🗞 What's New: Short videos bring major growth

For more organic reach, use short videos:

• YouTube Shorts now has 15 billion daily views, video viewing accounts for half the time that users spend on Facebook, and TikTok is... well, TikTok. Are you riding the short video wave?
• 77% of Americans are anxious about their financial situation, according to a recent survey. This opens up opportunities for founders to build in the "savingtech" space.
• Founder Paul Biggar's company hit a $1.7 billion valuation. Here's why he feels good about having been kicked out of Y Combinator.

Want to share something with nearly 85,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

📹 Short Videos Bring Major Growth

from the Growth & Acquisition Channels newsletter by Darko

YouTube Shorts now has 15B daily views, and Instagram Reels is the platforms's largest contributor to engagement. For founders, short videos can have a major impact.

Short video format

Last week, Fortune 100 companies like Facebook and Google published their quarterly earning reports. One thing that stood out to me was the stats around short videos:

• Mark Zuckerberg said that video viewing accounts for nearly half the time that users spend on Facebook.
• Reels is Instagram's largest contributor to engagement growth.
• YouTube Shorts now has 15B daily views, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Google really cares about this since TikTok has gradually surpassed YouTube in terms of watch time.

The opportunity: If you want to get more organic reach, going with short video is your best bet. TikTok is your obvious choice. Thousands of creators have gone viral thanks to the algorithm showing videos from the whole platform, not just people you follow.

Instagram and YouTube are starting to do the same, showing Reels and Shorts from creators that you don't follow or interact with. This isn't the case with "traditional" video formats (Instagram IGTV videos or regular YouTube videos) where it's much harder to get organic reach.

Marketing on Pinterest

The latest: Pinterest recently announced a new way for creators to earn money by tagging products in Idea Pins. When someone clicks on a creator's tag, it sends them directly to the URL to buy that product. The creator earns a cut from each product sold.

The URLs can also be affiliate links, enabling creators to earn a commission.

The opportunity: This change makes it easier for companies to partner up with Pinterest influencers. Find a few related to your niche and pitch them your affiliate program. They can then create a few Idea Pins for your products.

Native ads

To give you an idea of how hot native ads are at the moment, the top two largest native ad networks, Outbrain and Taboola, were both in the news last week:

• Outbrain raised $160M and is now worth $1.25B.
• Taboola has acquired Connexity, a performance marketing company, for $800M.

According to Outbrain, a web advertising platform, the native ad market is worth over $50B, and is predicted to grow to $400B by 2025.

The opportunity: Native ads work well for digital products (see this example). Native platforms also offer various targeting options, such as interests and granular location.

Barrier to entry: Unlike with Facebook, native ad networks have a minimum spent or deposit. This amount is $100 for Taboola, and $300 per campaign for Outbrain.

As a rule of thumb, the higher the barrier of entry, the more time it takes to get saturated to a point where it's hard to turn a profit. Native ads are no exception.

Do you use short videos on any platform? Share in the comments.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Growth & Acquisition Channels for more.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

🧐 Apple will start scanning iCloud Photos for child abuse images.

🌎 More wealthy people are renouncing their American citizenship.

🎙 HBO Max will exclusively stream "Batman: The Audio Adventures" podcast.

🏅 Here's why so many Olympians are broke.

📱 TikTok is testing "TikTok Stories" that disappear after 24 hours.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🧨 Savingtech Can Help Alleviate Financial Woes

from the Exploding Topics newsletter by Josh Howarth

A recent survey found that 77% of Americans are anxious about their financial situation, and 52% have difficulty controlling their money-related worries. This presents new opportunities for founders in the "savingtech" space to help alleviate these concerns.

Truly savings

The latest: Truebill is an app that identifies and cancels unwanted subscriptions. It also offers standard financial planning app features, such as expense reporting.

The startup now boasts over 1M users, with an additional 5-10K signing up every day. Its ARR is estimated at $9M. Truebill raised $45M in Series D funding back in June, making its total funding $83.9M.

Finance dance

What’s next: Truebill is part of the “savingtech” meta trend. According to a recent Mind Over Money survey:

These financial woes don't just end at the last page of a bank statement. They carry over into other areas of life:

Plus, 50% of US respondents in a Gallup survey said that their finances are getting worse. This is the highest percentage recorded in the last 20 years.

The road ahead: As a result of this anxiety, there’s growing demand for money-management and savings tools.

Wealthsimple, an online investment and saving company, automatically assembles diversified long-term portfolios for users. The company is currently at an estimated $77.6M ARR.

Other fast-growing companies in this space include WalletHub (personal finance resource site), Honey (coupon finder), and Lemonade (insurtech startup).

