🗞 What's New: The early retirement movement

Corporate spending on artificial intelligence is expected to hit $97.9 billion by 2023:

• The AI writing assistant software market is predicted to be worth more than $5 billion by 2028, with tons of new tools entering the space. For marketers, developers, writers, and publishers, this booming market means new opportunities.
• The FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) Movement is about living intentionally to achieve financial independence. Here's Dru Riley's primer on reaching FIRE.
• Founder David Miranda worked at 6 startups, and noticed that each one made the same mistake: Failure to launch successfully. He believes that the secret is to find a way to launch 20-30 times in quick succession. Launch, improve, and launch again!

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

✍️ Artificial Intelligence for Writers and Marketers

from the Indie Economy newsletter by Bobby Burch

Corporate spending on artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to hit $97.9B by 2023, according to Deloitte. The AI writing assistant software market is projected to be worth more than $5B by 2028. For founders, this means new tools and new opportunities on the horizon.

Write AI

The no-background: On March 17, 2014, an earthquake struck outside of Beverly Hills, California. The tremor wasn’t noteworthy, but the first report on the 4.7 magnitude quake sparked international headlines, as it was the first time an artificially intelligent machine had authored an article in a major publication.

AI-powered writing has come a long way since Quakebot’s first report, and there are a handful of firms vying to augment keyboard-intensive tasks for writers and developers.

AI-boosted marketing: Marketing departments are some of the key drivers behind AI-improved writing. About 63% of marketers would consider buying AI tools to generate and optimize their ad copy, according to a survey by Phrasee. Another survey found that 61% of marketers say that AI is the most significant data initiative that their companies are planning for next year.

Keeping up with the Joneses: About 80% of high-performing companies use AI in marketing and sales for pricing, predicting a customer’s likelihood to buy, and for customer service analytics, according to a McKinsey study.

Anyword: Israeli-based Anyword announced Thursday that it raised $21M to expand its AI-powered language optimization platform for publishers and marketers. Anyword offers original text suggestions, variations of existing text, keyword suggestions, and performance evaluations on a message’s potential success.

But how? The company’s predictive model has analyzed billions of data points from A/B testing messages across an array of industries, channels, audiences, and marketing objectives. Anyword says that marketers using its platform see an average increase of 30% in conversion rates.

The playing field

Grammarly: AI-powered writing assistant Grammarly recently hit a $13B valuation after raising $200M. Grammarly’s tool checks grammar, spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure in real time, and offers suggestions on clarity and vocabulary. It also offers a plagiarism checker. The company has more than 30M users.

For developers: Grammarly recently launched a tool for developers with Test Editor DSK. It allows developers to embed Grammarly into any web app to offer automated live editing.

Writer: San Francisco-based Writer recently raised $21M for its AI-enabled writing tool that automates checks on style, tone of voice, and inaccuracies. The tool, used by companies including Twitter, Intuit, Pinterest, and Accenture, implements a company’s brand guidelines to ensure that writers keep with its style. It offers approved suggestions, and even helps writers maintain company policies in regards to appropriate language.

Compose.ai: Y-Combinator graduate Compose.ai raised $2.1M over the summer to boost its browser extension, an autocomplete feature for writers. It also created a tool that will learn and automate your tone of voice, offering increasingly accurate suggestions over time.

Other players: There are a host of companies in the AI writing space that specialize in various niches or tasks:

• Skillroads offers automated tools for crafting and reviewing a resume and cover letter.

• Textio helps recruiters to automate compelling messages for candidates.

• QuillBot is a paraphrasing tool with two free modes and four premium modes.

• Ginger Software is a desktop app and browser extension offering grammar checks and copy suggestions for writers of all levels.

• Writesonic is an AI copywriter that uses GPT-3 autoregressive language modeling to generate ads, blogs, and landing pages.

• Article Forge (the same AI used by Google) writes articles in a few minutes. Just add a keyword, optional sub-keywords, and article length.

Do you use AI to enhance your writing? Share your experience below!

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

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

📱 Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has stepped down, and CTO Parag Agrawal will take over.

💾 This MySpace clone is reviving the Y2K social media aesthetic.

🔌 Crypto mining is crippling Kazakhstan's energy supply.

