IndieHackers - 🗞 What's New: Build on top of WhatsApp

WhatsApp has 3B monthly active users:

• People aren't just talking on WhatsApp; they're also using it to shop. Build outbound sales tools, business chat links, or text converting products.
• As your business grows, you face different challenges than in the early stages. Be diligent in hiring, and help your leaders take ownership.
• $1.5K MRR with an AI email writing tool. Danielle Johnson and James Ivings spent 18 months at sea, shipping products while sailing the world.

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from the Trendy Software Ideas newsletter by Darko

WhatsApp has 3B monthly active users. People use WhatsApp to talk to each other, and...to shop.

According to Statista, over 70% of people in most Latin American countries use WhatsApp in their purchasing process.

Despite that, I haven't seen a lot of indie hackers build on top of WhatsApp. This made me wonder whether I could find any successful examples.

I went through the Indie Hackers Product Directory, read through interviews with successful founders, and researched sites for sale that mention "WhatsApp" in their names. Here are the successful products I found!

WhatsApp outbound sales

I found three successful products that provide users with a way to send WhatsApp messages in bulk.

WASender is a Chrome extension that allows users to send personalized, bulk messages using WhatsApp Web. It's doing $30K MRR.

I've also seen two sites for sale that do the same. One was selling for over $160K+, doing $3K+ MRR:

According to the description, the app "provides a simple and fast way to schedule messages on WhatsApp...offering message scheduler, automation, and import features for businesses to automate booking confirmations easily, send appointment reminders, request post-appointment reviews, and tailor promotions to customers."

Create business chat links

ChatWith ($32K MRR) is a web app that allows you to create "free, easy-to-use WhatsApp links for your business."

Some products have taken this exact idea, and built it on other platforms.

SuperLemon ($29K MRR) is an app for Shopify. It does pretty much the same as ChatWith: It allows users to add a WhatsApp chat button to a Shopify store. According to the company's landing page, 65K+ Shopify merchants use the tool.

This free tool has 1.2M+ monthly visitors, according to SimilarWeb. The company also has a premium offer.

Convert text to another format

While doing my research, I saw this WhatsApp bot that allows users to automatically transcribe voice notes:

According to the description, "users who receive voice notes and prefer not to listen can forward the audio message to our bot within WhatsApp, and receive a text transcription within seconds."

There was also another bot that provided the same service. It's at $1K MRR.

So, there you have it: A few ideas for building on top of WhatsApp as a solo founder!

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by Jake Jorgovan

For most founders, their early careers are riddled by the problem of finding more customers. But what happens when your business grows?

Here are the challenges that come when your business starts to hit rapid growth, and how to prepare for it!

Scaling service delivery, while maintaining quality

As you grow, you reach a point where you can't be involved in every aspect of the business anymore.

You need a system to check in with your team on a weekly basis. Walk through accounts, challenges, roadblocks, hurdles, etc.

Use quantitative data to measure the key performance aspects of your business.

Recruiting and hiring new team members

The biggest mistakes people make here are:

• Not learning how to hire or recruit properly.

• Waiting until they are bursting from growth to start hiring. This leads to quick hires that end up not working out.

A few tips to help:

• Define the role, responsibilities, and skills.

• Define the 90 day expectations and results, and what they will achieve in their first year.

• Get clear on what you want from this hire before you start interviewing people.

• When in doubt, hire HR support!

Helping your leaders take ownership

This is more than just hiring someone to hand over part of the execution. This phase involves giving someone ownership over a facet of the business.

Ownership means that they adapt your vision and values, then execute them using their own strengths and talents.

Implement 1:1s, coaching, collaboration, shadowing, etc. to train that person, then hand it over!

Handling cash flow problems

Build a cash reserve so you can weather any growing pains.

For us, growth meant bigger enterprise accounts. This meant bigger deal sizes, but horrible payment terms.

Suddenly, I found myself starting at an accounts receivable number of $350K+, but hardly any cash in the bank. I had not built up the cash reserves to handle this rapid amount of growth.

