took me three days. On the third day, I launched on Product Hunt.

The business model

I initially bootstrapped the project with personal savings. I spent about $30K of my personal savings, then got some year-long grants from the community to build further.

Our business model is subscription based. We cater to two main segments:

1. Individual users and small businesses: We offer self-service access priced at $29 per month for individual plans, and $69 for team plans.

2. Enterprise clients: We offer a done-for-you service for larger organizations that require SSO, custom integrations, and higher security compliance standards. The pricing is custom, based on the requirements and the work involved to get it done.

We serve over 500 customers, and have facilitated 10M+ submissions so far. Of our $15K MRR, ~40% of that comes from enterprise clients, while 60% comes from individual users and small businesses.

Validation and growth

Shortly after launching BlockSurvey, the Black Lives Matter rallies kicked off, and the public used our tool to RSVP for the rallies.

It was a complete surprise. It was humbling and inspiring to see how my simple MVP could be put to use for good. It validated the importance of our mission, and showed the real-world impact our product could have in enabling people to safely engage in important causes.

This motivated me to take it seriously and keep building, but it didn't necessarily validate the product. I was offering the product for free at the time, and validation comes from a willingness to pay.

I found that privacy-first surveys resonated most with industries like mental health, sexual health, activism, relationship coaching, spirituality, and other niches. Once I discovered this, I was able to validate!

Building in Web3

Data privacy should not be an optional feature, or an upsell in digital products; it should be the default. At least, that's what I believe.

For indie hackers, Web3 opens up new opportunities to build innovative applications that prioritize user privacy, data ownership, and censorship resistance.

But there are challenges inherent to building in Web3. One of the main challenges is the limited acceptance and understanding of blockchain among non-Web3 businesses. Many traditional businesses are hesitant to adopt Web3 solutions, due to the perceived complexity and unfamiliarity with the underlying technologies.

Here are a few steps you can apply to build a vertical SaaS in the Web3 niche:

1. Identify a specific problem or inefficiency within the Web3 ecosystem. Usually, this can be identified from hanging out on Discord servers for large communities. You'll get to see the tools they use, and if you notice that they are not built for Web3, there is an opportunity. Ask the community manager if they are on the lookout for a tool that can help them.

2. Design your solution to integrate seamlessly with various blockchain networks. Go multichain from the start.

3. Prioritize user privacy, security, and data ownership in your product architecture. This will help you to expand to other niches once your Web3 opportunities are done.

4. Try building partnerships and integrations with key players in the Web3 space to expand your reach and credibility.

5. Apply for grants.

Pro tip: Stay focused on sales! I didn't. It was a mistake, and I learned the hard way. I eventually hired a consultant to teach me. Don't be afraid to learn the skill!

Discuss this story.

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 SolarFlare, Darko, Stephen Flanders, Rob Hope, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing