Product Hunt's New CEO · Find Your Target Audience · Three Tips From a 7-Figure Founder

Channing here. Ryan Hoover just stepped down as Product Hunt's CEO after seven years at the helm. The first version of Product Hunt was an email newsletter, and Ryan launched it… on Twitter.

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

• Get new users by going to where they hang out. Read this week's breakdown of one of the most popular acquisition channels.
• In the news: Gumroad's upcoming product competition. CA court rules against Lyft and Uber. Pieter Levels shares how to outperform Twitter ads.
• Streak does millions in revenue. Learn three actionable takeaways from Courtland's interview with the company's founder.
• Harry's growth tip: Being indie can be an asset or a liability. Depends on your presentation. Learn how to get it right.

Special thanks to Darko Gjorgjievski, Nicky Milner, 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. —Channing

👽 Weekly Acquisition Channel: (sub)Reddit(s)

I've read and analyzed all 485 Indie Hackers interviews and identified 34 acquisition channels that work consistently for founders (see Zero to Users for more details). The trending channel that I'll be reviewing today: posting and engaging on Reddit.

There are over 130,000 active communities on Reddit. Chances are, some of them are related to your market. Creative Tim ($118k/mo) sells UI kits/templates, and they're a great example of this:

Alexandru (the founder) made a bunch of freebies and submitted them to various subreddits where they got traction:

Reddit can also be an amazing place to validate your idea.

This was the case with everydayCheck ($4.8k/mo), a habit tracking tool:

Some subreddits can be pretty hostile to self-promotion. Simple Steps Code ($650/mo), a set of courses for web development, had to deal with this problem.

When asked about the marketing strategies he used to get students for his course, here's what founder Yaphi Berhanu said:

Thank you for reading, and talk to you next week! —Darko Gjorgjievski

📰 In the News

🙈 Paul Graham's latest essay explores how to overcome your embarrassment with new ideas.

🚕 Lyft and Uber must classify their drivers as employees in California, a court ruled yesterday. The stakes? The companies might leave the state and put 100,000+ people out of work.

🐦 Pieter Levels just shared his trick to outperform Twitter's ads. (Caveat: plenty of cash needed upfront!)

💻 Gumroad's 14-day product challenge starts October 26. Over a two-week period, you'll be guided from idea to first sale.

📹 Quibi is shutting down after burning $2 billion worth of VC funding in six months.

Three Takeaways from Courtland's Talk With Aleem Mawani

Aleem Mawani of Streak just came on to the Indie Hackers podcast to share his insights on running a SaaS business. And with a profitable, multi-million-dollar company that's still growing at 750k+ users, he had plenty to share.

Aleem raised some initial VC funds for his CRM tool for Gmail, but since then he hasn't found it necessary to raise additional capital or spend much cash on exotic marketing strategies. Streak is growing as rapidly as they want to through an "old-fashioned" model: word-of-mouth, relying on happy customers and users who recommend their product through social and professional networks. In Aleem's own words: "When people started telling other people about it, I knew it was a real thing… that's when I knew Streak was working."

Here are three takeaways from the episode.

1. Founder Decision-making:

Timebox the effort you commit to high-risk, intensive activities that chase massive growth. Otherwise, be prepared for what might come next.

The high-risk, high-reward VC track currently carries an expectation that a startup will either be massively scaled after 18 months, or go under. As the startup landscape matures, more investors will recognize that good, solid business fundamentals and a sustainable growth trajectory can offer desirable returns.

If the mid-size, slow-growth model is a viable path (e.g. Basecamp, Atlassian), founders can design a lifestyle that can be maintained for long periods of time, with a commitment to growth and success for the business.

2. The Bootstrapper's Playbook:

Pick an idea with a proven track record. There are companies who are already making money in the space.

Identify your product idea's scope. It may feel mundane or straightforward, but it's not necessary to try to enter a "winner take all" space, e.g. social networking.

In order to compete, niche down: Identify a target persona and understand their point of greatest pain. Select a specific use case (e.g. email inbox management for founders) and develop your product to be 10x better in a very narrow scope.

Focus on user experience. Stay as close as possible to your early adopters and refine, refine, refine the product based on their feedback and frustrations.

3. Focus on User Requirements:

Before rushing headlong into development cycles, focus your priorities on user feedback and on truly understanding your customer's use cases. If your product can provide significantly better performance — even if it's in a very narrow area — it may give enough runway to continue developing additional necessary functionality and features while you're rolling out.

Aleem admits that for an engineer, it wasn't particularly easy to squelch the natural instinct to just dive in and begin coding. But he can't overstate the critical importance of user interviews and interaction.

Key Lessons:

As long as your users are happy and your business is growing, you can choose from different strategic options for your company.

The global marketplace is large enough to support decent customer success for even a highly niched product, as long as it's clearly defined and provides significant improvements for your users. —Nicky Milner

🧠 Harry's Growth Tip

• Plain > Pretentious
• Faces > Illustrations
• Social proof at every opportunity

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