Indie Letters - ⚡ IL - Become a Friend of IL

After months of sending the IL newsletter, I’m launching IL’s membership program. It’s called Friends of IL and is entirely optional "you pay if you can".

It’s a model based on the idea that the most enthusiastic, loyal readers are willing to pay a small fee in order to keep IL fully accessible for everyone. It depends on the generosity of those who feel strongly about avoiding a two-class system of free and paid tiers.

I will add more perks over time (including exclusive discounts on my products), but right now Friends of IL are just that: generous supporters of this humble newsletter. If you get something valuable out of it and believe that $1.60 per month won’t break the bank, consider becoming a friend. 

Thank you! 

– Falak

If a non-profit asks you for giving product for free, give them for free but with a twist. Tell them "you will get this product for free in return for a backlink from their website." This way you will increase your domain authority and SERP rankings as non-profits have backlinks from authority websites.

Support us by sponsoring an issue sent to our 1650+ subscribers each week. (US audience: 74%) Book now →

Text-based interviews played a huge part in Indie Hackers growth. And they're not alone — Pat Walls of Starter Story got 12.6M impressions in a year by interviewing founders. 

What's more, from outreach to editing to publishing, it only takes about 30 minutes of work. 

Text-based interviews make for great content and they're way easier than creating articles from scratch. They also bring the interviewee's audience into your ecosystem. And they can be great for SEO too. 

All you have to do is create an interview template that you'll use each time. Then reach out to people in your industry, starting with people you know. When reaching out, keep your message short. Tell them why you want to interview them, specifically. Show social proof and let them know what kind of exposure they'll get. Don't be afraid to follow up. And after they've completed the interview, make sure to proof-read & edit it. 

P.S. Start interviewing your SaaS customers. They will feel special and you will get a blog post, and the interviewer's free promotion will hopefully bring more customers. Recently, EmailOctopus conducted a text-based interview of TheSlice creator.

• Work on the basics every day.
• Solve your customer's pains.
• Market constantly.
• Ship.

• It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it. (Tweet)
• Are you looking for freelance work & actively posting on Linkedin? Then use the LinkedIn name pronunciation feature. And add your message such as "I grew X to six-figures in a year or any other client success." This way your chances of getting a job through LinkedIn increases.
• Use answerthepublic.com to understand the type of questions around your niche/product. Then answer relevant questions on Quora.

Reduce churn by allowing customers to put their subscriptions on hold.

Nick Fogle of Wavve ($123K/mo) saw an immediate 3% decrease in churn when he started allowing his customers to pause their subscriptions instead of canceling outright. 

His paused users weren't paying anything so it was a lot like losing customers at first, but he found that they were way more likely to reactivate. And when they did, that was money in his pocket that otherwise would have been lost. 

If you decide to give users the option to pause, you can increase the likelihood that they'll come back by sending email reminders and limited-time offers. You can even let them set a date for the plan to automatically reactivate.

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