Discord is testing a premium membership feature: - **Discord is also launching an app discovery platform** where users can peruse a directory of apps, and add bots to their server groups. The company has come under fire this year for its alleged inac
Discord is testing a premium membership feature:
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Discord is also launching an app discovery platform where users can peruse a directory of apps, and add bots to their server groups. The company has come under fire this year for its alleged inaction in removing sexually explicit content stolen from OnlyFans from its servers.
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Don't have millions for a Rembrandt painting or a historic mansion? No problem. Buy shares instead. Dru Riley illustrates how fractionalization democratizes ownership.
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AJ is the anonymous founder behind Carrd, a single-page site builder. Here's how he bootstrapped to over $1 million in annual revenue, why he eventually sought VC funding, and why he won't reveal his identity.
Want to share something with nearly 85,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
💲 Discord's Premium Subscriptions
from the Indie Economy newsletter by Bobby Burch
Discord is testing a premium membership feature to allow creators to charge fans in their discussion groups. For founders and creators, this is a new avenue to monetize your audience!
Discord premium
The news: Discord announced that it will allow creators to charge $3 to $100 per month for premium subscription access to groups (servers). Discord will take a 10% cut of paid membership subscriptions. Creators can place part, or all, of a group behind a paid subscription, and will have access to analytics data.
What’s next: For now, Discord is only allowing 11 creators to charge fans for access. The San Francisco-based company plans to expand the premium feature to more communities in 2022.
Why? Creators have long offered access to exclusive Discord servers via Patreon, YouTube, Twitch, and OnlyFans. That route, however, prevented Discord from taking a cut. With premium memberships, the company hopes to win back lost revenue.
Why it matters: Discord’s new premium memberships puts it into direct competition with Patreon, OnlyFans, Twitch, and YouTube. Increased competition to serve creators is a net positive for the creator economy.
More features
An evolution: Though Discord’s roots are in gaming, its 150M+ users also engage with crypto, meditation, entrepreneurship, hobbies, and pornography. The company recently raised $500M at a $15B valuation.
App discovery: Discord recently announced that it is also launching an app discovery platform. Users will be able to peruse a directory of apps, and add bots to their server groups. The discovery platform will go live in spring 2022 with about 12K verified apps. Discord reported that more than 30% of its servers use bots, with 430K used weekly.
Servers of stolen content: Discord has been a repository of stolen content, sexually explicit content in particular, from other paid platforms. SEO Bounty founder Richard Lewis offered a thorough breakdown of how many Discord users leak OnlyFans content on the platform:
Right now, hundreds of thousands of stolen pictures and videos owned by OnlyFans creators are most likely sitting on Discord servers. These pictures are protected by the DMCA and worldwide copyright law, but Discord seems to have zero policy against the distribution of this material on their website.
Events: Discord also launched a few features to enhance creator events. In October, it launched Stage Channels to help event hosts manage larger-scale audio events. Nearly a million communities have run a Stage Channel event, hosting AMAs, open mics, and even beatboxing competitions.
Would you offer paid memberships on Discord? Please share below!
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Indie Economy for more.
📰 In the News
from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
⛓ Kickstarter plans to move its crowdfunding platform to the blockchain.
💼 Half of UK workers would quit if hybrid workplaces are ended.
📉 The meme stock hype has finally died down.
👶 The world's population is set to decline for the first time in centuries.
🧱 Investing in Lego could be more profitable than gold.
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
🤝 Trend Alert: Fractional Ownership
from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley
Why it matters
High-quality assets tend to have above average returns.
Problem
Most of us can't afford to buy fine art, an entire commercial building, or a billion dollar company.
Solution
Fractionalization democratizes ownership. Don't have millions for a Rembrandt or a Monaco condo?
No problem. Buy shares instead.
Players
Platforms:
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Fractional.art: Buy, sell, and mint fractions of NFTs.
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Royal: Buy ownership in songs directly from artists.
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Republic: Invest in startups, real estate, and crypto projects.
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FranShares: Earn cash flow from franchises without operating.
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Pacasso: Buy shares in a second home.
Tokenized assets:
DAOs:
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WhaleShark: DAO with a token backed by NFTs.
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Crypto Cookout: A group that pooled funds to buy several CryptoPunks.
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PleasrDAO: The group behind iconic NFT purchases.
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CityDAO: An experiment in decentralized land ownership.
Predictions
- Fractionally-owned networks will become more common. Shared ownership is an acquisition and retention strategy. See Chris Dixon's Why Decentralization Matters.
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NFT projects with limited supply (say 10K items) will have millions of owners. CryptoPunk #7171 is an early example, with 700+ owners (including me).
- NFT indices will become a popular way to lower volatility and boost diversification. Fractional vaults consist of single items and collections.
Opportunities
Risks
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High valuations: Keep an eye on fundamentals and valuations. Share prices (such as $1 per share) are arbitrary. What's the valuation?
