Publishing 1,000 Blog Posts in 3 Months · $100M Fund for Social Impact · How to Acquire Users

Channing here. A lot's happened this year. If I had to name a theme for 2020, it would be "break and destroy." Meanwhile, in the land of indie hackers and entrepeneurship, the theme has been to BUILD.

20,000.

That's the number of indie hackers who have started projects this year (as of two days ago). I speculated we might see a rise in our ranks back in early April, but I had no idea how quickly it would happen.

Newsletter time. Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• What if you could write 1,000 blog posts in 3 months? Self-described "productivity nerd" Przemek Chojecki shares some slightly subversive insights on AI and solo entrepreneurship.
• In the news. A $100M fund launches for "social impact" startups. Indie hackers debate the merits of a new app platform. The largest sector in the US economy is bouncing back.
• Want new users? Darko Gjorgjievski brings you a new series breaking down the acquisition channels that have worked for nearly 500 successful founders.
• Harry's growth tip: In under 20 words, a marketing expert shows you how you've been going about sign-up forms the wrong way.

Special thanks to Nicola Milner, Darko Gjorgjievski, and Harry Dry for contributing to this newsletter. Want to contribute a piece of your own? Check out this doc for an idea of what I'm looking for. Then simply publish a piece on IH and email me about it! —Channing

🎙 How to Publish 1,000 Blog Posts in 3 Months

More solo founders than ever are starting companies that tackle huge challenges. And they're making it work thanks to brand new tools and developments in A.I. that magnify the output of a single person. Today it's possible to interview hundreds of people a month, or to write thousands of articles a month, without hiring a single writer.

A Short Story

Przemek Chojecki put years into his career in academia, and his hard work was paying off. He earned a PhD in Mathematics, became a research fellow at Oxford, and was even profiled by Forbes 30 Under 30. But then he made an unexpected and risky decision — he wanted to leave that all behind and become an indie hacker.

"I was super insecure about switching from this defined career that I had," he confessed to Courtland on the latest episode of the Indie Hackers Podcast. "But I was so convinced that staying in academia would make me miserable in the long run that I just had to quit."

Despite his concerns, Przemek was excited to get started. But it wasn't easy.

After a year of hard work, his first company ran out of money and he was forced to shut it down. He had $0 to show for his efforts.

"It felt bad in the beginning… but it was really great learning. And I wasn't expecting much. I was expecting that to be kind of like going to business school."

Unfortunately, his second venture failed as well. It ended with a messy co-founder breakup, and a crazy product (a prototype quantum computer!) that was too hard to sell.

But Przemek persisted, determined to find his next big idea. Only this time, he wanted to take a different approach. Before getting started, he wanted to learn from others. How were other founders doing it? What was their recipe for success?

Enter: A.I.

As a self-described "productivity nerd," Przemek wanted to accelerate his interview process as quickly as possible. But, lacking funds and resources, he needed to get really creative with his next steps.

He decided to launch Petacrunch.com, an AI-powered media company. "I was trying to do TechCrunch, but done by AI without humans," says Przemek.

Although the company was staffed by Przemek alone, Petacrunch used "AI journalists" to rapidly interview over 1000 successful tech entrepreneurs… in just 3 months.

"It wasn't me who was doing all the talking. It was these AI journalists who were contacting people. And they even managed to get to talk to CEOs of startups who raised $100 million and things like that."

More than anything, Przemek was impressed by the operating scale of the AI solution he'd built. But he was still frustrated by the degree of human curation and intervention necessary to polish the finished product.

So he began to code a tool-set to improve his content-generating algorithms, and to improve the automation so that Petacrunch could run as autonomously as possible. Przemek’s subsequent breakthrough insight was that his algorithm technology could be scaled up as a SaaS platform, and made available for customers who want to generate more content, with lower costs and effort.

That effort became Contentyze.com, a synthetic media platform, which launched in February 2020.

Insightful, and possibly just the tiniest bit subversive, Przemek’s views on solo entrepreneurship and options for integrating AI into tech solutions are fascinating. And the huge opportunities (and possible risks?) developing in the future for AI and Machine Learning pose intriguing possibilities for innovative indie hackers.

• Can AI make solo founders 1000x more productive?
• Does AI-generated content match or surpass the quality of more-traditionally generated writing?
• Will we see single founders running giant media companies using nothing but AI?
• And how can the average indie hacker take advantage of this technology while it’s still early?

Listen to the latest episode of the Indie Hackers podcast to explore the future of tech entrepreneurship with Courtland and Prezemek. —Nicola Milner

📰 In the News

🚉 DigitalOcean just released a new app platform, and indie hackers are debating the pros and cons.

❤️ Salesforce is launching a $100M fund for startups with a socially positive impact.

📈 The largest sector in the US economy is showing growth as the country begins to reopen.

🚷 Bad news for Big Tech: a US congressional report forecasts an antitrust showdown with Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.

💻 Remote is the new black: most full-time workers in the US are working remote during the pandemic… and half refuse to return to non-remote jobs post-COVID.

🕵️‍ Acquisition Channel of the Week: Software Directories

There are currently 483 founder interviews on Indie Hackers. I've read and analyzed all of them and identified the top 30 acquisition channels mentioned. (See Zero to Users for more details.) I'll be reviewing one of those channels each Thursday. First up: software directories.

Software directories are simply websites that list tools by a specific category or type. I've seen them mentioned across many Indie Hackers interviews.

Here's an example from David Cacik of LiveAgent ($300k/month), a help desk and customer support tool:

There are a few general-purpose software directories like Capterra, G2, and GetApp. Martial Arts on Rails ($5k/month) sells management software for martial arts facilities and gyms, and they've seen success with one of these directories:

There are 100s of directories, and sometimes finding which ones bring traffic and users can be a matter of trial and error. Consider the example of Tettra ($61k/month), an internal knowledge based tool for teams:

AlternativeTo is another popular website directory that more than one founder has found success with. Phil Manavopoulos of Doorbell ($3k/month), an app feedback tool, used it to find his first customers.

Talk to you next week. :) —Darko Gjorgjievski

💡 Harry Growth Tip

Don't think about "capturing emails".

Think about creating something worth subscribing to.

Go here for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips. —Harry Dry

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

Tell me how I can make it better! Or help me out by contributing to it directly. —Channing