Facebook recently announced a complete rebrand: - **The company wants to focus on building the metaverse,** and hopes to avert attention from its growing list of scandals. Dive into the details below, including top bets on what its new name will be.
Facebook recently announced a complete rebrand:
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The company wants to focus on building the metaverse, and hopes to avert attention from its growing list of scandals. Dive into the details below, including top bets on what its new name will be. What's your guess?
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Consulting for OnlyFans creators is a lucrative business, with opportunities in marketing, accounting, and publishing. Grab your pickaxe for the OnlyFans gold rush!
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Founder Molly Wolchansky hit $8,000 in monthly revenue with her real estate agent marketing app. Here's how she went from freelance marketer to agency owner to SaaS founder.
Want to share something with nearly 85,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
✨ Facebook's Rebrand is Coming
from the Indie Economy newsletter by Bobby Burch
Facebook recently announced a complete rebrand, with a new focus on building out the metaverse. The company hopes to drown out a torrent of controversies, lawsuits, and damaging leaks by introducing a new image.
Rebrand me
The news: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the world’s largest social media firm will rebrand to reflect its mission of building the metaverse, a digital world in which people will interact via virtual and augmented reality.
PR 101: The rebrand will reposition Facebook as one of many apps within the entity’s corral, which includes Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and many more. Facebook is following Google and Philip Morris' example by creating an umbrella organization with a new corporate identity. Facebook hopes that a rebrand will also distance it from recent scrutiny, after a whistleblower testified to Congress about Facebook's "prioritization of profits over safety."
Metaverse vision: Zuck thinks of the metaverse as the successor to the mobile internet. Though it won’t be built by a single company, Facebook hopes to be a leader in a decentralized ecosystem of builders. The company pledged $50M to build the metaverse in a "responsible manner," and wants to hire 10K engineers in the EU for the effort. Zuck added that the metaverse will be accessible across VR, AR, PC, mobile devices, and game consoles.
The no-background: Facebook is currently in the middle of a PR nightmare, the likes of which it hasn’t experienced since the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal. The company’s rebranding effort aims to shift attention away from its recent controversies, and onto its vision for transforming the future of socializing, office work, and entertainment, according to Zuck:
You can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content, you are in it. And you feel present with other people as if you were in other places, having different experiences that you couldn’t necessarily do on a 2D app or webpage, like dancing, for example, or different types of fitness.
Why rebranding could work: PR experts told Business Insider that Facebook’s rebranding effort is a “classic” and “genius” move. The company hopes to "divert the conversation from their current problems onto the metaverse, which is exciting and futuristic,” said Anne Olderog, a senior partner at the consulting firm Vivaldi. The fact that many people are unfamiliar with the metaverse is also a smart move, she added, as it compels people to ask new questions and shifts their attention.
Why it may not: If Facebook doesn’t fix its trust issue, or address its array of other problems, a metaverse will only exacerbate its challenges. The company will find itself facing the same issues again and again, unless they are addressed at a fundamental level.
Scandal handle
Whistleblowing: Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen leaked thousands of internal documents that allegedly prove that Facebook violated US securities laws, has knowingly harmed children, has repeatedly lied to the public about its platform, and more. Frances shared the documents with Congress, US regulators, and The Wall Street Journal, which has published a series called The Facebook Files.
Tip of the iceberg: Facebook's list of scandals seems to be growing by the day. Here’s a quick recap of the biggest stories and allegations:
- Facebook researched a product specifically for children, and found that Instagram harms teens’ mental health, particularly that of young girls.
- Facebook has known about a human trafficking problem for years, and still hasn’t fixed it.
- Facebook is seriously worried about losing young users.
- The company allegedly caves to Communist governments and lets celebrities break its rules, all for the sake of growth.
- Facebook created “tiers” of countries to prioritize its content moderation.
- Facebook’s "Like" button causes stress and anxiety.
