⚡ IL - No prize for doing it the hard way

Today's newsletter is about major announcements in the Newsletter industry. And, if you still suck at marketing (pun intended 🙂), then don't build a standalone product - rather build plugins on top of marketplaces so the platform plays a role in marketing it. Checkout B2B marketplaces list in the worth-reading section for more details.

Earlier, I was dealing with sponsors by email. And it sucks. Yes, it sucks.
So I have re-created the ad-booking sheet. By the way, few sponsor slots are left now. Go and grab them...

Marketing & Growth

Get new customers by creating a related (and free) chrome extension

To bring new people to your product's ecosystem, it can be helpful to tap into a new marketplace. Increase your brand awareness and get new users by launching a free Chrome extension.

Surfer attributes roughly twenty trials and five subscriptions per month to the free Chrome extension they launched in 2019. The extension now has 220,000 users, and each of those users sees Surfer's logo whenever they conduct a search on Google. More than 1,000 people have come to their landing page through the extension's CTA. And they've received hundreds of high-authority backlinks to boot. Not bad! The extension is specific to their niche and pulls data from their paid tools. And it's also worth noting that they hit the user-jackpot by launching v2.0 at a time when a related extension was transitioning to paid. To get started, check out Google's documentation. Or if you prefer, you can save time by buying one on the cheap.

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Don't build something for early stage startups

1. They don't have money

And what little they do is aimed at making sales or building the early product. If your service doesn't do those two things really well, it's not a good fit.

Founders also tend to be (rightly so) very price sensitive. With large companies, you can leave plenty of room for margin because a middle manager has a budget that is independent from his mortgage. A founder is either giving up a piece of his company (equity to investors) or personal savings to buy your product.

2. They don't know what they need yet

Most startups should begin their market/sales validation by doing things that don't scale. Software tools tend to help with scaling problems, not validation problems. The possible exception here is simple, no-code tools, but that space is getting crowded and the tech bar is high.

3. They won't be around for long

The average lifetime of a new company is just 20 months. That includes the time before they found your product, so you won't get many long-term users if you are working with startups.

4. Startups should take risks on their product, not yours

Finally, experienced startup founders know that technology can be a huge leverage point, but taking unnecessary risk is foolish. They should be building their own product not helping you get early feedback on yours.

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Snippets

• Newsletter industry going through revolution. Twitter acquired Revue - made it free and 5% fees on paid newsletters. Forbes is also stepping into paid newsletter things - 50/50 spilt between creators and Forbes and unlimited ad money share for them as well. Finally, The Everything Bundle graduated from Substack, now it's every.to. 
• According to Patrick Tanguay, Twitter is playing a big game now. Users can attach a credit card or a Square Cash account to Twitter, and sell access to Revue content on Twitter as well as allowing users to upgrade to "Twitter Pro”, which would give them a badge on their avatar like the blue-check verified badge.
• GitLab removes its 'starter' tier - $4/mo'. So users have to upgrade to Premium plan - $19/mo or downgrade to the free tier and lose some features.
• Paradox of Price - You'd think the more expensive something is that the person buying it would want more accountability. In reality, it's less, because the people who can afford to pay that much money understand that you're the expert, not them. Cheaper people don't understand that, they want to stretch their dollar, which makes them worse customers.
• SaaS case studies - in-depth collection of 20+ marketing case studies of brands and SaaS.

Twitter users attach a credit card (or a Square Cash account.

Worth Reading

1. No prize for doing it the hard way

2. 67 B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

3. Bannerbear's 2-year journey to $10K MRR

4. Automating my job with GPT-3

5. Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

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How companies want to sell to customers VS how customers actually want to buy

One more thing!

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