🚀7 Ways to Build Virality into Your Product (With Examples) and the Bright Future of Community Monetization

Snippets
  • Use Redditwrite.datasources.co to optimize your Reddit title and it relies on the data
  • Highlyts.com, a new tab chrome extension that presents you random highlights from books tailored for entrepreneurs
  • FileWhopper allows its customers to perform unlimited-size data transfers without prior compression and with a one-time fee. The first 5GB is free. It has been used to send over 18K terabytes data successfully
Growth & Sales
7 ways to build virality into your product

1. Create a Two-Sided Reward
Create an incentive for initial users to invite their friends to use your product. Paypal and Dropbox are 2 companies that did this extremely well. Paypal offered $'s for every person you helped sign up to their platform. Dropbox offered extra storage for every new member you helped bring into their storage service.

2. Appeal to Users' Vanity
Appealing to a users' sense of vanity and competitiveness encourages them to spend more time using your product or service. Indie Hackers does this well by allowing users to accrue points. Linkedin also did this well in the early days by showing the number of connections you had front and center on your profile. This incentivized users to start thinking about inviting more people to connect.

3. Build for Collaboration
Build for collaboration between users. Apps like Google docs allow you to "Share" files for collaboration purposes. Slack allows you to "invite people" to new workspaces.

4. Embedding
Create the ability for others to embed your product within your website. This is especially true if you are building products with user-generated content. Twitter does this well for embedding tweets and news. Stripe and Gumroad also do a great job of this allowing users to embed payment widgets within their websites.

5. Incorporate Social Sharing
If your products produce artifacts from user-generated content, you should incorporate social sharing that can link back to your product.

6. Artifacts Shared via Messaging
Utilize things like SMS and text sharing as a viral opportunity. When using Lyft for example, users can click a “Send ETA” button which is actually a viral feature. Pressing it prompts the user to send a tracking URL to another person, which in turn spreads the word about Lyft.

7. Signatures
Attach promotional signatures to all messages that are sent relating to your product or service. You can create your own signature for Free using the HubSpot email signature generator. Hotmail’s signature line at the end of every email helped them grow from 20k users to 1.5M users over the course of 4 months in the early days.

Community Building
The future of community monetization?

SaaSmarketer.io is already generating $13k/mo. On Monday, Tom tested a new way to make more money by allowing members to promote their products in his small community. Kacper agreed for 60:40 split with Tom and made 500$ in ebook sales.

Design & UX
  • Essentials, an icon font by SmplKit. More than 300 icons, free to use anywhere you want by @rosiesherry
  • HappyHues - an awesome collection of curated colors in context by @rosiesherry
  • Ikonate - fully customizable & accessible vector icons by @rosiesherry
Content Creators
How to write a title for Indie Hackers / Reddit

👉 Rule Number One - The title is more important than the text.
You can write the perfect text, but without a great title, no one will ever read it.
👉 Rule Number Two - Don't disappoint the user.
The user clicked on your eye-catching title. But now he wants to get reward by the content.

Here are the five patterns:

1. The CTA - "Explain what your startup/project does in under 10 words"

2. The Big numbers title -  "0-19k email subs. How I promote my content."

3. Story title - "The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever"

4. Lesson title - "How to brainstorm great business ideas"

5. Unique title - "I sold my B2B business and achieved my dreamed... meaningless life?"

Miscellaneous
(Ad) Go Beyond Your Passport to Global Growth

Payoneer’s cross-border payments platform empowers businesses, online sellers, and freelancers to pay and get paid globally as easily as they do locally. And it's fees are much less than PayPal.

Get It Now
People hate surveys, but like being interviewed

Instead of posting a link to a survey in a Facebook group with potential customers, post that you're doing a research project and would love to interview some people that do [whatever your target market does].

Here's my theory: People don't like filling out surveys because it feels cold and impersonal. On the other hand, answering questions being asked by a human interviewer, even if they are the same questions, makes them feel important because of the personal touch. Someone else is taking time from their day to ask the questions, so it's more reciprocal.

Mark used this approach and got 12 volunteers for interviews within 8 hours from a Facebook group.

Worth Reading
1. Use this segmentation grid to plan your community outreach
2. Six ways for SaaS businesses to use visual social proof
3. What are your best tips for cold emailing? (Read comments)
Indiemaker's Products
  • 8base - serverless GraphQL Backend-as-a-Service for building SaaS, Marketplaces and other professional-grade web and mobile applications. 
  • Phot-awe - create Awesome Videos in minutes by @photawe
  • UpStamps - feature flag management platform to separate code from different environments and projects for web developers
  • Hexiconapp - multiplayer word game with a territory control twist, featuring a minimal aesthetic and simple, deep gameplay.

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Indie Letters · Kotli Sahian P/O Ghakhar Mandi

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