IndieHackers - 🗞 What's New: TikTok's new boost

TikTok now has Facebook's equivalent of boosted posts:

• The platform's new feature, Spark Ads, allows users to boost already-popular content on TikTok. Use this feature to showcase your product in a cool way and stand out from the crowd.
• 18.5 million people are subscription box members in the US alone, and 35% have 3 or more active subscriptions. Founders thinking about launching a subscription box should act now.
• Founder John Lafleur raised $31 million in 10 months. His advice? If VCs are asking irrelevant questions, they don't understand what you do. Don't be afraid to pass on them.

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

📱 TikTok's New Boost

from the Growth & Acquisition Channels newsletter by Darko

TikTok's Spark Ads allow users to boost already-popular content on the platform. Founders can use this feature to boost videos that have already gotten a bit of traction, and promote them to a larger audience.

TikTok Spark Ads

What's new: TikTok now has Facebook's equivalent of boosted posts. They're called Spark Ads, a native ad format that will allow you to boost already-popular content on TikTok.

They look like this, and this tutorial shows you how to turn any post into an ad.

The opportunity: I've been seeing a lot of people on TikTok promote software using cool little videos. Let's say you find a competitor who's promoting themselves on TikTok organically with an appealing video.

You could use a similar concept and make your own cool video for your own product. Then, you could boost that post so that it reaches lots of people. Good artists copy, great artists borrow.

Higher organic reach on Reddit

What's new: Reddit has launched a new type of sorting for its home page, which is called 'Better than best.'

What it means: According to Reddit's official post about the feature, the platform uses AI to predict what posts you may like and show them to you. Previously, 'Best' used total upvotes and comments to figure out what to show you.

Fine-tuned recommendations: Reddit will now also show you recommended posts instead of recommended subreddits. This will be based on what you engaged with, what you like, etc:

The opportunity: Your Reddit posts will show up in way more places than before, drastically increasing the probability of achieving more organic reach.

Twitter and Snapchat are larger than you think

How large exactly? Both companies just released their quarterly reports:

• Twitter: Made $1.19B in revenue last quarter, mostly from ads. The platform now has 206M daily, active, monetizable users.
• Snapchat: Made $982M in revenue last quarter. It now has 293M daily, active users.

When we want to advertise somewhere, we usually start with the big two: Google and Facebook. For some reason, we fail to consider other platforms, thinking that they're insignificant in terms of users or people advertising on them.

The opportunity: Let's take Twitter, for example. Even if 0.01% of Twitter users were in your target market, that's still 20.6K people. If 1% of them liked your product and bought it (not an unrealistic estimation), that's 206 sales. Not bad for a bootstrapped business.

Have you boosted videos on TikTok? Please share in the comments.

Subscribe to Growth & Acquisition Channels for more.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

💎 This Cuban-backed startup aims to turn your loved one's ashes into diamonds.

🩺 A magnetic helmet shrunk a deadly tumor in a world-first test.

💲 The UK plans to introduce its own digital currency, 'Britcoin.'

🛍 This site is selling luxury goods seized from criminals at a discount.

🐶 This $700M pet startup wants to increase your dog's lifespan.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🧨 Exploding Topics: Subscription Boxes

from the Exploding Topics newsletter by Josh Howarth

There are 18.5M subscription box shoppers in the US alone, and 35% of these buyers have three or more active subscriptions. Thinking of launching a subscription box? Read on!

Snack attack

Bokksu is a subscription box offering Japanese snacks. Themed boxes are sent out each month with snacks sourced from a range of local Japanese makers.

In 2016, Bokksu had 40 subscribers. By the end of 2018, that number had hit 10K. Today, its subscribers number over 20K.

Alongside that customer growth, annual revenue has jumped from $400K to $4.8M between 2017–2020.

And notably, unlike most subscription boxes, 15% of Bokksu revenue comes from one-off purchases.

Subscription, please

Bokksu is part of the subscription boxes meta trend.

The Subscription Trade Association estimates there are 18.5M subscription box shoppers in the US alone, and 35% of these buyers have three or more active subscriptions.

McKinsey estimates that the e-commerce subscription box market is worth over $15B. Beauty subscription boxes receive the most traffic, with over 216M combined hits.

Scentbird is an established player in the space. The monthly designer scents subscription box has raised $28.7M in funding, and generates an estimated $20.9M ARR. But new brands in this category are growing fast: Roccabox, BoxyCharm, Clean Beauty Box, and The Natural Beauty Box are all seeing increased growth.

Bokksu is a part of the second-largest subscription box category: Food. Subscription food box websites get a collective 150M visits per year.

