Launching on Your Employer's Product ‧ Largest IPO in History ‧ 3 Years, $0 MRR

Quick update: Did you catch Courtland's announcement about Indie Hackers groups this week? Now, if you're a group owner, you can publish guidelines that people will see before they post in your group. This means more control for group owners and better discussions for the rest of the community.

On to this week's email! Here's what you'll find:

• Most founders hide their side projects from their employers. But Daniele Secondi built his product directly on top of the business he works for full time. Learn how.
• In the news. The largest software IPO in history just happened. A billionaire is making good on his promise to die broke. Kanye West is launching a Y Combinator for the music industry.
• Harry's growth tip: A one-minute case study from marketing expert Harry Dry on how to connect with your users… and get them sharing your product for free.
• 3 years, $0 in revenue. That's the hole that Dru Riley needed to climb out of when he launched his paid newsletter Trends.vc.
• Trend alert. Have a sneak peek into the future of marketing funnels. Courtesy of Dru Riley (speak of the devil).

Special thanks to Dru Riley and Harry Dry for contributing. You can write for this newsletter as well. Here's how. Journalistic posts that help early-stage founders stay informed are especially welcome. —Channing

🏗 Building a Business on Your Employer's Product

The term "side project" doesn't fully capture what's special about Pipechat, Daniele Secondi's $3,000/mo business. True, he's built and grown the app "on the side" while working full time for his employer Pipedrive. But he's also built it on top of Pipedrive as an integration. So you might think of Pipechat as a "top project" rather than a "side project." And it's completely independent:

But why did he risk building on his employer's product in the first place? Many tech companies have legal clauses that prevent their employees from building businesses that are too similar. So Daniele has spent much of his budget on legal consultations. And that's not the only disaster scenario he's had to worry about:

But the benefits of moving forward on the project outweighed the costs of starting something else. In a word, these costs boiled down to one thing: time.

Like other entrepreneurs itching to build their own businesses, any project Daniele chose to work on would face a massive time investment. First he would need to come up with a product idea and do the hard work of building it. Then he'd have to generate attention and acquire a customer base from scratch. Finally, he'd have to grow his revenue to the point where it could at least cover the costs of doing business.

But Daniele's day job presented a solution. Pipedrive is a sales tool with an app marketplace for developers. And Daniele realized that building his own product on the platform could lessen the burden of many of the challenges of growing a business. For example:

Coming up with the product idea? He leveraged his familiarity with Pipechat's customers to identify a problem worth solving:

Finding and growing a customer base from scratch? He piggybacked off the traffic and customers already using the Pipechat marketplace:

And on top of the benefits for his business, building Pipechat even helped Daniele do better work at his day job:

But what about building Pipechat in the first place? Pipedrive's app marketplace wasn't able to help Daniele with that. And what about the legal and employment-related challenges created by the arrangement?

Check out the full interview to learn how Daniele has dealt with the dark sides of building on his employer's product. —Channing

📰 In the News

🚀 It's the largest software IPO in history. Cloud-computing company Snowflake goes public at $245 per share.

🛒 An early Amazon employee just shared an account of the near-death experiences the company faced as a young startup.

📝 A note-taking app just raised $9m at a $200m valuation. Quite the milestone for a company that got rejected by Y Combinator five times. And speaking of Y Combinator…

🎤 Kanye West just announced plans to start a Y Combinator for the music industry. How long until we're all applying for #YeCombinator?

💰 The former billionaire co-founder of a retail giant wanted to die broke. And now… he's officially broke.

🎓 The market is betting big on EdTech. Companies that help students learn from home are raising more money than ever.

🚀 Harry's Growth Tip

How brands make friends:

1. Fast coins the term "Fastronaut"
2. It tweets "Reply to this tweet and we'll give your profile pic a Fastronaut helmet"
3. 400 do so and get a pic
4. The "rule of reciprocity" creates a bond
5. Users share and update their profile pics

More short, sweet, practical marketing tips here. —Harry Dry

🌥 Three years without revenue, a founder finally breaks through

Everybody wants to start a business. But how do you find a "sweet spot" idea — one that matches how you want to spend your time and what the market is willing to pay for? It's the holy grail, and some people are lucky enough to find it.

Dru Riley is the creator of Trends.vc, a newsletter covering the latest trends in tech and startups. As Dru puts it, "Trends.vc helps people find emerging opportunities." And it's working, too. Last month the newsletter was the #1 product of the month on Product Hunt and raked in over $24,000.

But Trends wasn’t the first product that Dru attempted. After leaving his "too comfortable" software engineering position with $250,000 in the bank, Dru embarked on a mini retirement where he worked on a variety of ideas and projects, including…

• an iOS app for setting timers
• a marketing playbook for B2B SaaS companies
• a Chrome extension to kill idle tabs
• a natural language processor to determine the intent behind tweets

Unfortunately, nothing ever seemed to click.

Back in May, with his savings dwindling, Dru wrote a post on Indie Hackers called "3 Years. No Income." He'd quit his job in February 2017 and still hadn't made a single dollar from any of his ideas yet.

Then he hit on Trends.

Unlike the other newsletter projects Dru had worked on in the past, Trends felt more like play than work. He'd built his own "learning machine" that gave him the freedom to do in-depth research into the topics he cared about, then pass that information onto his subscribers.

So when Dru made his first dollar with Trends, he was ecstatic. He never could've imagined just how successful it would become a mere four months later.

You can listen to my convo with Dru here. I learned quite a lot from his journey, especially about the power of persistence, and some keys to founder-product-market fit. —Courtland

🛣 Trend Alert: The Future of Marketing Funnels

Soon, retargeting will move into the physical world. Billboards track cell phones and show us ads as we move. Geofencing makes this more accurate.

With 98% open rates, SMS will become a popular channel.

And access to data services will become democratized. We'll move from demo-based models (Acxiom) to self-serve models (Clearbit).

Building your own funnel? Find and optimize a model:

• Awareness-Evaluation-Purchase
• Attention-Interest-Desire-Action (AIDA)
• Acquisition-Activation-Retention-Referral-Revenue (AARRR)

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