🗞 What's New: Everything you need to know about the leaked PDF from MrBeast

An internal onboarding document was leaked from MrBeast's production company, and more:

• Founders are gushing over the candid strategies shared by the world's #1 YouTuber.
• Last week, Shopify highlighted 5 categories that merchants are searching for. Here are the top Shopify ideas to build now.
• $10M ARR with B2B SaaS analytics. Nick Franklin raised funding to launch, then stopped raising after finding product-market fit.

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An internal onboarding document leaked from MrBeast's production company has been generating tons of chatter online.

On one hand, the PDF outlines MrBeast's sky-high expectations for his employees at a time when MrBeast himself is battling allegations of running a toxic workplace environment. On the other, startup Twitter has embraced the PDF for its abundance of insights and content strategy gems from YouTube's #1 creator.

Here's everything you need to know about the doc and why it matters.

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This week, Shopify published a tweet highlighting five categories that merchants are searching for in the App Store. For indie hackers, this gives us 15 viable Shopify ideas to build!

Shopify apps and bootstrapped founders

Bootstrapped founders love building Shopify apps. There are a bunch of profitable Shopify apps in the Indie Hackers product database, including SuperLemon ($29K MRR), WiseBundle ($25K MRR), and StoreMapper ($21K MRR).

Shopify is probably the best B2B platform to build on. Why?

• It has been supporting third party developers for years. Shopify.dev is frequently updated, and has a vibrant community.

• We've seen many successful Shopify apps with high MRR.

• The fees are quite affordable. You get charged 0% in fees for your first $1M in revenue.

Five popular Shopify app categories

According to Shopify, these are the top five trending categories on its app store:

1. SKU and barcode management:

The JTBD: E-commerce merchants need better inventory tracking across sales channels.

Apps you can build:

• Multi-channel SKU syncing tool.

• AI-powered barcode generator and scanner.

• Inventory forecasting, based on SKU performance.

2. ERP integration:

The JTBD: Businesses want seamless connections between Shopify and their ERP systems.

Apps you can build:

• Real time inventory sync between Shopify and popular ERPs.

• Automated order fulfillment and accounting integrations.

• Custom ERP connectors for specific industries.

3. Product content management:

The JTBD: Merchants need tools to create and manage compelling product descriptions.

Apps you can build:

• AI-assisted product description generator.

• Bulk product content editor with SEO optimization.

• Multi-language product content management system.

4. Security enhancements:

The JTBD: There's a growing concern for protecting merchant and customer data.

Apps you can build:

• Advanced fraud detection for high-risk orders.

• GDPR and CCPA compliance automation tool.

• Two-factor authentication for customer accounts.

5. Staff notifications:

The JTBD: Merchants need better internal communication tools.

Apps you can build:

• Real time order alert system for staff.

• Task management and assignment tool for store teams.

• Performance dashboard with customizable staff notifications.

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

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💻 Best practices for handling negative reviews.

😩 The experience economy is booming...but so is regret.

Nick Franklin raised $3.7M early on for ChartMogul, his CRM and subscription analytics platform. But then, he did something unusual: He found product-market fit, and stopped raising.

Seven years since its last round of funding, ChartMogul is at ~$10M ARR. Here's Nick on how he did it.

Seizing an opportunity

Ten years ago, I was working as Zendesk's sales director for the Asia region. It was a fun role, but my heart was always in designing and building products. I'd tried to build my own startup three times before.

We were measuring subscription metrics internally at Zendesk, using a business intelligence tool called GoodData. The UX wasn't so great, as it hadn't been designed for subscription businesses. I figured there were probably other subscription businesses out there that could benefit from a dedicated solution, so I decided to build it.

I didn't really validate the idea before starting to build. I learned Ruby on Rails and Backbone.js, then started coding up an MVP. The first real validation for the idea came when a competitor launched their product before me, and started getting some traction.

That showed me that I needed to go all-in to have a chance at winning this market. By that time, I had already gone part-time at Zendesk. I soon quit, and went full-time on ChartMogul. We didn't even have revenue yet, but I didn't want to miss the opportunity window, so I took a risk.

Launching a second product

ChartMogul has two products under its umbrella:

1. ChartMogul Subscription Analytics: You connect your subscription billing platform (i.e., Stripe, App Store Connect, Recurly), and we compute all your SaaS metrics. Then, we give you a really powerful set of analytics tools that help you deeply analyze and understand your subscription business.

2. ChartMogul CRM: We launched our CRM about 18 months ago, purposefully built for B2B SaaS companies. It lets you analyze your self-service and sales-led funnels in one place.

The CRM is fully integrated into the same platform as the analytics, and using both together brings a lot of benefits.

Hiring and raising money

All of this started with me working solo, but I built a team very early on. At first, I was using my own savings. Then, I used money from investors, then customer revenue. We now have 67 full-time team members.

My goal was always to try and build a large business, so taking investment made sense for me. My old boss at Zendesk, Michael Hansen, knew that I was working on something, and emailed me to offer an investment. Michael then suggested bringing in his longtime friend Tom James, who was also an angel investor.

Then, I asked Christoph at Point Nine if they'd be up for leading a seed round along with Michael and Tom, and we went from there. The advantage of taking investment (aside from the money) is the press and exposure. Point Nine is very connected in the SaaS world, so they were able to introduce us to many potential customers early on.

We were pre-revenue, so I presented the vision, the product, and the very positive traction data we had from our initial users (we found them on Product Hunt). Thankfully, that was enough. The deal was done fairly quickly at the end of 2014; we got $600K.

After that, we raised another $3.1M, but we haven't raised any capital for over seven years now. Common advice holds to "always be hiring, always be fundraising," but I'm not into that. There are more interesting and impactful things to spend my time on.

On hiring well

You have to have a rigorous hiring process. Always do reference checks. And, remember, "if there's any doubt, then there is no doubt."

Once you have a team, one of the most important things you can do as a leader is to keep doing the actual work yourself. Own some of the responsibilities of the team. They'll see that you're pulling your weight, and that's motivating for them.

Someone once told me that, regardless of whether you try to build a small business or a large business, you're likely going to put the same amount of time and effort into it. So, you might as well try to build a large business!

Discuss this story.

Amazon is forcing employees back to the office 5 days a week. And indie hackers are relieved not to work at Amazon. 😌

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