The opportunities

Founders can create money-management products for niche groups: Products specifically targeting high-schoolers, college students, Gen Z, millennials, creators, or freelancers are all avenues that can be explored.

Given the anxiety that it creates, resources for mental health specifically related to finances is another area to tap into. Platforms combining financial advice and counseling or therapy could catch on, especially in light of the ongoing pandemic. COVID-19 financial recovery products would be helpful, as many facets of the finance industry are in flux amid the pandemic.

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 consider opportunities in this space? Please share in the comments!

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

🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week

🤑 Monica's first month as a $10K founder. Posted by Rosie Sherry.

📨 Indie Hackers is now an invite-only community. Posted by Channing Allen.

💡 How did you come up with your idea? Posted by Andrew.

🛠 Post what you're building. Posted by Kyle Krzeski.

🗓 The challenge: $10K MRR in 30 months. Posted by Yusuf Parak.

❓ Do you like Twitter? Posted by Peter Hagen.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

💰 Paul Biggar's CircleCI Hit a $1.7B Valuation

by Paul Biggar

Hey IH! Lovely to be here! I'm Paul Biggar, founding CEO of CircleCI, which I started and ran from 2011-2015. These days, it's the largest CI/CD company, and was recently valued at $1.7B.

Since 2017, I have been building Darklang, which is an attempt to make it 100x easier to write cloud backends. It's an integrated programming language, editor, and PaaS (good deep dive here). It still needs a lot of work, but you can try it out today if you'd like.

A brief overview: I earned a PhD in compilers/static analysis, worked on Firefox, failed hard at a startup, got kicked out of Y Combinator, have opinions (and a podcast) on dev tools, started in the games industry, and just left San Francisco for NYC.

AMA!

What was your process of product idea validation for CircleCI?

The product validation process was pretty quick. It was pretty obvious at the time (October 2011) that things were moving to the cloud, with GitHub and Heroku having already been successful. But the gap between them (the deploy pipeline into production) was not in the cloud yet. So we knew it was needed.

We spoke to a handful of customers, and they all needed it. But they had wildly differing use cases, so we set out to build CI for all of them. That was a mistake. After a few months, we realized that there was an available stream of customers who all used Rails, so we cut scope to just handle that.

From there, it basically took off. We had more users than we could handle. We spent every day making builds work and expanding our support to more edge cases, more languages, and more versions.

Was CircleCI bootstrapped or funded?

CircleCI was very definitely funded. For the first few months, I ran it off of savings. Later, a small investor came in with $50K. We ran it like that for a year before raising $1.5M, then $6M the next year. A few years later, we raised subsequent rounds totaling $300M.

How are you conducting user research for Darklang?

We did pretty heavy user research at the start and made multiple iterations, completely changing things based on the feedback.

The first version was pretty awful; it was nodes and edges that you dragged around. (I posted some screenshots of these variations recently).

The simpler test was "can people write a Caesar cipher?" It turns out that you could write a pretty decent one, so we asked other people to see if they could do it. We just had a bunch of engineers come over to our house to try it out. Well, it turns out that no one knows the Caesar cipher.

At this point, we were planning each week in a spreadsheet, outlining our hypotheses, and noting what we were going to do to test them. Again, we had a handful of people come over each week and we watched them code. They reported it to be extremely frustrating, and it was frustrating to watch them struggle. Even when we eventually ironed out all the bugs, we realized that users just didn't like or understand how to code in a graph-like language, so we went back to the drawing board.

We switched to an AST-based language that looked textual. That is, it looked like what everyone expected code to look like. This was much better, and people could get much further. At that point, we wanted to see if someone could build a startup based on this.

We sat down and made a list of everything we needed to build a simple startup in Dark, and then built all of that in six weeks.

In the meantime, we put an ad on Hacker News: "We'll pay you $3K per month to build your startup on Dark." That was enough to get people interested, and we found a good candidate after some false starts. He was building a small SaaS that had been built on Meteor (which was deprecated at that point), and he wanted something new.

Then, we just worked to get his app working. Any issue that came up was our top priority.

Any advice for someone launching something online for the first time?

I think the main thing is to understand just how much product market fit matters. It is literally everything; nothing else matters. Growth and sales are basically pointless without it. I know multiple companies who raised big rounds off of impressive growth that they had gamed, then had to significantly shift their company when it became clear that it was unsustainable because they never had PMF. And I know more companies that died because they never really found PMF to begin with.

How do you feel about being kicked out of YC?

I feel good about getting kicked out. YC was definitely worth it in 2010 when I wanted to learn about startups and didn't have a network. These days, I wasn't personally getting much value from it, although I was putting a bunch of value into it that I should have been putting elsewhere. When you're acting out in a community, it's a good sign that you don't want to really be there.

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

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

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

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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, and Paul Biggar for contributing posts. —Channing