Name bets: The internet is clowning Facebook's upcoming rebrand, and many people are taking bets on what its new name will be. The leading bet is “Virtuel,” which currently sits at +400 odds. Other bets include “Connect” (+500 odds), “Horizon” (+500), “Ecoverse” (+700), “Immerse” (+800), and “Metabook” (+800).
Facebook earnings: Facebook announced its Q3 earnings on Monday, reporting $29.01B in revenue. This is slightly lower than the $29.57B that analysts expected, according to Refinitiv. The company hit 1.93B daily active users for September 2021, an increase of 6% YoY. Facebook anticipates Q4 revenues to hit between $31.5-34B.
What do you think about Facebook’s rebrand? Share below!
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📰 In the News
from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
🎧 Amazon is working on a Clubhouse rival to turn hosts into DJs.
🏠 Buying a "pied-à-terre" is real estate's newest trend.
🎩 Kickstarter's latest hot offering? Magic.
👚 Never run out of battery with these solar-powered clothes.
💳 Here's why your credit card company wants to give you crypto.
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
💋 Making SaaS Products for OnlyFans Creators
from the Growth & Acquisition Channels newsletter by Darko
Two days ago, The Hustle published an article about the lucrative business of OnlyFans consulting.
Some of the stats mentioned blew me away. For example, did you know that OnlyFans paid its creators over $2B in revenue in 2020? This figure is expected to rise to more than $5B this year, hitting $12B by 2022:
Throughout the pandemic, OnlyFans has seen explosive growth, with 200K new users and 8K new creators signing up every day.
During a gold rush, sell pickaxes
I learned about this a few years ago from Chris Dixon:
When a major new technology trend emerges, say, the rise of online video or social media, entrepreneurs can try to capitalize on the trend by creating a consumer product (mining for gold), or by creating tools to enable consumer products (selling pickaxes).
For most technology trends, the number of successful companies created in gold mining and pickaxes are comparable, yet the gold mining businesses tend to get much more attention.
This has also been the case with OnlyFans. Almost every mainstream media outlet has written about it, but The Hustle is the first (that I am aware of) to cover the "pickaxes" part in depth.
Its article focuses on human services for OnlyFans creators (marketing, accounting, etc.), and where there is a market for B2B human services in a specific niche, there is also a market for SaaS products in that same niche.
The OnlyFans creators market appears to be a good fit for this. Here's why.
OnlyFans creators spend a lot of time on marketing
Richard Lewis is the founder of SEO Bounty, a digital agency for OnlyFans creators. Richard surveyed 105 OnlyFans users to find out how many hours they spend each week promoting their OnlyFans page:
SaaS ideas: How many of these hours are spent on repetitive tasks? If you spend some time talking to these creators, you're bound to discover repetitive or hard tasks that a SaaS product could automate.
OnlyFans subscribers have a low retention rate
According to The Hustle, the retention rate of OnlyFans subscribers is quite low: Creators may lose up to 50% of their subscribers each month.
This forces creators who want a steady stream of revenue to constantly look for new user acquisition strategies.
SaaS ideas: There are numerous SaaS products that address retention in a variety of industries. I haven't come across anything related to the adult industry. Can you think of a creative way to ask about why subscribers stopped paying, for example?
OnlyFans creators spend money to promote themselves
The most important question of all: If I make a SaaS product, will creators pay?
Richard Lewis has a Twitter account with 139K followers. Most of them are male OnlyFans subscribers. Richard charges $20 to share a post linking to a creator's account. He's currently selling around 400 posts per month.
OnlyFans models also have hundreds of private Telegram groups where they promote each other's accounts for a certain sum.
So, the answer is yes. Just like in any other business, if you help people make or save money, they will pay.
Other SaaS ideas
Take a social network like Facebook or Twitter. Examine some of the successful SaaS tools that exist for them. Can you replicate the same model for OnlyFans? Here are some ideas:
- More sophisticated post scheduling.
- Innovative ways for models to promote themselves.
- Accounting software for OnlyFans models. (The Hustle highlighted a Virginia-based firm that helps OnlyFans models handle their taxes. It currently has over 100 clients.)
