🗞 What's New: YouTube's top trends of 2024

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

• YouTube reveals this year's top creators, topics, and songs.
• These 3 studies prove that hobbies boost confidence, spark ideas, and help you tap into flow state.
• 6 figures in ARR with an AI gateway platform. Emma Lawler shares her most useful growth tactics (Hint: Try event demos!).

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With 2.5B monthly active users, YouTube is the world’s second most popular social media platform (Facebook is the first). So, it's prudent to take note when the company speaks about the creator economy.

Thankfully for us, the latest version of YouTube's yearly Culture and Trend Report has just arrived. It's a list of the year’s top trending topics, creators, songs, and Shorts songs across 12 different countries.

Unsurprisingly, in the US, the recent election, MrBeast, and Kendrick Lamar are in some of the top spots.

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Taking time for hobbies isn't just about recharging; it's about boosting your creativity and brainpower.

For indie hackers, that could mean the difference between burnout and success. Let's dive into three research-backed reasons why picking up that guitar or paintbrush can level up your hustle.

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Every day, indie hackers post updates about the products they're building. Here's what the community voted to the top yesterday!

	1. Pieter.com: Pieter's Official Homepage on the World Wide Web You never know where hacking on random projects might lead you.	▲ 19
	2. Chative.IO: Best alternative to Gorgias, Intercom Fin AI, Tidio Lydro Chative.IO launched on Product Hunt today!	▲ 17
	3. DataFast: Grow your startup with data, not guesses Made the design cleaner and more minimalist.	▲ 14
	4. Tailwind UI: Components and templates from the makers of Tailwind CSS Shipped a version switcher so you can test out the v4.0 beta.	▲ 12
	5. Feeedbackr: Turn user feedback into actionable insights, with AI analysis How the project started.	▲ 3

Enjoy building in public? Post an update to your product page on Indie Hackers, and it will automatically be added to the daily leaderboard.

Emma Lawler is a second time founder, and she's building an AI gateway platform called Velvet. Velvet has already logged over 60M requests, and is approaching six figures in ARR. The team keeps momentum by shipping early and often.

Emma says a founder must make five major decisions:

1. Bootstrapped vs. VC-backed.
2. Solo founder vs. cofounder or team.
3. Hiring junior employees vs. senior employees.
4. Remote vs. in-person.
5. Hustle vs. time for rest.

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