Companies bullied us into 90 day payment terms, meaning we had to pay money out of pocket, then wait three months to get paid.

Having cash as you grow is invaluable. Opportunities will present themselves, and cash enables you to jump on them with confidence.

Business hack: Find a legitimate business coach

My advice for hiring a business coach is to find someone who has done something pretty darn close to what you want to do. Don't get caught up in the world of coaching crap out there!

This article was originally published here.

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by Katie Hignett

In 2016, Danielle Johnson and James Ivings left their office jobs behind to backpack for a year. They've built successful email and AI startups, and after eight years on the road, they're still shipping as they travel.

An urge to travel

James: I got bad grades at school, and went to university on a whim.

A job in the UK government was my first taste of office life. Later, I started working for a startup with a group of friends from work.

Danielle: I got a placement job in the government as part of my computer science degree. That's where James and I met.

After a couple of years of working, we both decided to quit our jobs and go backpacking. We did client work while we traveled, and also started working on our first product.

We launched after a year, and got no traction at all. We made about $600 total.

Building an MVP

Danielle: Leave Me Alone is a service that helps you unsubscribe from emails to find inbox zen. We launched the first version in January 2019, after cobbling together a prototype on this really long bus journey in South America.

James: It was very simple. You'd see a list of your subscriptions, and a button next to them allowing you to unsubscribe. I shared it with Maker's Kitchen, a group of ~20 other indie hackers. That was super helpful.

We spent a couple more weeks building, then shipped it. It was our first launch to get any traction.

Our first pricing model was based on how far back through your emails you wanted to search. The further you looked, the more server time it cost. People didn't understand it.

Danielle: Ultimately, we wanted an MRR model. So, we decided to improve on a rollup concept from a competitor, Unroll Me. We grab mail you want to read, put it into collections, and deliver it whenever you want.

Around the same time, we introduced a mail screening function called Shield. It also holds mail that's not from a priority contact, and releases it at a time you prefer.

We offer a seven day pass to get people to try these subscriber features as part of an inbox clear-out.

James: Before that, we made a couple of hundred dollars a month. Then, our revenue started doubling.

Most marketing we've tried has had no impact at all. The most effective marketing we've had has all been organic: People randomly tweeting about us, or a big influencer making an Instagram post.

Anytime we try to replicate that, it hasn't worked at all.

Shipping while sailing

James: We've launched two products since Leave Me Alone, both after moving to a small sailboat called Nayru.

We bought the boat thinking it would be a two year extended holiday where we didn't really work.

Danielle: It's hard enough getting work done while traveling on land. Try doing it when your office is rocking about! But, we still ended up building new products.

We launched an AI email writing extension called Ellie in 2022, after leaving the boat for the winter. James put a basic version together while were in Thailand for two weeks with friends.

We shipped it on Product Hunt, and it was so basic. I made the website with vanilla JavaScript and HTML.

James: We've made some improvements since we launched, and it's making us about $1.5K a month, with very low churn.

18 months at sea

Danielle: Later that year, we traveled from Europe to the Caribbean on our boat. Because of the time of year we crossed the Atlantic, we ended up living on Nayru for 18 months straight. Everything was harder, both work-wise and life-wise.

James: It can take two hours to get ready to just go and sit in a café. We could do it in the Mediterranean where there's more sailing infrastructure, and there's all these cute little coastal towns.

In the Caribbean, you're much more off-grid. We didn't vibe with that so much. We found ourselves working from the boat most of the time.

About four months ago, we launched an AI SaaS boilerplate called StartKit.

Danielle: It's been hard to work on it since we launched. We had to run away from Hurricane Beryl in June, then we took the boat out of the water and prepped it for sale.

Now, we're traveling around Europe, so we can do a bunch more work. We love work, but it's never been the priority for us. We always say yes to experiences: Hiking, diving, socializing, things like that.

Indie hacking is a dream for us because it gives us the lifestyle we want. And, if you've tried for a few years and decide you need to get a job or do some freelance work, that's not a failure!

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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, Jake Jorgovan, and Katie Hignett for contributing posts. —Channing