🗞 What's New: New products to build with OpenAI's update

OpenAI just launched an experimental GPT-4 "long output" model:

• The new model can produce up to 64K tokens. Use it to create business plan generators, in-depth research reports, and more.
• Measure the success of your SEO and digital marketing efforts by tracking bounce rate, conversion rate, and average time on page.
• 120 products total. $10K MRR with a product studio. Mubashar Iqbal holds the record for most Product Hunt launches: 85!

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from the Trendy Software Ideas newsletter

This week, OpenAI launched an experimental GPT-4 "long output" model.

What's new

This "long output" model can produce up to 64K tokens, a significant increase from GPT-4's initial 4K token limit. That's a 16 fold increase.

Most OpenAI models have a limit of 128K tokens. Think of tokens as similar to words. OpenAI offers a calculator to see how many tokens your text contains.

There are two types of tokens:

1. Input tokens: When people refer to token limits, they usually mean the maximum number of tokens you can use as input. Longer input tokens are useful if you want to provide extensive context to the AI model. For example, you can input an entire book, then ask questions about it.

2. Output tokens: This refers to the amount of text the AI generates in response. Previously, if you input a mini report and wanted OpenAI to rewrite it, you'd be limited to 4K tokens. With this new model, that limitation is significantly increased.

What can you build

Let's start with a disclaimer: While building these tools was possible before the update, it was much more challenging. You had to prompt the AI to "continue" its generation, which could cause loss of context, and introduce errors.

With the new context models, you can get a comprehensive response in one go:

• Comprehensive book summaries: Input entire books, and generate detailed chapter-by-chapter summaries.

• In-depth research reports: Create extensive research reports or whitepapers by feeding in large amounts of source material.

• Advanced content rewriter: Rewrite lengthy articles, reports, or documents in a single pass.

• Detailed code reviews: Input a large codebase, and get reviews for the entire code.

• Longform content creation assistants: AI-powered tools that can generate entire e-books, whitepapers, or comprehensive research reports in one go.

• Business plan generators: 64K tokens is a substantial limit for creating detailed business plans.

• Creative writing assistants: Generate novel outlines, plot developments, or even entire drafts of novels or screenplays.

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

by Tuiddy

Measuring the success of your SEO and digital marketing efforts is a complex, yet crucial, process. Here are some key methods and metrics to help!

KPIs

Key performance indicators are at the heart of measuring success. For SEO and digital marketing, the following KPIs are particularly important:

• Organic traffic: The number of visitors who come to your site through search engines.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who leave the site without interacting with the page. A lower bounce rate usually indicates a better user experience.
• Average time on page: The average amount of time visitors spend on your site.
• Conversion rate: The percentage of visitors who complete a goal (such as filling out a form or making a purchase).
• Ranking position: The position of specific keywords on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Website analytics tools

Using website analytics tools (like Google Analytics) can provide deep insights into your site's performance. Here are some important analysis points:

• User behavior: Analyzing the paths users take on your site can help identify user experience issues.
• Traffic sources: Understanding where your traffic comes from (organic search, paid ads, social media, etc.) can help optimize your marketing strategy.
• Page analysis: Identifying your top performing pages, and pages that need improvement.

SEO tools

SEO tools (like SEO AI) can help you analyze keyword density, detect webpage structure issues, and provide optimization suggestions. These tools typically include features like:

• Keyword ranking tracking: Monitoring changes in the rankings of your target keywords.
• Competitor analysis: Understanding your competitors' SEO strategies to adjust your own.
• Website health checks: Detecting technical issues on your site, such as broken links and page load speeds.

Social media analytics

Using social media analytics tools, you can evaluate metrics like:

• Engagement: The number of likes, shares, and comments.
• Reach: How many people see your content.
• Clickthrough rate (CTR): The percentage of people who click on your social media ads or links.

Conversion tracking

Using conversion tracking tools, such as Google Analytics's goal-setting feature, you can precisely track conversion paths.

Understanding which channels and pages generate the most conversions can help optimize your marketing funnel.

