🗞 What's New: HARO/Connectively is shutting down

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

• It's the end of an era: Help A Reporter Out (HARO) is shutting down after 16 years.
• Vulnerable code can come back to bite you. Hard. So, level up your security game.
• $5.5M ARR. Nenad Milanovic landed 17K users within 5 days of launching.

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The service formerly known as Help A Reporter Out (HARO) is shutting down after a 16 year run that included an acquisition, a merger, a rebranding (to Connectively), and a mailing list of 800K+ sources and 55K journalists.

Founded in 2008, HARO operated under a very simple business model: Journalists posted queries, then sources responded with a pitch. If the journalist used the pitch, they would be quoted and receive a backlink. For many years, this was the best way for indie hackers to land high quality backlinks from esteemed publications like The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

But things took a turn for the worse in 2022, with the release of ChatGPT.

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Last month, prominent indie hacker Marc Louvion found himself in hot water when an X user pointed out security flaws in his boilerplate product.

The ShipFast saga has many indie hackers questioning the security of their own SaaS products, a crucial element they may have overlooked in the drive to get a product out quickly.

Don't make that same mistake. Level up your security using AI.

📈 Bluesky adds 700K new users in the past week, most from the US.

✅ Validate your startup idea fast: Survey 100 real consumers for $163. #ad

💰 21 Black Friday marketing strategies to maximize your profits.

🍕 How California Pizza Kitchen goes viral on TikTok by giving people FOMO.

🤝 Crucial strategies for promoting team collaboration.

💋 Mattel accidentally linked a porn site on Wicked doll packaging.

In 2017, Nenad Milanovic and his team built Clockify after a decade of building products that eventually failed.

The game changer? Scratching their own itch. At a time when the team had no projects, they received an email notifying them of a price increase for their existing time tracker. Unwilling to overpay, they decided to build their own tool.

Here's how Nenad attracted a large user base shortly after launching.

True for startups, as well! You don't want to build something that's liked by everyone — you want to build something that's loved by someone.

—@channingallen

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