🗞 What's New: Almost 50% of indie hackers suffer from loneliness

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

• Indie hackers are ditching loneliness, one meetup at a time.
• Silly gameplay and TikTok virality gave this game 20M downloads last month.
• 8 figures in ARR. Aleem Mawani operates his funded YC company like a bootstrapped product.

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Life as a digital nomad isn’t all sunsets and laptops by the beach. It’s also a lot of solo meals, fleeting acquaintances, and wondering who you’ll hang out with next. But that’s starting to change, thanks to a wave of online communities that are turning isolation into genuine connections.

For indie hackers, this shift matters. In a recent poll conducted on X, almost 50% of indie hackers who weighed in shared that they are “usually lonely.” This makes sense; indie hacking and digital nomadism often overlap, with both lifestyles requiring long hours of solo work in constantly changing environments. The isolation can crush creativity, kill motivation, and lead to burnout.

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TikTok has quickly become the premier spot to market your consumer app. The latest major TikTok marketing slam dunk? A quirky indie game that recently become the most downloaded game in the world.

Mini Games, better known as the “Screaming Chicken Game,” works exactly like it sounds. You guide a chicken through an obstacle course by making chicken noises. This game is outperforming even giant incumbents, like Subway Surfers.

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Marketing Examples brings you short, sweet, practical marketing tips, along with examples. Here's the latest:

Never underestimate the power of repetition and rhyme.

Aleem Mawani's business, Streak, was a YC product before it was cool. Halfway through the program, he pivoted and got funded. 10 years later, it's doing eight figures per year.

He started like a lot of first-time founders: Working on a product that wasn’t working.

He and his cofounder were a two person team, doing sales, hiring, fundraising, and everything else themselves. When they decided to pivot to a new product and look for new ideas, Paul Graham gave them two great pieces of advice:

1. Don’t be constrained by your old crappy idea.

2. Be your own customer.

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Michal Kankowski, Stephen Flanders, Harry Dry, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing