SEO for Bootstrappers · Choosing Your Next Product · $Discounts for Black Friday

Channing here. Today's Tuesday, not Friday. But we're going to talk about Black Friday deals in this issue since, apparently, it's Black Friday all week in indie hackers land.

What else will we talk about? Feast your eyes (browser view):

• Learn about two market trends you should capitalize on before everyone else does.
• What's your next project going to be? An info product? SaaS? Micro-SaaS? If you're struggling to choose, we've got you covered.
• In the news: 160 CEOs vs Donald Trump. Problem with paid newsletters. Future of automated workflow tools.
• Black Friday deals are here. Check out this guide to the best discounted tools for indie hackers.

Special thanks to Pete Codes, Josh Howarth, and Nicky Milner 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

🧨 Trending Markets: SEO for Bootstrappers and Automated Messaging

by Josh Howarth of Exploding Topics

Exploding Topics scours the internet to find emerging trends before they take off.

Two of the latest trends to take advantage of are Mangools and Discord Bot. I'll explain both of them in turn.

1. Mangools

Mangools is a low-cost SEO software suite aimed at small businesses and solopreneurs.

Many SEO SaaS products (like SEMrush and Ahrefs) have gradually pivoted toward enterprise customers. Today, typical pricing for a mid-tier plan on a leading SEO software suite is around $200/month.

While they don’t offer the same level of features as enterprise-level SEO tools, Mangools’s mid-tier plan is around $40/month.

Overall, at a 14.83% CAGR, SEO software is one of the fastest-growing martech segments.

What's next:

Mangools is part of the Accessible Martech meta trend. Martech is notorious for stodgy practices, like product demos and lengthy contracts. But we’re seeing an increasing number of martech companies bucking this trend, like Canva, Wavve, and Later.com.

2. Discord Bot

Discord is free messaging software with text, video and voice chat built in. It’s designed for gamers to create online communities. Though with 250M user accounts, Discord is also used for non-gamer communities, online teaching and more.

A Discord bot tackles and automates away some of the challenges from running Discord communities. Chief among those problems is moderation.

Discord bots are often used for non moderation purposes too. Some automatically share content from social sources such as Twitter and YouTube. Others encourage community discussion with user leaderboards, awards and mini-games.

The general purpose bot Loritta bills itself as “yet another Discord bot”. Yet, as of writing, it runs on 840K Discord servers.

And countless more bots exist on the Discord Bot List website top.gg. With the most popular receiving millions of monthly upvotes.

What's next:

Discord bots are part of the community building and social automation meta trends. Other examples of bots taking off in this category include ManyChat (Facebook), Standuply (Slack) and Hypefury (Twitter).

3. Read more

Check out the full post to see this week's other two exploding topics. And join Exploding Topics Pro to see trends 6+ months before they take off!

📰 In the News

💸 Software Ideas hits $9k MRR after just five months.

🏛 More than 160top American executives pushed Trump to concede the US election.

👀 150,000 views in one day: an indie hacker went viral with his free illustrations product after posting on reddit.

🕵️‍♀️ Google is testing encryption in its Android messaging system.

💸 Automated workflow products are on the rise with $2.2bn of investment in the last 12 months.

🗞 Paid newsletters aren't enough according to Hunter Walk who says writers need a mix of income streams.

🎙 Indie Hackers are Choosing Between Info Products, SaaS, and Micro-SaaS

by Nicky Milner of Indie Airwaves

You've got a newsletter, right? They're trending these days. So are podcasts, for that matter. And so are Micro-SaaS products. And so are no-code tools. And so are…

The point here is that if you've been feeling overwhelmed at all the different product categories that seem to be blowing up, you're not alone. Most indie hackers starting out today are facing a tyranny of choice.

Rob Walling of TinySeed just joined Courtland on the Indie Hackers podcast to talk through the pros and cons of entering the various verticals. TinySeed is an accelerator for bootstrappers, so Rob's developed a bird's eye perspective of the evolving marketplace.

Here are a few of Rob's insights into three of the most popular product categories among indie hackers today.

Info Products

Info products are one of the fastest avenues to income generation for solo founders, and many entrepreneurs have scaled them to multi-millionaire businesses.

