🗞 What's New: Marc Lou’s success sparks another founder's criticism

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

• Marc’s latest course hit big, but not everyone's impressed.
• According to TikTok, long-form videos get up to 5x more engagement than short-form videos.
• $2M MRR by helping men grow beards. Eric Bandholz grew Beardbrand fast by focusing on building trust with his audience.

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Marc Lou just can't seem to catch a break from the drama lately. The recent controversy kicked off when he released his newest product, CodeFa.st, a coding course. The tagline? "Build your SaaS in 14 days."

People are loving it so much that he pulled in $100K in just two days. Impressive, right?

Enter Arib Khan, a 19 year old founder who openly criticizes the idea of selling courses, especially when the creator isn't a top expert in the field. Marc's own SaaS, Datafa.st, makes about $1K a month, and Arib wasn't shy about pointing that out.

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TikTok is known for short-form videos, but in recent years, the app has made a concerted effort to incentivize longer, more in-depth videos. TikTok has increased the maximum video length to an hour, and rewards creators who make videos over a minute long.

This new focus seems to be paying off. According to TikTok, the watch time of content over one minute was 5x that of short videos (although the inherently longer videos might have something to do with this), and creators who focus on high-quality long-form videos earned 15x more per month.

Luckily for us, TikTok handed out 10 tips on how creators can best maximize their long-form returns.

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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. Q-Flow: Advanced asynchronous message handler & event gateway Why subscribers are at the heart of what we do	▲ 6
	2. Worksomic: White label all-in-one app for productized services Launching Worksomic: A white-label al-in-one solution for productized services	▲ 2
	3. Bitcoin Sidekick: Your Bitcoin Companion New Updates!	▲ 1
	4. CozyBlocks: Ultimate Page Builder Blocks for WordPress Site Editor Changing Website Templates on WordPress	▲ 1
	5. NVSTly: A free social investing platform for retail traders Social Trading Explained	▲ 1

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Eric Bandholz decided to grow out his beard for an entire year after leaving his corporate job. Over time, he got deeper and deeper into the “beardsman” community, and eventually he decided to build an entire brand dedicated to helping other men grow their beards.

Now, trust is the cornerstone of Beardbrand’s whole philosophy. Eric understood that the beardsman-to-beardsman connection was an essential way to build trust with his audience, and began producing a ton of helpful, free content. He does recommend his own products, but never in a way that feels pushy.

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