- There are currently a few popular books among OnlyFans models. One of them is by Amberly Rothfield, a creator with nearly 27K followers on Twitter. Can you take a piece of advice from that book and automate it with software?
Ethical dilemmas
The adult industry is quite controversial. A few months ago, Axios reported that OnlyFans couldn't find investors due to its adult content.
The adult market is quite large, as we've seen in the first graph, and there are no signs of it slowing down.
As the "gold rush" continues, more people will figure out how to sell pickaxes to OnlyFans creators. Will you be one of them?
Would you enter this market? Let me know your thoughts below.
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Growth & Acquisition Channels for more.
🧠 Harry's Growth Tip: Conversational Copy
from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry
Load up on personal pronouns. People pay attention when you talk directly to them.
Go here for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.
Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.
📱 Molly Wolchansky's Marketing Tool Hit $8K MRR
from the Listen Up! IH newsletter by Ayush Chaturvedi
Molly Wolchansky is the founder of The Agent Nest, an app that provides marketing content for real estate agents to use for their property listings.
The Agent Nest handles digital and physical media content for its clients. For a monthly subscription fee, clients gain access to more than 3K marketing resources, including social media posts, logos, flyers, and postcards, with an option to schedule content from within the app itself.
Molly started as a freelance marketer, then built her own agency, eventually using her skills to launch a SaaS tool. The Agent Nest hit $8K MRR, and is on track to reach $10K MRR in a couple of months. Indie Hackers sat down with Molly to talk about her journey to SaaS!
Freelance marketing
Molly got her start as a freelance marketer by creating content for her mother, a real estate agent herself. She knew exactly what her mother needed, and was able hone her content creation skills while working for her mother and her mother's friends in the industry.
As Molly got better at her job, she began attracting other clients. That's when she started her marketing agency, MoRealty Marketing.
As a freelancer, she had a tough time managing her workload. Saying "no" was becoming a problem for her, and often she felt like she wasn't getting fairly compensated for the amount of work she was putting in. Feeling overworked, overwhelmed, and underpaid, she knew that it was time for a change.
Founding The Agent Nest
Molly launched The Agent Nest in January 2020 with her cofounder and boyfriend, Shane White. Shane is a software engineer, so he was able to write the code for The Agent Nest. Molly began creating content for the company, and was able to land a partnership with a white label social media scheduling tool to provide an integration. This allowed her to offer a premium subscription with one-click automated posting and scheduling; the standard tier is $32 per month, and premium is $59 per month.
The Agent Nest targets US real estate agents who use its content for running Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn ads. The content is accessed through Canva links that agents can edit and customize with their own information and listing details. The product solves a very specific problem: Agents need marketing material to build a social media presence and target prospective buyers. Because they aren't as good with content creation as professional digital marketers, The Agent Nest allows them to implement a robust digital marketing strategy without relying on a marketing agency or freelancers.
It automates marketing for them.
Growth channels
Throughout her six year agency career, Molly had built up an email list of 1K people. When she started The Agent Nest, she sent out a blast to her email list, and ran a Facebook Ad campaign targeting real estate agents.
Within a month, she had seven paying customers. Here are her top channels:
- Pinterest: The Agent Nest gets 90K page views a month from Pinterest Ads.
- Facebook and Instagram ads: This helped with initial growth.
- Organic: The Agent Nest homepage accounts for much of the company's traffic, and Molly continues to conduct free webinars and podcast interviews to attract a wider audience.
Advice for indie hackers
Molly's advice is to avoid being deterred by your failures or the success of your competitors:
Don't let other successful companies in the same field become a deterrent to your success. Just focus on your business [and] what you care about. If you do become discouraged, don't stay in that discouragement. Use that discouragement as fuel to grow and to get better.
Check out Molly's full episode here on the Indie Hackers Podcast.
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Listen Up! IH 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, Priyanka Vazirani, Darko, Harry Dry, and Ayush Chaturvedi for contributing posts. —Channing