Rob advises the "build an audience first" approach for info products. Yet:

Also worth noting: info products rely heavily on the knowledge, experiences, and content-creation skills of the founder. So it's difficult to transfer or sell the company in the future without solid talent transition mechanisms.

SaaS

Meanwhile, on the SaaS side, the mythic dream of "create a widget that makes money while you sleep" is not the reality that most founders encounter. There is a lot of effort and maintenance required after launch.

SaaS subscriptions sell for very different reasons than info products. The service is a tool for ongoing work.

According to Rob, building an audience first is not particularly effective here. Sustained growth for a SaaS product relies on "flywheel" marketing tools, such as cold e-mails, stellar SEO, network effects, and integrations.

One big upside with SaaS? The ease with which the founder can transfer or sell the product down the road, converting recurring income into capital gains.

Micro-Saas

Here's Earnest Capital founder Tyler Tringas's definition of Micro-SaaS:

Rob suggests that the best opportunities for Micro-SaaS products may lie in physical industries where they can address highly specific pain points. These industries are often slower to adopt new technology, so the key to selling into them is to offer SaaS capabilities that improve their processes.

In Rob's words:

Competitor pain is what founders face in a saturated marketplace, continually striving for functionality and feature parity with competing products.

Customer pain offers advantages when working in a less-crowded space. But companies have to be prepared for a hefty support burden, since buyers are likely to be non-technical and are typically very price-sensitive.

Discuss this story with other indie hackers here.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

Yo. Whoa. So…

I post tweets that indie hackers are into. And for today's pick from Siqi Chen, repeat after me: "I swear I'm not high. I swear I'm not high. I swear I'm not high…"

Flex out. Or am I…?

💰 The Best Black Friday Deals for Indie Hackers

by Pete Codes

It's not quite Black Friday yet, but the discounts have already arrived. Here are some deals I think most indie hackers will appreciate:

E-books

• Zero to Sold by Arvid Kahl: $11.99 (20% off). Learn how to build and sell your own bootstrapped business.

• Make by Pieter Levels: $14.99 (50% off). One of the best books on being an indie hacker.

• Revenue Report by Pete Codes: $5 (50% off). An analysis of founders' business models, marketing strategies, and pricing featuring Pieter Levels, Andrey Azimov, Pat Walls, and Hari Krishna Dulipudi.

Communities

• Nomad List by Pieter Levels: $75 lifetime membership (50% off). A community for digital nomads. Meet people and find out where to live as a remote worker.

• Ness Labs by Anne-Laure Le Cunff: $37.50/year (25% off the annual membership). A community focused on mindfulness and productivity.

• Everything Marketplaces by Mike Williams: $225/year (25% off annual) if you use the coupon code "BF25OFF". A community for makers building marketplaces.

• Starter Story by Pat Walls: over 50% off all plans. Access the Starter Story database of successful companies and discuss with other entrepreneurs.

Email Marketing

• Email Octopus by Gareth Bull: 50% off for three months for new customers. Email marketing service like Mailchimp (which I use), but cheaper.

• ProtonMail by Andy Yen: up to 50% off annual. Email marketing service focused on privacy.

• Mailmeteor by Corentin Brossault: 50% off annual, 30% off monthly. Gmail-based email marketing service.

Miscellaneous

• Namecheap by Richard Kirkendall: 99% off domains and 98% off hosting. Buy domains and get a free email address for two months.

• Carrd by AJ: 50% off pro accounts. Make websites without code. Add domains and take payments using Carrd's built-in forms and Stripe.

• Simple Ops by Hari Krishna Dulipudi: $299.99 lifetime (standard plans are all recurring). Uptime monitoring for your website.

• No Code API by Mohd Danish Yusuf: $249 lifetime (80% off). Connect third-party APIs without a line of code.

• Meet Your Heroes by Pete Codes: $5 (50% off). Exclusive video interviews with Scott Keyes, Daniel Vassallo, Ben Tossell, and Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

• Checkbot by Sean Wilson: $48 for the first year (60% off). Chrome extension that tests pages to find critical SEO, speed, and security issues.

More Deals

There's more! Check out my full post on Indie Hackers for deals on design, coding courses, and more.

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

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