🕳 San Francisco is sinking into the earth.

😇 Ethical hackers saved $27B in security risks.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🔥 Trend Alert: The FIRE Movement

from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley

Why it matters

Time is your most valuable resource.

Problem

We spend most of our lives working, in hopes of reaching financial independence in our 60s. By then, we may be financially wealthy, but time poor.

Solution

FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) is about living intentionally. Financial independence helps you focus on non-financial forms of wealth, such as time, health, and relationships.

To reach FIRE:

1. Find out how much you need to live.
2. Multiply your projected annual expenses by 25.
3. Calculate your financial independence number.
4. Set your savings rate.
5. Automate investing.

The "25x rule" (or 4% rule) is based on the Trinity Study. It is focused on a mix of stocks and bonds.

Players

Examples:

• Roshida: A lawyer took time off to travel with $660K in investments, then retired to Mexico City at 39 years old.
• Amy: She went from waitressing to managing social media, and amassed a six figure net worth by 25.
• Lynn: A nurse reached financial independence, and describes her state as "work optional." She decided to continue working.
• Amon and Christina: This couple had a combined income of less than $100K annually. They retired at 39 and 41. They now live in Portugal with two kids.
• Bianca: This flight attendant made less than six figures a year with children, and reached financial independence.

Notable figures:

• Scott Rieckens: Author of Playing with FIRE.
• Brad Barrett: Cofounder of ChooseFI.
• Rich & Regular: Financial independence lessons for the Black community.
• Vicki Robin: Co-author of Your Money or Your Life.
• Paula Pant: Founder of Afford Anything.

Predictions

• Remote work will help some reach FI sooner by separating where we work from where we live. You can boost your quality of life while lowering expenses. Work in New York City and live in Mexico City...until wages globally normalize. Arbitrages eventually fade.
• Active investing will become more popular as passive investing gains traction. Index investing and robo-advisors (such as Wealthfront) are well-known. The more people zig, the more profitable it becomes to zag with real estate, micro private equity, and more.

Opportunities

• Know your why. This group shared their "whys" at CampFI. Grant found his "why" post-FI. A North Star helps you through tough times.
• Trial your post-FI life. The sharing economy (Airbnb and Turo) makes this easier. Planning a life of travel, jiu-jitsu, or surfing post-FI? Why wait to try these experiences?
• Set an aggressive savings rate. Saving 10% of your income lets you take one day off for every nine days that you work. Saving 50% lets you take one day off for each day that you work. This is before compound interest accelerates this.
• Set milestones to stay motivated. An emergency fund reduces stress. So does a mini-retirement fund. FIRE has levels. See LeanFIRE, FIRE, and FatFIRE.

Risks

• Status games: This is keeping up with the Joneses. Have an inner scorecard to reach FI. Status games are a race to the bottom.
• High-interest debt: Debt can work for you or against you. High-interest debt may lead to net losses in wealth, even if you invest.

Key lessons

• Time is our most valuable resource. It's nonrenewable.
• Simplify savings to make the journey sustainable. Don't enjoy budgeting? Set an aggressive savings rate, automate investments, and spend the rest.

Haters

"This takes too long."

Time will pass whether or not you're financially independent or stressing about money. You can cut years, or decades, off of your FI journey by making more, saving more, and cutting expenses.

"I don't want to cut expenses."

You don't have to. Focus on making more, saving more, and setting an aggressive savings rate. Use FatFIRE, which focuses on making and saving more, instead of only cutting expenses. There's no wrong FI number. Your number is your number.

"This is only for people who make lots of money."

There are examples of those who reached FI with modest incomes. A high income can help. Making more is in your control. Earn more if you prefer to hold this belief.

"Money isn't everything."

There are other forms of wealth. These types of wealth are easier to optimize for once you reach financial independence.

"I don't want to retire."

Most who reach FI (financial independence) don't RE (retire early). They have optionality. They can take breaks. Or quit. They can do what they want to do, not what they have to do.

Links

• Who should I talk to about the FIRE movement? The tweet behind this report.
• Playing with FIRE: A narrative-driven book on the FIRE movement and those behind it.
• Welcome to the FI Community: On the 4% rule of thumb, saving rates, and "the gap."

