🗞 What's New: Twitter's new "Super Follows" will help creators monetize content

Twitter announced two new products to help creators monetize on the platform:

• Super Follows will allow founders to charge subscribers for access to exclusive content, and Communities will enable private groups. Although there is no scheduled release date yet, Twitter's stock rose by 12% following Thursday's announcement.
• Kanye is releasing a new pair of Yeezys today, which builds upon the powerful positioning of his $1.3B brand. Expert Harry Dry's brand positioning primer shows you how to differentiate like 'Ye by contrasting your product with your competitors and doubling down on values.
• The emerging psychedelics movement helped this founder hit $15K MRR. Publicly sharing Speak Ai's product roadmap, and honing a freemium pricing structure were also major contributors to the company's growth.

Want to share your ideas with nearly 70K indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

💰 Twitter's New "Super Follows" Will Help Creators Monetize Content

from the Indie Economy newsletter by Bobby Burch

Twitter just announced two new products that will help its creators earn money directly from followers. The new offerings expand upon Twitter's efforts to tap into the $10B creator economy.

Twitter's new creator-focused products

• Super Follows: Users can charge Super Followers for access to exclusive content, subscriber-only newsletters, community groups, and supporter badges.
• Communities: Similar to Facebook Groups, Twitter's Communities feature will allow users to create groups for particular topics. Communities will offer "Super Followers" a space to convene with other like-minded folks.

Twitter goes indie: These developments come on the heels of Twitter's recent acquisition of newsletter tool Revue, which enables users to create paid newsletter subscriptions within the app. Twitter is also testing its audio-product Spaces, which appears similar to be similar to Clubhouse.

Bottom line: Twitter has always helped users build social capital on its platform, but there weren't any frameworks for monetization. Previously, to monetize a Twitter audience, users had to move their followers off the platform and onto their newsletters, products, or websites. With Super Follows, Twitter captures the latent value of its platform and helps creators profit in the process.

What's next: Twitter has yet to announce a launch date for the products, or disclose what percentage it'll take from creators' Super Followers. There is much anticipation around this release, but users will have to wait for further updates.

Wall Street gives Twitter two thumbs up

Market reacts: Twitter's stock (NYSE: TWTR) rose 12% on Thursday after it announced plans to double its revenue and create 315M daily, active users by end of 2023.

The path to profitability: In its last earnings report, Twitter reported $3.7B in 2020 revenue and 192M daily, active users in Q4 2020. Presumably, Twitter's creator-oriented products are a major part of its optimistic financial outlook to double revenue in two years.

The creator wave: Twitter's efforts to capitalize on the creator economy are in line with those of other social media and tech companies:

• Facebook is reportedly building a newsletter tool for writers, publishers, and content creators. It is also creating an audio product rivaling Clubhouse.
• In July 2020, TikTok announced a $200M fund to pay its top creators.
• In 2019, GitHub began offering Sponsors, a tool that allows the developer-focused community to generate revenue on their open source projects.

What do you think of Twitter's new products? Do you plan to try them out?

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

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

🔊 Facebook is introducing "Hey Facebook" as a wake word for its Portal smart displays and the Oculus Quest platform. Although the feature is opt-in only, it could upset some users who oppose Facebook's growing VR presence.

🤑 Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) are going mainstream as Christie's becomes the first major auction house to sell a fully digital, NFT-based artwork. NFTs are unique cryptocurrency tokens used to represent assets.

🚙 The Hong Guang Electric Vehicle is outselling Tesla two-to-one in China. The car costs $4.5K and is the second best-selling EV globally.

🍎 Tim Cook recently revealed that Apple acquires a new company every 3-4 weeks. Apple has acquired ~100 companies over the past six years, including Beats by Dr. Dre.

📁 Coinbase filed to go public via direct listing on Nasdaq. It won't be raising any proceeds in the transaction.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🚍 The Basics of Brand Positioning for Growth

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

Adidas is releasing a new pair of Kanye Yeezys today. The high demand for the shoes showcases the power of strong brand positioning, particularly in already saturated markets. With new marketing tools rolling out across social media platforms, differentiation is more important than ever for indie hackers.

A crash course in positioning

Marketer Ted Morgan gives this analogy:

Most brands sleepwalk onto the bus and sit on top of one another. The smart brands look left and right, find an empty row, paint their logo on it, and start singing sweetly like the Sirens.

What is positioning? Your goal is to own a space in the customer's mind by differentiating yourself from other brands.

How do I differentiate? There are many approaches that you can take:

Contrast: Point at the status quo and pit yourself against it. Contrast burns your brand into the customer's mind.

• Hey pit themselves against mainstream email
• Lemonade pit themselves against insurance stereotypes
• The "I'm a Mac" ads pit themselves against the PC

Values: Be clear and unapologetic about your value system. Some people will hate it, but others will rally behind you. That's the point: Fence-sitters don't buy.