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Illiquidity: How will you get paid back? Is there a secondary market for your shares? Will you have to wait for an acquisition? Understand liquidity events.
Key lessons
- Fractionalization increases access to quality assets and makes it easier to diversify.
- Fractionalization unlocks liquidity and boosts valuations. See the liquidity premiums.
Haters
"Facebook is a public company. It's technically a user-owned network."
Facebook went public after eight years. It has dual class shares. There's not much overlap between users and decision makers.
"PFPs should not be fractionalized. If they are, who gets bragging rights?"
Social consensus will decide. Some add party hats to NFTs to indicate fractional ownership.
"This report is too focused on web3."
We looked at traditional asset classes in past reports. See Equity Crowdfunding.
Links
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.
Subscribe to Trends.vc for more.
🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week
🗣 Share your product if you haven't made your first sale! Posted by Denis Shatalin.
✋ Turning down a lucrative acquisition offer. Posted by Wojtek Krzciński.
🛑 What stops founders from going for it? Posted by Eduardo Holschneider.
🤔 Rethinking e-commerce frontends. Posted by Nicklas Gellner.
📚 Indie Hackers book club? Posted by Cody Norman.
🛠 Creating tools for nonprofits. Posted by Miguelem.
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.
💻 AJ's Carrd Hit $1M ARR
from the Listen Up! IH newsletter by Ayush Chaturvedi
AJ is an anonymous founder who bootstrapped single-page site builder Carrd to over $1M ARR in five years. Carrd powers more than 3.3M sites on the internet today, and is used by over 2.2M people.
Who is AJ? Nobody knows! Though he has a Twitter account and a basic personal site, nobody knows who he really is. He created a pseudonym when it was popular to go by a nickname or made up handle online, and now he doesn't see a need to reveal his identity.
AJ actively builds in public and shares his progress. Read on for more about his journey!
Founder beginnings
For years, AJ sold website templates and themes. In 2008, themes and templates were a rising tide. Everyone wanted a website template, and you could make good money from selling them. By 2012, though, AJ noticed that the trend was slowly dying.
Responsive design was gaining momentum, but he had no knowledge of it. He launched HTML5 UP and started sharing free templates there. The site has over 40 templates that have been downloaded more than 14M times. To this day, HTML5 UP is the number one search result for keywords related to "free html5 templates."
AJ gave these templates away for free under the Creative Commons license, which enables the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. Under this license, users can implement your work into their projects, but they have to attribute it to you.
Soon, people started reaching out to AJ asking for a way to buy the templates outright. This was a clear sign that there was a market!
AJ launched Pixelarity, a site where users can buy 91 responsive templates for a lifetime price of $19. At that price point, the templates were a steal for his users. The project was also massively profitable for AJ himself.
Both of these projects helped AJ build an audience on Twitter consisting of people who were interested in responsive design.
Carrd
AJ built Carrd because he wanted to challenge himself, and leverage his knowledge and experience in building responsive templates. He started working on Carrd in 2015, and launched it on Twitter in 2016 with a single tweet. Carrd got its first 100 users, and made its first $1K, from Twitter.
Because one of the most popular templates on HTML5 UP was the "one-page site" template, AJ already had a validated idea. Furthermore, his existing audience was also the perfect user base for Carrd.
AJ knew that he couldn't compete with players like Wix and Squarespace in the site builder space. He was a solo founder with limited expertise. So, he massively scaled it down so that he could polish every feature to perfection, and keep support requests down.
Going viral
While Twitter was the source of its initial users, Carrd got a major boost when it was featured on Product Hunt. It has received 5437 upvotes so far, and was the number one product of the day, week, and month in March 2016.
This brought in thousands of new users and pro upgrades. Carrd has also benefited by being at the heart of the no-code movement. Then, at the start of the pandemic, the company saw fresh growth due to people increasingly moving online and starting internet-based businesses.
In May 2020, Carrd went viral when Kim Kardashian shared a single-page site to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Since then, traffic to the platform has skyrocketed, with thousands of new sites being built on Carrd every day.
VC money
With Carrd's rapid growth came new challenges. Questions arose around infrastructure, content moderation, support, and development, and AJ realized he needed help.
He decided to enter a small funding round and leverage the networking, connections, and knowledge that investors could offer.
Advice for indie hackers
Pick something that you enjoy, and start building:
Just find something in your life that interests you, then build a small product around it that solves a problem or make something better.
AJ has been featured on the Indie Hackers Podcast twice, and you can check out the episodes here:
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:
🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?
Forward it to a friend, and let them know they can subscribe here.
Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.
Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Nathalie Zwimpfer for the illustrations, and to Bobby Burch, Priyanka Vazirani, Dru Riley, and Ayush Chaturvedi for contributing posts. —Channing
