🗞 What's New: An acquisition channel that works

Founders need acquisition channels that can give feedback fast:

• Discord isn't super saturated, isn't expensive, and can help you get to product-market fit faster. DM admins to ask for a shoutout.
• Common myths about QA include falsehoods around cost, productivity, and motivation. Truth: QA can save you time and money in the long run!
• A failed SaaS and a $37K exit led to a new lifestyle business. Andrew Kamphey recorded 8 videos in a day, and that kicked things off.

Want your product seen by nearly 95,000 founders and businesses? Sponsor an issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter. Choose between 3 affordable tiers that can fit almost any budget.

from the Trendy Software Ideas newsletter

To grow as a newbie founder, you want to focus on acquisition channels that are not that saturated or expensive, and give you a fast feedback loop.

Let me explain.

Channel search

A channel's age is directly correlated with saturation. Take Facebook Ads, for example. Facebook was launched in 2004. If you want to use Facebook Ads, expect to pay up to $2 per click. Ouch.

As a new founder, you want newer, cheaper channels. Ideally, you want to get feedback from users fast.

Going with the Facebook Ads example, you probably won't get much feedback from people there if you run an ad.

A solution? Discord

Discord is a relatively new marketing channel. It launched in 2015, and has really taken off since then.

There are now 614M+ Discord users. In reading recent interviews on Indie Hackers, I've noticed more and more founders mentioning Discord as an acquisition channel that works for them.

Take Masud and his product, Queue, which is currently doing close to $1M in revenue a year. Masud tried a bunch of different marketing channels, but Discord was one that worked really well:

Alexander Chen is another indie hacker who found success by launching on Discord.

Hit product-market fit faster

Remember our earlier point about fast feedback? Discord can help you get that, because at its core, it's a chat app. You send something, then you receive something in return.

People respond on Discord. You won't get radio silence there, like on some other channels.

How to find a Discord server relevant to your product

There are 19M servers on Discord. Chances are, several hundred of those servers are related to your product.

Discord has its own search engine where you can find relevant communities. There are 38K+ servers listed there currently. Just type a keyword related to your product (i.e., "founders") to start your search.

Think of each Discord server as its own subreddit. They're all different, with their own rules and community norms.

Which leads me to my last point...

How to post on Discord without getting banned

The last thing you want to do is join a Discord community and immediately post a link to your product. Either DM the admin, or be subtle about things.

DM the admin directly to ask to promote. Each Discord server has an announcement channel where admins post things relevant to their members. One of those things can be your product.

Scan the announcement channel for any previous links. If you find any, it's likely that you'll also get approved for your shoutout request.

If you don't want to take the DM route, you need to master the art of being subtle. If you want to promote your own product on a channel, you could start by posting a question.

Say you have a project management SaaS. You could ask people to list their favorite project management tools. After that, mention that you're building a similar tool, and are looking to find out what people are currently using. Some people will bite, and provide you with feedback.

When trying to be subtle, a popular quote among VCs comes to mind: Ask for investment, get advice. Ask for advice, get an investment.

Same thing here. Ask a question, get customers. Ask for customers, get a question asking if you're a bot.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Trendy Software Ideas for more.

from the Trendy Software Ideas newsletter

🆓 Google will give users free dark web monitoring.

📱 The top trend that every app developer should know about.

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

📖 The Verge's guide to Amazon Prime Day 2024.

👎 X moves to the next stage of testing for comment downvotes.

🖥️ Cable management and other tips for planning a new workspace.

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

by Martin Baun

QA remains frowned upon, despite its overwhelming benefits. Let's explore a few QA myths and facts!

Myth one: Expenses

Many businesses view QA as an unnecessary expense, but QA actually saves money over the long run. It does this by saving on the costs of development, finding critical bugs, and avoiding potential lawsuits over faulty software.

Implementing QA can save your brand's image and prevent customer churn. This protects your income source, making QA a good investment.