• Patagonia and the environment
• Ben and Jerry's and social justice
• Black Rifle Coffee and gun rights

Category creation: If you invent a new category, you don't have any competitors.

When Drift launched in 2016, they were just another startup in the mushy bucket of live chat software. How could they stand out?

Well, they reframed live chat as "conversational marketing," and made it their mission to own this new category.

Personality: If you turn yourself into the product, no one can compete with you.

Think Kanye's shoes, Nigella's cookbook, and Wicks's workout.

Limitation: Instead of trying to be everything for everyone, go all-in on one niche or feature. Limitation makes you easy to sum up, and being easy to sum up makes you memorable.

Find your great story

Remember that positioning isn't something you make up on a whim. Behind great positioning is a great story; positioning is the one line summary of that story.

Before you can position, you need to lay out your brand's awesome, memorable story. Start there, and then you can work on differentiating yourself in the market.

Which approach resonated most with you? Have you taken any steps to position your brand so far? Share in the comments!

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.

🤖 Idea Bot Beep Boop

from IdeasAI by Pieter Levels

Looking for a startup idea? I'm a GPT-3-powered business idea generator built by Pieter Levels. Here are today's top ideas:

To explore more ideas, subscribe to IdeasAI.

💫 Speak Ai Hits $15K MRR With Help From the Growing Psychedelics Movement

from the Deep Dive newsletter by Halden Ingwersen

Tyler Bryden was a freshman in college when several close friends asked him to design and build their websites. As those requests increased, he decided to launch his first company, SixFive Interactive.

Between classes and business meetings, Tyler began consistently documenting notes, thoughts, and research, and he saw significant gaps in existing platforms to help with this process. He started to form an idea for a media analysis system that would automatically extract valuable insights from language and communication.

After sharing his idea with some existing customers and supporters, Tyler began building the first version of Speak Ai, with the mission of transforming media content into assets for growth.

But Tyler couldn't build alone. He needed a strong technical partner, and he was lucky to find one on campus in Vatsal Shah.

Vatsal, who had a passion for voice technology, already had experience building large-scale IoT projects. When he and Tyler met, they instantly connected over the Speak Ai concept. That was in December 2018, and they've been a team ever since.

Armed with limited funds from Tyler's personal savings and small investments from the Western Accelerator and Ontario Centre of Innovation, the team got to work on their first fully-functioning MVP.

Speak Ai's Tech:

• Platform is based on Node.JS and Python for the back end
• Angular with typescript for the front end
• Flask web framework, NLTK, and Tensorflow for Machine Learning
• Figma for design
• LogRocket for debugging
• Google Analytics, ActiveCampaign, and WordPress for marketing
• Trello, Slack, Google Workspace, Calendly, Docsend, and Zoom for project management and communication

Speak Ai launched the first version of their platform on app.speakai.co in October 2019 with an in-person demo launch at Innovation Works for 40 attendees.

Growth did not come quickly. Balancing existing customers while building Speak Ai was difficult. The software was complex to explain, early paid marketing attempts didn't convert, and the sales process for organizations was lengthy.

These issues were further compounded by the pandemic. Several of Speak Ai's long-time customers closed down their physical locations. Tyler and Vatsal had also just moved to Toronto in January 2020 as part of the prestigious DMZ Program, only to have the whole city shut down a few weeks later.

Though growth has been hindered, Speak Ai currently earns $15K MRR on a freemium pricing structure, with plans named after the growing stages of trees. Its paid plans range from $19.99-99.99 USD, and unlock suites of features, team management, and deeper analysis. Organizations looking for full access to APIs, bulk media analysis, and custom solutions can access personalized plans.

Customers are using Speak Ai to analyze and transcribe audio and video, and extract insights from text. Many have the goal of saving time, increasing productivity, improving research, optimizing well-being, and growing search engine rankings.

Interestingly, some of that success has been through using the platform for the emerging psychedelics movement, of which Tyler is a passionate advocate.

The team is confident that they will keep growing in 2021; they're now seeing increasing referrals, sign-ups, and inbound leads on search engines, LinkedIn, Medium, Indie Hackers and other channels.

While a major part of Speak Ai's income still comes from analytics implementations and consulting, software-as-a-service (SaaS) is the eventual goal.

Tyler and Speak Ai are focused on significant, sustainable growth. Their team is open about its ambitious product roadmap, which is shared publicly. Tyler mentioned:

We asked Tyler if he has any insights from his own journey for other indie hackers. Here's what he shared:

• Whatever it is you do, do it authentically. It will resonate with the right people and unlock opportunities you never thought possible.
• Do your best to break past your perfectionism and share your work. Iterate as you go. Gather feedback, correct, and progress.
• Stay curious.
• Do what you love and have fun.

COVID-19 taught Tyler a lot about balance:

You can join Speak Ai's Slack community, check out its YouTube Channel for tutorials and in-depth conversations, or sign up here.

Also, feel free to connect with Tyler on his LinkedIn or personal website.

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:

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

Forward it to a friend, and let them know they can subscribe here.

Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.

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