Up and coming food box companies include Flaviar (liquors), Snackcrate (global snacks), Crowd Cow (meats), and Love with Food (healthy snacks).

Opportunities

With subscription boxes, the sky's the limit. Gourmet snacks, cheeses, desserts, liquors, and cigars are all areas ripe for exploration. Workout and fitness boxes are also on the rise as people search for ways to elevate their home gyms, or prepare to return to public gyms.

Niche boxes such as the Nickbox offer items associated with pop culture: This one offers 90's Nickelodeon-themed items on a quarterly basis. Founders can offer subscription boxes in markets including video games, books, and pop culture paraphernalia, just to name a few.

Check out the full post to see this week's other three exploding topics.

And join Exploding Topics Pro to see trends 6+ months before they take off.

Would you launch a subscription box? Share in the comments!

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Exploding Topics for more.

🧠 Harry's Growth Tip

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

Social proof above the fold adds instant credibility to the value that you're promising.

Take Privy, for example. Any startup can write about "how small brands sell more online." But it's their 18K+ reviews that make you believe it.

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

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

🤑 Founder John Lafleur Raised $31M in 10 Months

by John Lafleur

Hey! I’m John Lafleur, cofounder and COO of Airbyte, the leading open-source data integration platform. Airbyte helps you replicate data from APIs, databases, and files to data warehouses and lakes.

We started working on Airbyte in July 2020 and launched an MVP two months later, with only six connectors in full refresh. Since then, we've built 80+ connectors (incremental also), and 3.5K+ companies have been syncing data with us for analytics or data science purposes. They also offer our connectors to their customers on top of their platforms, or in operational-use cases like database replication.

In March 2021, we raised a $5.2M seed round with Accel, and in May 2021, we completed a $26M Series A with Benchmark. Our goal is to commoditize data integration and disrupt how data is moved.

We don’t currently make any revenue, but we will release Airbyte Cloud in October.

AMA!

How often do you have changes from your connected sources?

It changes every two or three months for most connectors, even those at bigger companies. That's why Airbyte has a lot of value. You don't have to shoulder the maintenance of your in-house connectors yourself. It can be shared with Airbyte and our community!

Did being a YC help you succeed?

Founders often consider two dimensions: The valuation of their startups and how much equity they have.

But there is a third dimension, and this one is the most important of all. It's either zero or one. Zero, you fail. One, you succeed. YC brings you much closer to the one. So, for us, YC was a no-brainer; no regrets at all. The YC alumni community is very useful! But you need to understand how to leverage it best.

What's your user acquisition strategy?

Being open source definitely lowers the barrier. It changes the 'build vs. buy' consideration, because you're a part of the build. Also, we're addressing an old problem. Building and maintaining data integration is being done across all mid-market and enterprises. This context helps.

About 70% of our users came to us organically. We focused a lot on content marketing at first. But with developer tools, it's all about providing value and publishing your content where your audience is (Dzone, KDNuggets, Towards Data Science, etc.). That's what we've been doing.

How does your product differ from Stitch?

We wrote this last year, and you can check it out for a more in-depth answer. But essentially, Stitch is no longer really supported anymore. It doesn't support Singer for sure, but as a company, Talend has stopped investing in it. Support and data connectors are getting worse with time. The support that we provide our open source users in our Slack for free is way better than the premium support that you pay for with them.

Some big technical differences:

• Airbyte has been designed for connector standardization, so we can make maintenance a lot easier. Also, on community-contributed connectors, you receive better service overall. Stitch and Singer treated every connector as its own open source project, so there was no standardization. In the end, you only had 30 connectors that were high-quality.
• Airbyte is containerized, and works out of the box.
• Airbyte will keep all its connectors open source.

What were the worst questions from investors about your product?

If they asked irrelevant questions, that means that they didn't understand what we do. So that was an indicator for us on whether we wanted to work with them or not. But product in itself is not enough. It's product > persona > ICP > benefits > etc. It needs to display a relevant go-to-market.

Was it always your intention to raise money?

The open source approach is a long-term one, so you need capital for it. Also, open source is kind of a winner-take-all approach, so you need to invest a lot in your open source project and community. All this is to say that we knew we needed to raise money, but we didn't intend to raise that much in this short period of time. I feel that we had the opportunity to raise from the two of the best VCs in the world (even more in open source), and felt they would add tremendous value aside from just the money.

We're very transparent as a company. You can learn more about our strategy and business model in our handbook. We will soon release Airbyte Cloud, and we intend to disrupt the ETL/ELT industry with this!

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, Josh Howarth, Harry Dry, and John Lafleur for contributing posts. —Channing