More reports

Go here to get the Trends Pro report. It contains 200% more insights. You also get access to the entire back catalog and the next 52 Pro Reports.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Trends.vc for more.

🧠 Harry's Growth Tip: Conversational Copy

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

Don't imitate. Let your personality and character shine through, and speak the way you actually speak.

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

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.

🚀 David Miranda's Quick Launch Tips

by David Miranda

Hey indie hackers! I'm David Miranda. I've worked at a bunch of startups (~2 years each) and observed firsthand that each one made the same mistake: They refused to launch. The source is simple. They had a deep, visceral fear of rejection.

Half of the startups I worked at didn't make it. Here's the exhausting cycle:

1. "We need to tell more people!"
2. Delay for a while because you're afraid.
3. Finally do a press release, publish a blog post, and launch after a ton of work.
4. Launch doesn't go as expected; you only get a few users.
5. Become depressed because the effort didn't seem worth it.
6. Start over from step one.

If you go through this process two or three times, and you still have zero real users, it can be incredibly demoralizing.

I think the secret is to find some way to do it 20-30 times in quick succession. If that means you have to call up random people and launch to them, do that. Or if it means you have to build an app within a company, for only that company, do that!

Any situation that can help you iterate quickly (i.e. launch, improve, and launch again) is what's going to lead to ultimate success.

AMA!

How do you decide what feedback is actually valuable?

When you're small, just keep a tally of votes on each piece of feedback and work on the thing with the most votes. This will lead to more customer engagement, great testimonials, and referrals, and this will help you grow.

When you're at a medium-sized company, talk to your sales team or customer service team. Figure out what the sales team is telling people before they sign, and make sure that's what they experience after they sign up. Do everything you can to empower your support team (provide workarounds, admin tools, workflow automation, etc.) with anything that helps them scale to serving the most customers per rep. Then, build their automations and workarounds into the product as they become the standard.

When you're starting to get bigger and scaling up, there will be so much feedback coming at you that it'll be impossible to categorize and prioritize it fast enough. Everything will seem like an emergency. A really good product manager will be able to handle it though: They'll put most things in the backlog (documenting them, but not prioritizing them), lean heavily on customer support to find workarounds for customers, and will make sure your company continues to innovate by focusing on high-level, strategic projects (and not just one-off bug fixes).

If you have a high-value customer that won't sign until you build a feature, write that feature into their contract and get them to sign before you build it. On the flipside, if there's a segment of the market that doesn't pay your company that much, but makes a lot of requests, ask them if they'd upgrade to a more expensive plan in order to get that feature. If a large segment of this market agrees, build an MVP of that feature and get them to upgrade.

How do you deal with negative feedback from a launch?

Think about how you browse the internet. Most people visit one site after another, and only post comments or send chat requests when something goes wrong, or they disagree.

What would it take for you to care about something new with all that you have on your plate already? Understand that other people are no different; their default mode is just browsing, then later discarding anything that doesn't fit their expectations.

The key is to either break through people's malaise or seek out those who are open to caring about something new. And both of those are hard to do.

How do you iterate based on constructive feedback?

1. Find out as much as you can about the needs of your customers.
2. Design an ideal solution that would take 10+ weeks of work to implement.
3. Cut out 75% from the solution, everything except for the essentials.
4. Ship it in four weeks or less.

If the solution you made doesn't fulfill the need, learn and iterate. If it satisfies 90% of your customers 90% of the time, move on to the next project!

Advice for indie hackers

I've learned that startup employees get burned out because there's a lack of connection to the work they're doing. The way to ensure a strong connection to your work is to just launch! It doesn't have to be anything big. It can be a blog post, a Twitter thread, a landing page, whatever! But you need to take the first step and put yourself out there.

It's basic:

• If you don't launch, no one knows.
• If you don't explain what you're doing, no one understands.
• If you don't tell people why you're excited about it, no one cares.

The only way to learn and overcome your fear of rejection (and connect with your audience) is to launch and fail again and again until you realize it's not such a big deal!

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 Bobby Burch, Priyanka Vazirani, Dru Riley, Harry Dry, and David Miranda for contributing posts. —Channing