🗞 What's New: Reddit upended Wall Street in a battle over GameStop stock

Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• Reddit caused a major stir on Wall Street this week. From the subreddit to the SEC, we break down what indie hackers need to know.
• Micro-SaaS trended in 2020. We highlight 21 companies to watch in 2021, and dig into great micro-SaaS ideas for founders.
• This founder used a backpacking trip across Europe as an opportunity to test his product. Get the backstory below.

As always, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🧨 Reddit Upended Wall Street in a Battle Over GameStop Stock

from the Indie Economy newsletter by Bobby Burch

GameStop's stock is up 13x since January 1st, and its market cap is at nearly $16.5B, thanks to a coordinated push by a dedicated subreddit. Let's dive in.

Power of the subreddit

What happened: Wall Street Bets is a subreddit forum dedicated to upending Wall Street hedge funds. Short traders in Wall Street Bets organized a short squeeze on GameStop's stock: a short squeeze occurs when a stock's price jumps sharply higher, forcing traders who had bet that its price would fall to buy it to prevent even greater losses.

Some of the high-profile short sellers of GameStop, specifically Melvin Capital and Citron, closed out their position (ending their trade in GameStop) to the delight of Wall Street Bets, which celebrated their downfall with memes and "sh*tposts."

The fallout: As GameStop's value has grown, short sellers have lost more than $5B on the stock. Melvin Capital received a $2.75B bailout from Citadel and Point 72 to shore up its finances.

Wall Street Bets' push upset traditional traders and hedge funds, while emboldening investors to replicate the event; next up on the list are AMC Entertainment and BlackBerry. On Thursday, the popular trading app Robinhood announced it would temporarily ban trading on GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Nokia, as stock for these companies experience a sharp increase in recent weeks. Angry traders have already filed a class action suit against Robinhood, striking back against the restriction.

Robin Hood in real life

The movement: The Redditors of Wall Street Bets are being broadly hailed as working-class heroes for sticking it to Wall Street in a way that the government does not. Reddit user "DeepF*ckingValue" led the charge on the short squeeze. He managed to turn his $55K bet on GameStop into $47M, while helping his fellow Redditors also rake in millions.

Financial pundits never saw it coming, but they should have. Chock full of irreverent memes and colorful language, the subreddit has a war-like mentality against hedge funds, and believes that the stock market is a casino. Wall Street Bets' 4.7M self-described "degenerates" have a "YOLO" mentality, vowing to either "get rich and ride away in a Maserati or end up living underneath a bridge."

Why it matters: GameStop's vertical ascent is the latest reminder of how a dedicated community can dismantle the status quo. Take indie hackers, who are steadily shifting attitudes on what it means to create value in the marketplace. The rise of micro-investors, and groups like Wall Street Bets, mirrors the growth of indie hackers and their digital communities. It all comes down to disruption of tradition, and breaking the mold.

What's to come: More people than ever are launching side projects, freelancing, and quitting their full-time jobs to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams. As an increasing number of these independent workers see success, they'll find more ways to exert their influence on systems in which they've traditionally lacked power.

Underdog ethos: The millions of Wall Street Bets members view their GameStop push as a David vs. Goliath battle. The little guys took on hedge funds with a desire to expose hypocrisy and buck traditions that have left small investors at a disadvantage.

This is a similar sentiment held by indie hackers who are aiming to topple conventional thinking on how to grow a business, and challenge the status quo.

What are your thoughts on the GameStop kerfluffle? What's your title for the movie that will undoubtedly be made about this? Please share your thoughts.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Indie Economy for more.

📰 In the News

✍ Facebook is building a newsletter tool that will help writers and journalists monetize their content.

😂 The SEC issued a statement on the "volatile" market activity caused by Reddit this week.

🐶 Joke crytocurrency Dogecoin soared more than 300% in 24 hours, as Robinhood restricts cryto trading.

📥 Telegram now allows users to import their WhatsApp chat history, as Whatsapp users continue to abandon the app over privacy concerns.

🍎 Apple's upcoming privacy updates require users to opt in to data collection, but many are confused about exactly what's being collected.

💻 12 Micro-SaaS Companies to Watch in 2021

from The Content Marketer newsletter by Marc Brohmall

Micro-SaaS trended in 2020, and will likely continue to rise in 2021. I've put together a micro-SaaS primer, including a list of 12 micro-SaaS companies to watch this year.