User feedback

Direct feedback from users is also a valuable method for assessing success. User surveys, reviews, and customer service interactions can help you understand users' real thoughts and experiences.

Regular review and adjustment

Successful SEO and digital marketing efforts require continuous monitoring and adjustment. Regularly review your data and strategies, and make necessary optimizations based on real-world performance to ensure ongoing success.

Discuss this story.

💡 From idea to $1K in less than a week. Posted by Davis Baer.

🤑 Five untapped ways to make money online. Posted by Amol Chavan.

🗓️ I've launched 24 products in the last four years. Posted by Alex Belogubov.

🚀 How our network helped us prepare to launch on Product Hunt. Posted by Maximilian Fleitmann.

🏖️ I created an app for people who hate planning vacations. Posted by Modupe Ogun.

💰 Monetize your Telegram through paid posts. Posted by Marie.

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

After building 120 side hustles, and breaking the record for most Product Hunt launches, Mubashar Iqbal recently became a full-time indie hacker. He's currently running a product studio, Mubs Inc., and it's at $10K MRR.

Side hustling full-time

My parents bought a computer for my older siblings when I was eight years old. We got bored of the two or three games that came with it, and they stopped using it. I started coding with it.

I'd buy computer magazines and copy coding examples into the computer, then modify the program to do what I wanted. That was how I learned to code, and I fell in love with it.

I recently hit 120 projects total. It took me over 20 years. I won't list them all, but you can find them here. Also, I believe I still hold the record for the most launches on Product Hunt: 85!

The most successful was probably Will Robots Take My Job? It got covered by magazines, newspapers, TV, and radio all over the world, and did about 14M pageviews before we sold it. It made about $4K per month in ads at its peak.

I limit my time to work on each project to between two and four weeks. If I haven't launched it by then, I've spent too much time on it. Likely, I wouldn't finish it after that point anyway, so I kill it.

Since I'm able to build pretty quickly, it's worth scratching the itch and building the idea, even if it doesn't amount to anything.

Current side hustle focus

Here's what I'm working on currently:

• GuestLab is an AI research assistant that generates personalized intros, interesting topics, and insightful questions from your guests' LinkedIn profiles. We use a SaaS subscription model, and it's at ~$100 MRR.

• MicroAssets connects buyers with bootstrapped founders that sell high potential projects under $100K. It's free to use, but premium members get faster listing review, access to additional data, direct access to sellers, and more items listed simultaneously. We just crossed the $300 MRR mark.

• Once.Tools is a database of software you only have to pay for once. It's pre-revenue, but the eventual business model will be based on sponsorships.

• SideprojectMVP is a newsletter with everything you need to know about building your side hustle. It's also pre-revenue, and I don't have a solid plan.

I'm building all my projects slowly and methodically, bootstrapped all the way, and spending zero on ads. It might take a little longer to grow, but this is the best approach for me right now.

Validate an MVP, not an idea

Validating before you build doesn't work. A lot of indie hackers recommend validating with a landing page before building anything, but I think it's much easier to validate once you have a working product. Not the finished product, but a working product.

It's just very difficult to get good, accurate feedback on an idea. Even with a sketch or mockup, potential users rarely truly understand what you are planning to build.

Having a functioning MVP makes it much more likely that potential users will be able to give you useful feedback. And, if they like the idea, they can start using it (and paying) right away.

Paying the bills with a service

Thanks to my experience with products, I also have a product studio, where I work with others to build and launch their products. It's my main focus at the moment.

We typically do fixed bids for each project, but we've also experimented with revenue share. In other cases, we have joined as equity partners.

It keeps me afloat, but I hope to work less on other people's products and more on my own soon!

My business has grown entirely organically, mostly through word-of-mouth and social media. Here's my marketing process:

• Build in public (mostly X).

• Launches (Product Hunt, Hacker News, subreddits, etc.).

• SEO.

• Mailing list.

For me, building in public has had the highest return on investment!

Discuss this story.

by Tweetmaster Flex

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Darko, Tuiddy, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing