Building a Side Hustle… Next to Your Side Hustle · Is Google a Monopoly? · Profit Sharing on the Rise

Channing here. Shots fired today: the US Justice Department officially issued an antitrust lawsuit against Google after a year-long investigation.

What's at stake? The US government might move to break Google up by unwinding some of its allegedly anticompetitive acquisitions. That includes DoubleClick, the platform that powers Google's ads.

On to the newsletter. Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• How do you find time for a side project? Actually, hold that thought, because this solo founder's found time for two.
• In the news: Devs debate the new antitrust suit against Google. An angel investor shares her returns publicly. The new #2 in e-commerce releases a long-awaited feature for its merchants.
• Profit sharing is one of the biggest new trends. Learn how to capitalize on it with your team.
• Is SEO part of your growth strategy? An expert explains how to go from page two to page one on Google.

Special thanks to Andrea Bosoni, Dru Riley, and Jake Lazaroff 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 Run a Side Project Next to Your Side Project

For most people, "side project" means a project on the side of their full-time job.

Jake Lazaroff isn't most people. He's grown his side project SongRender while working a full-time job. While keeping active with his band babygotbacktalk. While moving to a new city, getting engaged, and getting married. Add to all of this the recent headwinds of the coronavirus, which forced Jake to record and release his latest album under stay-at-home orders and re-plan his already-planned wedding from the ground up.

As if that weren't bad enough? Time wasn't Jake's only constraint. When he first started out, he didn't have the technical chops to build SongRender, a visualizer that helps bands promote their music online:

Despite all this, Jake has willed SongRender to $870 in revenue per month, which amounts to a profit:

How has Jake been able to grow a profitable side project in the midst of all the craziness around him?

For one thing, he's developed a great system for allocating time to his various projects. For another, and this is key: he's mastered the art the SLC.

SLC stands for simple, lovable, complete. And it stands in contrast to many founders' approaches to MVPs. You don't want to undercook a product, shipping a version that's not complete enough to satisfy users. But you also don't want to overcook it, spending ages building a complex feature set that goes beyond a good stopping point for shipping and getting user feedback.

Perhaps by necessity, Jake stayed disciplined and nailed the goldilocks zone between these extremes:

The product was now ready to go: it did what users expected it to do, and it even had a mechanism for receiving payments.

But Jake needed it to grow.

Rather than wasting time overanalyzing all the potential growth strategies he might go with upfront, he jumped in with a battery of experiments and reacted to the feedback.

Early on, the results weren't promising:

Traffic wasn't the problem. Relevant traffic was.

So Jake continued experimenting and placed more of his efforts targeting audiences with a better chance to convert.

Two strategies that worked for him? Subreddits and SEO. Today, SongRender's search traffic is up to around 3,000 clicks per month.

But a third, more unique strategy gained him even more traffic than his launch on Product Hunt.

Check out Jake's full interview to learn about that final strategy, along with his crafty approach to budgeting his time. —Channing

📰 In the News

🍿 Tech founders and developers are debating the merits of the antitrust case against Google.

💃 An angel investor just shared her returns publicly… along with the lessons she's learned.

🛍 Shopify now supports subscriptions. Big news, given that Shopify just passed Ebay for #2 biggest shopping site last month.

💉 Several industries were expected to recover after the initial coronavirus lockdowns lifted. Now, they probably won't bounce back until a COVID-19 vaccine arrives.

🐙 Ever considered selling access to a private GitHub repo? Now there's a product that lets you do that.

📖 Daniel Vassallo just just did an AMA after crossing ¼ of $1 million in sales on Gumroad from two products. Check out his answers.

🤝 Trend Alert: Profit Sharing

You have profits. Ok... What's the problem?

Investing in growth and development has diminishing returns.

But profit-sharing plans give employees a percentage of profits. This is a powerful short-term incentive.

Established indie hackers are setting the example:

• Balsamiq
• Basecamp
• ConvertKit
• Mailchimp
• Zapier

Know your north star. Sometimes profit isn't the goal. Maybe it's growth. In which case, profit sharing may be a bad idea.

Go here for more. Including predictions on the future of profit sharing and ways indie hackers can capitalize. —Dru Riley

🚀 How to Go from Page Two to Page One on Google

The best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google. Here's what I do to go from page two to page one.

Based on my experience, the three most important ranking factors are content, links, and user signals. So that's where I focus my attention.

I start by doing a content gap analysis.

• "Why do page 1 results satisfy searcher intent?"
• "Are there any important topics I'm missing?"

I pay special attention to pages that rank high despite having low domain authority, because it means their content is really good.

Then I take a look at their backlink profile: "Do they have high page authority? Or are they ranking high because they live on a powerful domain?"

Google ranks pages, not websites. So often times just getting a handful of quality links to the page can help me outrank more authoritative domains.

Lastly, I try to influence user behavior.

• "How can I make people click my result?"
• "What can I do to make them stay longer on the page?"

I write custom titles and meta descriptions that match search intent to boost my CTR and make sure my content is scannable and easy to navigate to improve dwell time.

For more from me, check out Zero to Marketing, where I pick a new online business every Monday and write a 5-minute-read case study with actionable tips on how I'd grow it. —Andrea Bosoni

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

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