What is micro-SaaS?

The term was coined by Tyler Tringas in reference to his company, Storemapper, and I'm going to revert to his definition:

Micro-SaaS companies are often remote, and are usually run by one person. These low overheads can produce favorable margins with a much lower degree of risk.

They still benefit from the recurring revenue model of a traditional SaaS company, but without the hassle of renting an office space, managing a large team, and dealing with investors. Most micro-SaaS companies are bootstrapped.

Naturally, the revenue of micro-SaaS companies is commensurate with their size, meaning that their MRR is more likely to be in the 4-5 figure range, rather than the 6-7 figure range. But micro-SaaS doesn't always equate to micro profits.

Finding a micro-SaaS idea

Micro-SaaS companies are often born from a problem or a pain point, but there are many ways to discover a new micro-SaaS idea:

• Problem with an existing product: Founders who encounter a product issue or gap often end up scratching their own itch. With SaaS companies at record highs, right now is a great time to launch an itch-scratching micro-SaaS.
• Niching down: There are many product and UI requirements that are unique to industry, and necessitate a bespoke solution. For example, CRM is a large and lucrative category; creating a CRM platform for a specific industry, like the wellness industry, is a niche.
• Productizing freelance work: An example of this would be a digital marketing freelancer running ad campaigns for their clients. One element of the role is campaign reporting: there's an opportunity here to build a tool which automatically creates and collates these different campaign reports into one super report.
• Automating manual tasks: A good example of this is the task of manually checking for failed customer payments every month due to expired credit cards. For a small business it isn't such a big deal, but if you've got thousands of customers this can be incredibly laborious. Stunning created a solution to this problem by building an app which plugs into Stripe, and automatically starts sending follow-up emails and in-app messages to customers until they update their account.

12 movers & shakers in micro-SaaS

1. StatsOut

This is a really nifty dashboard for your most important online stats. It syncs with Google Analytics, Search Console, Facebook, Instagram and Stripe. It launched in January 2021, and aims to hit $1K MRR this year.

2. The Agent Nest

This platform helps realtors create social media content. Its current MRR is $6.5K, and its goal for this year is $15K MRR.

3. StartingPoint

This is an after-sales product that helps service-based teams easily manage each customer after acquisition. They make functions like onboarding, project management, support, and task management super easy via one simple platform.

StartingPoint can be set up within one hour, and no action takes more than 5 clicks. It launched in June 2020, with current MRR being $5K. Its 2021 goal is to reach $45K MRR.

4. Justredirect

This is a tool to manage redirections and website migrations. It just launched in 2021, and aims to hit $5K MRR by the end of the year.

5. Linkody

Linkody operates in the marketing/SEO industry. It offers a tool to track and manage link building campaigns, also known as off-page SEO. Its current MRR is $12K. It aims to grow this to $15K MRR this year.

6. PassiveWeekly

This is a weekly newsletter that teaches methods to create passive income, reduce expenses, and launch profitable side hustles. Its current MRR is $0, and it aims to reach $15K MRR this year.

To see the rest of the list, check out the original article.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to The Content Marketer for more.

🍪 Growth Bite: Offer a Deal Right Before the Free Trial Ends

from the Growth Bites newsletter by James Fleischmann

After a trial ends, your likelihood of converting a user decreases rapidly. Get more paid users by sweetening the deal with a limited-time offer right before trials end.

Surfer ($233k/mo) boosted their trial conversions by 33% with a well-timed offer. They have a seven-day trial and found that they got most of their conversions on days seven and eight, with a steep drop-off after that. Makes sense.

So they decided that on the sixth day, they'd encourage signups by offering users added value — in their case, additional queries — if they signed up within 48 hours. They mentioned the deal in an email that went out automatically on the sixth day of the trial, with a link to their upgrade page. By signing up and replying to the email, the user would get credits added to their account. According to Karolina Gawron, Surfer's head of marketing, it was the quickest boost to conversions that they've experienced.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Growth Bites for more.

🎒 Fernando Pessagno Tested His MVP on a Backpacking Trip Across Europe

from the Deep Dive newsletter by Halden Ingwersen

In August 2018, Fernando Pessagno posted ResumeMaker.Online on Product Hunt. To his total shock, it finished number one for the day and week. Not only that, but the successful launch spurred an avalanche of early growth.

In ResumeMaker's first month alone, more than 20K resumes were downloaded from more than 100 countries, along with countless shares and tweets.

The project started in January 2018 when Fernando's sister asked him for help with a task everyone faces eventually: designing a resume. Fernando, an Argentinian UX designer, couldn't find an online resume builder tool that would help his sister stand out.

There were plenty of resume builder sites, sure. But they were all either user-unfriendly, looked unpolished and unprofessional, or both.

Fernando had been itching to build something new for a while, but not just anything; he wanted to make something that had the playfulness and challenge of the sites he'd built for fun as a teenager. He also wanted what he built to be meaningful: a resume maker that would help people look their best and stand out from the sea of generic designs.

That was the inspiration for ResumeMaker.Online, a straightforward web app for not-so-tech-savvy users to quickly design a beautiful resume.

Fernando took his time building the app, and often found himself baking in additional features like multiple layouts, mix and match design options, and various ways to input methods. But even as he built them, he wondered if he was making the same mistakes of other resume builders.

The other resume builder options missed the mark because they were either so complex that they were hostile to anyone but a designer, or they were so simplistic that they just looked awful. What was missing was something beautiful and simple. By implementing additional features because they were fun to build, he was helping himself, but not his users.

Fernando had previously planned a two-month-long backpacking trip across Europe, and he created a deadline around it: before leaving for the trip, he wanted to have his MVP ready. The trip ended up being an incredible proving ground for Fernando's concept. As he traveled, he struck up conversations with fellow guests of the hostels he stayed in, floating his concept to get their thoughts. It provided an endless supply of free feedback from potential users, and it was very valuable in the long run.

His hunch about simplicity proved to be correct, and Fernando realized that he also needed to cut his array of layout options, limit font and color options, and change complex section choices into yes-or-no toggles. That left him with a tool that looked good, while being truly basic, in order to avoid scaring off users who weren't comfortable with design:

When Fernando returned home to Argentina, he launched the final version of the product: a beautiful and super-simple resume creation tool with space to input your information, and little else.

Following the successful Product Hunt launch, Fernando focused on adding seven different languages, including French, Spanish, and Swedish (though he says that 85% of traffic still goes to the English version).

Although he saw a money-making opportunity, Fernando did not want monetization to get in the way of growth. So he started with a fixed-value donation button, with options ranging from $1 to $20. Fernando said:

With this, and a few affiliate links alone, Fernando kept the lights on for two years. And he was happy. Soon, he was approached with an opportunity to sell the site.

The sale was nearly complete in January 2020, and then COVID-19 hit. The sale fell through. Website traffic took a huge dip in February and March, and then several of Fernando's affiliates pulled out.

During the strict Argentinian lockdown, Fernando paused to reconsider his monetization strategy. He decided to switch from donations to freemium, introducing a "PRO" plan with higher resolutions and no watermarks for $2.95 per download.

Now boasting over 400 downloads per month, it was a huge success. Traffic recovered and is now at an all-time high: ~3K unique users daily, and 70K+ uniques per month. On his path to monetization, Fernando commented:

With numbers like that, if Fernando had decided to stay in Argentina, he could live comfortably off of ResumeMaker alone. But he now makes his home in Europe, commuting between Estonia and Sweden, where his girlfriend lives.

To facilitate this, he's kept his day job, and it fuels his drive to generate multiple income sources to accomplish the European version of the indie hacker's dream scenario. He plans to market more aggressively in 2021, and with a +10% monthly site growth, living off of ResumeMaker isn't a far-fetched goal.

We asked Fernando what advice he has to offer to other indie hackers just getting started. He told us that starting your own project is overwhelming for everyone, so don't let that discourage you. He underestimated himself constantly as he built, but that's what convinced him to keep his build small. To combat that feeling, Fernando advises approach your creation humbly, with realistic goals.

If you'd like to learn more about ResumeMaker.Online and connect with Fernando, you can find him here:

• Linkedin
• Instagram
• And check out some of his UX case studies on Medium.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Deep Dive for more.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Nathalie Zwimpfer for the illustrations, and to Bobby Burch, Marc Brohmall, and Halden Ingwersen for contributing posts. —Channing