Growing Without Marketing · AI-Powered Startup Generator · How to Build a Media Company

Channing here. So… a ball of flaming orange apocalypse has apparently swallowed San Francisco. And the wildfires continue to set records up and down the west coast.

It's very 2020, no?

If you're in SF and you've taken photos of the smoky sky, let us see 'em!

Here's today's newsletter in a nutshell:

• All product and no marketing. That spells disaster for most startups. But Colin Mitchell's an exception. Read how he's used product iterations to find traction.
• In the news. Pieter Levels just launched an AI startup generator. An email inbox solely devoted to newsletters is on the way. Mobile app stores are set to break sales records because of the virus.
• How do you build a media company? Alex Wilhelm, the Senior Editor at TechCrunch, shared more than a dozen tips on how to start a media organization instead of another small blog.
• Trend alert: Audience-first products. It's getting harder and harder to reach customers. Learn why you should start by building trust.
• 3 growth tips. Drive more search traffic to your articles. Get free promotion from a network of peers. Up the conversions from your calls to action.

Special thanks to Dru Riley for contributing to this issue. You can contribute, too! Just post a great article on the forum, then shoot me an email requesting that I include it in an upcoming issue. —Channing

🏗 Growing Without Marketing by Building a Better Product

You hear it all the time: you can't grow a business product with improvements alone. You need to focus on marketing and distribution as well. Most founders who ignore this advice do so at their own peril. They continue focusing on their products day after day, month after month, without ever looking up. Sooner or later, they're dead.

But Colin Mitchell of Stencil Stop might be an exception to the rule. He didn't like the feeling of actively pushing his product on people, so he focused on improving the product instead. Surprisingly, it worked. To the tune of $44,000/month in revenue.

The beginning of Colin's journey is familiar. He worked full time at a job he wanted out of. The majority of indie hackers I talk to fit this pattern. They want the freedom to do their own thing, and they're willing to work hard to get it:

Unfortunately, these early ideas weren't the best. For example, he considered making a "Pablo Sanchez bobblehead" and "a sock that holds three beers."

Then he came across an idea with promise. He'd just graduated from Clemson University, and he'd been using the machines at his manufacturing job to make stencils of his college logo. A friend asked him, "What about Clemson stencils?"

Colin was sure an official stencil of Clemson's logo already existed. But to his surprise, nothing turned up in a search. So he booked a meeting with the head of licensing at Clemson and secured a license.

Then he got to work on the product:

Colin was off to the races. The only problem: he had no idea how to grow. In fact, he was too timid to do any marketing whatsoever.

To make matters worse, the tech side of the business ran into trouble. After switching to a new e-commerce platform, his website stopped working. Traffic plummeted and sales tanked for a month before Colin managed to migrate back to the original platform.

He'd spent years looking for an answer for how to grow. Then, finally, he found one. By listening to his customers:

Today, those custom stencils make up 80% of his sales. That's $32,000 per month. Not too shabby.

And the improvements didn't stop there. Colin recently had another product-driven insight, and it's supercharged the sales of his ready-made stencils.

So it's no surprise he's raised his ambitions:

Read more insights from Colin's journey by checking out the full interview on the site. —Channing

🕺 Trend Alert: Audience-First Products

Build trust before you build products. Audience-building is a forcing function to find and understand customers. Look at companies like LetterDrop and Earnest Capital. LetterDrop is Product Hunt for newsletters. Earnest Capital offers funding to early-stage, non-unicorns.

In the future, startups will seek founding influencers like Justin Jackson of Transistor.fm. Audience-first funds will become popular. Ben Tossell and Sahil Lavingia will leverage their audiences to get deal flow, find LPs and help portfolio companies.

More on this trend here. Including opportunities for indie hackers. —Dru

📰 In the News

🤖 Pieter Levels just launched an AI-powered startup generator. He shared dozens of the best product ideas on Twitter.

📱 Mobile apps are forecasted to set sales records this holiday season. And U.S. consumers are expected to spend twice as much time on their phones.

🍼 Tech employees with children are struggling with new work-from-home policies. And now they're going public with their complaints.

🧙‍♂️ A clip of Steve Jobs sharing visionary insights about podcasting is making the rounds on Twitter.

📧 Some indie hackers are building a new email product designed specifically for newsletter subscriptions.

💻 Laravel 8 is out. The popular PHP framework will now support job batching, improved rate limited, and other new features.

🖨 How to Build a Media Company

If you want to build a massive audience, the most ambitious thing you can do is start a media company. How does one accomplish that in 2020? I interviewed a pro to find out.

Alex Wilhelm (@alex) is Senior Editor at TechCrunch. Before that he built Crunchbase News from scratch, and grew it to a million monthly pageviews. Here are just a few of the principles from his playbook:

📈 Be prolific. Consistency is table stakes. According to Alex, "Everyone knows that it's true [but] the reason why no one does it is because it's hard."

🗞 Make it newsworthy. "Having a news hook is a great way to draw near-term attention," says Alex. Whatever the topic you're discussing, you can "hang that on top of something that's happening, that people… care about now."

🌍 Mix it up. There's no single formula readers won't get bored of. So write about a variety of topics using a variety of formats, then push your articles out over a variety of channels.

📖 Tell stories. Instead of just delivering facts, tell a story around the facts. "Building context and walking people through why something matters is very important."

🚀 Freshness matters. People want to read, discuss, and share news about recent events. Break news fast, then come back and do your analysis piece tomorrow.

🎓 Learn constantly. "I'm always trying to talk to people, to listen, to ask probing questions, to learn more, so I have more stuff to write about… When news breaks, I have a lot in the back of my head that I can bring up."

👊 Don't quit. "It can take a long time to get an audience going," Alex says. "It was a grind. The first year was writing for a much smaller audience than I anticipated."

These are just a few of the basics. I counted, and there are close to 15 big principles Alex covers in the podcast that separate real media companies from small blogs.

As always, enjoy the episode. And leave comments with your ideas and suggestions for other guests and topics you'd like to see me cover 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. Ranking for more keywords means more traffic for your blog posts. And you don't have to do anything fancy. Just study the section headers of top-ranking pages on Google, then enhance your own articles with missing keywords. Read more…
2. Colleagues in your industry can grow your audience by amplifying content that you create for them. Get their permission with a few simple steps, and then consistently send them world-class content. Read more…
3. When you show users the same call to action every time they visit your site, you lose out on conversions. Create multiple CTA options and adjust which one displays based on the user's stage in the customer lifecycle. Read more…