Myth two: Time

I often hear that QA takes a lot of time to implement. The truth is, the testing process can be a simple and smooth one, provided you contract the best people or teams to handle it for you.

QA will pick up errors and bugs that can be quickly corrected to shorten the development time. Furthermore, it gives your developers time to improve the functionality of the product, and even add more beneficial features.

The testing process takes time, but it gives back more time to you!

Myth three: Productivity

I keep hearing that QA affects developer productivity by constantly critiquing their work. Good QA should not be like that; it should actually be the complete opposite. Developers aren't the best critics of their own work, and QA can give them concrete feedback on how to improve.

Developers can then correct errors, and focus their time and energy on improving the software, instead of hunting down every bug.

Myth four: Motivation

This is the funniest myth I've had to debunk. The myth states that QA demotivates developers.

Developers are less likely to pinpoint the bugs plaguing their software, due to the creator's bias. This makes it a challenging and demotivating prospect for them to sit and continuously hear that their creations are flawed.

QA gives the developers time and freedom to work on new ideas by identifying tangible errors. This will increase customer approval of the product. Customer approval is the best feedback developers get, which increases their motivation.

For more thoughts, guides, and insights, visit my blog or find me on YouTube!

Discuss this story.

by Rob Hope

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

Add a radial burst behind your product imagery.

With only a few additional lines of CSS code, you can add another dimension to your landing page design. The addition of a drop shadow on the image can really add depth to the design, bringing your product imagery to life.

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

by James Fleischmann

After a small exit and a failed SaaS, Andrew Kamphey built a business in 24 hours by focusing on what he knew best: Spreadsheets.

Taking the leap

I used Google Apps Script to automate my job. I didn't know it at the time, but five years of using Apps Script was five years of learning how to code.

Better Sheets wasn't even an idea in my mind at that point. I was just the "Google Sheets Guy" in the office, and thought it was a fluke.

In 2018, I quit and went off on my own.

A failure that led to success

I built a site and newsletter about influencer marketing, and eventually sold for $37K.

For me, building a SaaS was the dream. Over the next two years, I built a SaaS called Hypeletter...but nothing came of it. We grew it to $200 per month in revenue, and got stuck.

When I was trying to build that SaaS, my cofounder convinced me that what I did with spreadsheets was valuable, not just some fluke.

We were trying to come up with a domain for the SaaS, and I put together a quick rating system in Sheets that automatically calculated a score for each domain based on a number of factors. To me, this was a simple sheet. To him, it was incredible.

Building a lifestyle business

In 2020, I built a simple video library and monetized it as my full-time income.

In one 24 hour period, I recorded eight videos with Loom. It's cheap, and it hosts the videos for you. To save time, I chose not to do any editing. Then, I put four videos up for free, and four behind a paywall through a Gumroad landing page.

Then, I launched Better Sheets. It made $390 the first month, then took off through AppSumo.

In my case, validation was literally one customer: The very first buyer.

I launched on a Saturday, and Carlos bought Better Sheets that Monday. Within a couple of hours, he sent me an email. In it was a before and after screenshot of his dashboard. He had bought Better Sheets, watched all eight videos, and immediately made his dashboard better.

That was all I needed. It told me that it worked.

Revenue streams

Better Sheets is currently at $5K a month in revenue. Here's the breakdown:

• Templates and tools via Gumroad: 12% of revenue.

• Subscriptions and consulting via Stripe: 22%.

• Lifetime deals via AppSumo: 50%.

• AppSumo Marketplace: 4%.

• Courses via Udemy: 10%.

• Ad revenue via YouTube: 2%.

Lifestyle business longevity

I've run Better Sheets for four years. It pays my bills, and I love it. I love solving the little puzzles that people have, and automating manual processes away. I believe that enjoying the process is the key to longevity.

My best advice for founders is to just ask. If you want to know something, ask someone. Indie hackers are very open, and willing to pay it forward. You just need to be curious and ask!

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