🗞 What's New: Instagram expands Reels ads

The feature, previously just in eight countries, is now worldwide:

• Users can like, comment on, and share Reels Ads, increasing the potential to go viral organically.
• The global cannabis packaging market is expected to more than triple by 2027. These new opportunities can help founders "secure the bag."
• Founder Trevor Longino is on a mission: He plans to help 1,000 startups reach $1 million in revenue in the next seven years.

Want to share something with nearly 80,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🎞 Instagram Expands Reels Ads

from the Growth & Acquisition Channels newsletter by Darko

Instagram just expanded Reels ads from eight countries to the entire world. For founders, this strengthens Instagram's reach as a powerful acquisition channel.

Reels are getting real

Where these ads will show up: You will see these ads in the Instagram viewer, which appears after you open a Reel video via Stories, the Explore tab, or your feed.

They will be interactive: Users are able to like, comment on, and share Reels ads. This means that if you create something cool, it has the potential to go viral organically.

The opportunity: Every time a new ad format is released on a social media platform, it has a much lower cost-per-click (CPC) than veteran ad formats. Early reports on Twitter and Clubhouse suggest that this is now happening for Instagram Reels ads. Take advantage now to get the biggest bang for your buck.

Google wants you to create better content

Google just published a blog post announcing an “Insights” section for Search Console. Here are some questions that Search Console Insights can help you with:

• How are new content pieces currently performing?
• What pieces of content perform the best?
• How do people discover my content across the web?
• What keywords do people enter on Google before visiting my content?
• Which article(s) refers users to my content?

...and so on.

The opportunity: This is a much easier way to see how your content is performing. If something works, it's a good idea to double down on it.

Shopify's new feature can increase your conversion rate

Shopify wants to speed up checkout on the entire web, not just on its platform.

The company will make its accelerated “Shop Pay” checkout available to all merchants on Facebook and Google, even if they don’t have a Shopify store.

What's the fuss? According to Shopify, Shop Pay is 70% faster than a typical checkout tool, and can get you 1.72x higher conversion rates. Here's the official tagline:

Availability: US merchants on Facebook are the first to get the new feature. Merchants on Google will have access in late 2021.

The opportunity: Take advantage of improved conversion rates thanks to easy, fast, painless checkout.

Do you advertise on Instagram? Share your experience in the comments.

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📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

🏛 Facebook has joined the $1T club after a judge dismissed its federal antitrust complaint.

🎶 YouTube will open a live entertainment arena in California.

🤐 This weight-loss device locks people’s jaws, causing major backlash on Twitter.

🚫 Britain has banned Binance operations in its latest cryptocurrency crackdown.

💸 60% of millennials earning over $100K live paycheck-to-paycheck.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🌳 The Global Cannabis Packaging Market is Exploding

from the Hustle Newsletter by Trends Team

The global cannabis packaging market is expected to more than triple by 2027, with North America accounting for 80% of that market. For founders looking to enter the cannabis market, packaging could be the move.

Papa's got a brand new bag (of weed)

The global cannabis packaging market is set to explode as more countries begin to legalize and formalize the industry. North America should account for over 80% of the global cannabis packaging market by 2024.

*Source: Yahoo Finance

As packaging regulations evolve with the industry, there will be opportunities to provide specialized products and services:

1. Advanced packaging technologies: As the market becomes more regulated, we will likely see more stringent requirements for safety (i.e. tamper-proof and child-resistant packaging) and stay-fresh features (negating the need for preservatives).

2. Contract packaging and equipment leasing: If this ~100 page document is anything to go by, packaging and labeling requirements will be complex, from font type and size to warning statements. This presents an opportunity to provide packing services and equipment to producers, many of whom are small companies currently packaging and labeling by hand.

3. Materials: Different cannabis products use different types of packaging. Some will become more important than others as the industry evolves. For example, cannabis concentrates in vape cartridges are expected to be the most common format for legal cannabis, which means that demand for specialized glass packaging will increase.

4. Digital security: Cannabis companies like Akerna and KushCo are already partnering with, and investing in, anti-counterfeiting firms to enhance packaging with advanced digital security features. One example is the use of unique device identifier (UDI) codes that can be validated and tracked by both producers and customers at each stage of distribution.

Mary Jane is on the move

Cannabis distribution is also set to explode. We spoke with Vince Ning, founder and CEO of Nabis, a distributor that ships ~10% of all cannabis products in California.

In the nearly four years since Ning started the company, Nabis has grown a portfolio of 100+ brands, which collectively ship ~$300M worth of cannabis products per year.

