🗞 What's New: Substack is giving away free subscriptions

Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• Substack's giving away free subscriptions? More on this interesting growth hack.
• LLM hallucination is a real thing. Here's your guide to all things LLM.
• $238M ARR. Ryan Sanders and Ben Peterson spent a year building an MVP for BambooHR.

Want your product seen by over 110,000 founders and businesses? Sponsor an issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter. Choose between 3 affordable tiers that can fit almost any budget.

Substack is incentivizing users to install its mobile app by offering free subscriptions.

Users get emails with subject lines like "Here's $7" (or the cost of one month). If they click the link from a desktop, they're redirected to a pop-up that says: "Accept this gift in the Substack app."

The data shows that Substack's tactic is definitely working.

🌟 Reddit's growth presents new opportunities for brands.

🎙️ Don't overlook podcasts as a marketing channel.

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

📌 TikTok is becoming a job board for Gen Z.

🤖 Decoding copyright: Who owns your AI-generated marketing imagery?

🏃‍♀️ I got a desk treadmill to relieve stress...but, it stressed me out.

Understanding how LLMs operate is becoming an essential skill in machine learning.

Whether you’re choosing the right model for your app, looking for a general knowledge of the field, or following discussions about LLMs and their potential to understand, create, or lead to AGI, the first step is understanding what they are.

This comprehensive roadmap can help you learn almost all of the essentials.

Welcome to From Our Desks, where the people behind Indie Hackers share the stories behind the headlines. This week, we talk election doomscrolling, new AI releases, and rival newsletter platforms.

Channing Allen, cofounder and editor-in-chief: I'm glad to say I didn't have much time this week to doomscroll through all the US election drama, because I was so busy working with the Indie Hackers newsroom and working on product strategy. Granted, I did enjoy reading this piece from our very own Stephen Flanders on what Trump's victory might mean for tech regulation over the next four years.

Stephen Flanders, journalist: One of the articles I'm working on right now is a comparison between the newsletter platforms Kit and beehiiv.

A large part of the research process for the article is talking to people who have used both (if you're one of them, hit me up!). These conversations remind me how little competing platforms often differ. The people who ultimately chose Kit or beehiiv didn't do it because it blew the other out of the water. Instead, it almost always came down to something very small.

This insight points me to two main takeaways.

Ryan Sanders and Ben Peterson spent a year building BambooHR's first version, due to their product-first mindset. The early years were financially challenging, as Ben and Ryan decided to bootstrap.

They funded the company with their savings; luckily, Ben had recently sold his business. They didn't take a paycheck for three years.

Here's how changing the company's name also completely changed the game.

Careful what you wish for? —@channingallen

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