Cashing in on a Hobby Project ‧ How to Win People's Attention ‧ An Indie Hacker Hits $1M ARR

Channing here. Happy September! We're entering the final months of one of the strangest years imaginable. Question is: will things calm down in 2021, or does the new year have more surprises in store for us?

While you're thinking up an answer, make sure to drop by the site and tell us what you're working on this month.

Here's what's in the newsletter this week:

• From hobby project to $400/mo. But six months ago, the founder had no clue how to attract users. Read how Dirk Hoekstra got his side gig into the hands of paying customers.
• In the news. An indie hacker hits $1M ARR. Remote work threatens a trillion-dollar industry. A top newsletter company shares its playbook.
• Get attention, get paid. Nathan Latka used this insight to start a media business rather than another product business. Now he's got millions to show for it.
• 3 growth tips. Take advantage of paid ads that are affordable. Avoid the risks of a big launch but reap the same benefits. Increase your search traffic by limiting the length of your articles.

As always, shoot me an email if you're interested in contributing stories to this newsletter! —Channing

💰 Cashing in on a Hobby Project

Things are going well for Dirk Hoekstra. 20 users are paying him $400 a month for ScreenshotAPI, a project he started as a hobby. And in a way, those hundreds in revenue are just icing on the cake for him, since he only built the tool to scratch his own itch.

Less enviable is the story of how he got here. He works full time, so building ScreenshotAPI was brutal for him. He remembers coming home from work and forcing himself to squeeze out an extra hour or two of product development.

And then there was marketing. Like many developers, he felt out of his depth trying to attract users:

Then Dirk had an idea. He used an SEO tool to find out how his competitors were generating search traffic. Then he copied their tactics by writing blog posts and submitting them to reputable tech blogs and other public forums. The results weren't promising:

Eventually he had a breakthrough: Google Ads. Of his 20 paying users today, 13 came from a single paid ad he'd placed on Google.

See what else has been working for Dirk by checking out his full interview on the site. —Channing

📰 In the News

It looks like "one million" is the theme this week:

💸 One million in annual revenue for Canny. It's fully bootstrapped, fully remote, and doesn't do any outbound sales. Co-founder Sarah Hum shares the details.

🏚 One million filed for unemployment this week in the US. Just weeks ago, the numbers fell below a million for the first time since March. Now it looks like that trend has reversed.

📰 One million email opens for Morning Brew, a tech and business newsletter. One million per day, mind you. To commemorate the achievement, the founder tweeted their growth strategies and tactics.

🏢 The trillion-dollar office economy is dying. The culprit? Nobody needs office supplies anymore because everyone's working from home.

💃 How to Win People's Attention

When Nathan Latka was 21, someone offered to buy his SaaS company for over $7 million. He turned them down. "I thought I was the crap," he explained to me in our podcast interview. "I thought I was a stud." It was 2010, and he wanted to go for a billion.

Five years later, he finally sold his company Heyo… for a loss.

Most of us would wallow in regret at the missed opportunity and wasted time. But Nathan had realized something big. He'd discovered a new perspective that would allow him to eventually earn millions from his future businesses. So he kept going.

While Heyo was flailing, Nathan had been pitching. He'd pleaded with bloggers to write about his product. He'd pitched affiliates on linking to his website. He spent years trying to convince people who had an audience to help him out… and then it clicked:

So Nathan went into media.

In 2015 he started a podcast. Then he wrote a book. He even launched a magazine, which he dubbed "the most expensive magazine in the world."

And instead of taking VC money, this time he went the indie hacker route. Sure, this meant he'd move slower. But for Nathan, building a media business was a marathon, not a sprint:

It wasn't easy. But through a combination of clever strategies, shameless marketing, and sheer consistency, Nathan has made millions from his one-person media company. And now he's set to pivot into SaaS with his new company, Founderpath.

For various reasons, Nathan has generated his fair share of controversy… which he then amplifies and retweets. I've known Nathan in person long enough to know that he actively courts drama and then uses it to win attention for his media businesses. It's one of the many tactics we discuss in the episode, in addition to:

• how to get famous people promoting your stuff when you're brand new
• how to earn $1M+ from sponsors with < 5000 downloads per episode
• how to know when time is right to pivot from media to products

Enjoy the episode! There are tons of gems in it.

And as always, reply and send me your feedback, as well as your suggestions for other guests, topics, stories, or debates I should feature on the show. —Courtland

🔥 3 Growth Tips

We've got a mailing list that sends out 5 growth tips a week. You can sign up on our site. Here are 3 from the past week:

1. Traffic from paid advertising sounds nice. It would sound even nicer without the "paid" part. But just like you can leverage roommates to cut down on rent, you can leverage shared ads to cut down on ad spend. Read more…
2. Promoting your product with one big launch is like putting your eggs in one big basket. If your site has bugs or performance issues, everyone will experience them. Make a better impression on these first users by launching in stages and iterating on feedback in real time. Read more…
3. If you're looking for Google search traffic, many people will advise you to write longer posts. Data suggests that they're right! But only up to a point. The sweet spot is 1,750 words, give or take. Read more…