There are three areas where Ning sees white space in the cannabis distribution niche:

1. D2C Delivery: Cannabis delivery is expected to be the fastest-growing cannabis sub-market. The proportion of cannabis delivery and curbside pickup sales soared during COVID-19, and are still 10% higher than pre-pandemic levels. It's not surprising that Uber wants its piece of the pie.

2. D2C software: There are opportunities to create plug-and-play software solutions that help brands and dispensaries create a D2C experience for their customers, whether it be from a logistics angle or enabling brands to market better.

3. Data consolidation: There are plenty of players both upstream and downstream (i.e. from raw materials to POS providers) with datasets that could be combined and leveraged to help brands grow faster. According to Ning:

What do you think of these cannabis opportunities? Please share in the comments!

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🧠 Harry's Growth Tip

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

The challenge was to rank this page in time for Christmas. Enter The Christmas Tinner.

It was a three-course meal in a tin for hardcore gamers, and this page linked to their gaming chairs. The Christmas Tinner went viral, and the "SEO juice" passed down. Within three weeks, Game's gaming chair page was ranking for over 400 keywords.

Go here for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.

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🚀 Founder Trevor Longino is On a Mission

by Trevor Longino

I'm Trevor Longino, and I've launched a dozen startups to over $2M ARR, including companies like GOG.com, Unito, Kontakt.io. I am an expert in launching startups by helping them nail positioning and prove market demand with quantitative data. I've taught and mentored a few hundred early-stage startups through StartupHub in Europe, and Founder Institute in North America and MENA. I love helping early stage startups get up off the ground, and am on a mission to help 1K startups reach $1M in revenue in the next seven years.

AMA about launching your project (ideally before you've even finished building it)!

How can I position in a way that encourages more signups?

The usual method I'd tackle is to try some positioning tests on Twitter, where you pay to display ads to generate a top of funnel test campaign. You're looking to see what kind of engagement and interaction you can get with different messaging and different ways of targeting an audience.

Do you have more success targeting the founder persona on Twitter? A content creator? A salesperson? Targeting each group with an ad that has a clear value prop, and noting the click through rate (CTR) of those impressions, will tell you a lot about who you might actually be building for.

You could also try the steps I've outlined here in Build Your Worst Enemy, as long as you're not so far along on your journey that you need to build a mock enemy to test your positioning against.

Should I offer a free, no login option, or a trial period?

I've been doing marketing for startups for 15 years, and I'm still wrong about these kinds of questions roughly 70% of the time.

The best way to find out what works is to implement each. I can hear you saying "that's a lot of coding!" Sure. If you actually coded it.

But if you just offer people either the playground option and a free tier, then change what you tell them they're allowed to do with it, you can test messaging and trial duration without updating a single line of code. Pay attention to what brings top of funnel conversions into your app. If you tell people that they aren't going to get something, but they actually do get it (like if your seven day trial is actually 21 days), no one is going to be mad.

Personally, I'd embed the playground feature in the homepage (think of how Slack has a preview on their homepage) rather than behind a button. I would not do a free tier, but would do a free seven day trial. In my past experience, trial length didn't matter. Most conversions took place within three days after the trial ended, no matter how long it lasted.

That said, test, test, test. That's the only way to know for sure.

What do you think of customer discovery calls?

I have used customer calls a lot. I've found that they have two weaknesses:

1. The skill of the person on the phone makes a tremendous difference in terms of commitment from a lead. You can easily collect a few thousand data points with ads.
2. You will have to hustle like crazy to collect a few dozen on the phone. Most teams I work with are product-heavy teams where the developer needs help with validation. I haven't met many developers who are happy to cold call people!

How can I get users to commit when nothing is built yet?

I'd collect beta list signups. Figure 100 beta signups are going to be somewhere between 10-30 trials. If your product works well, you need to acquire ~300 beta signups before you start building.

If you can't get 300 signups in 90 days, what you're doing isn't going to work. Find a new approach, a new target market, or a new product, and try again.

What's your best piece of advice for indie hackers?

Don't trade six months of your life for something you can learn for $1K in ad tests. Think of the two reasons that startups die: Time and/or money. This breaks it down using a wolf vs. rat analogy. The moment you launch a startup, there is a wolf at your door.

I hope you found this useful! Feel free to hit me up on Twitter if you have any further questions.

Discuss this story.

🐦 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 Darko, Priyanka Vazirani, Steph Smith, Harry Dry, and Trevor Longino for contributing posts. —Channing