Data from Stripe indicates that education is the creator economy's fastest growing sector: - **Stripe has strengthened its creator economy stronghold** with a major investment in SendOwl, a startup that helps creators sell their digital goods. Here's
Data from Stripe indicates that education is the creator economy's fastest growing sector:
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Stripe has strengthened its creator economy stronghold with a major investment in SendOwl, a startup that helps creators sell their digital goods. Here's a new opportunity for founders to monetize, particularly if you're selling courses.
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Play-and-earn games are onboarding millions of people into Web3. Dru Riley highlights how play-and-earn games open the door to new business models, strong property rights, and the ability to participate in governance.
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Veronica Picciafuoco Hit $150,000 in 9 months after launching her no-code agency, Eldur Studio. Below, she chats the pros and cons of no-code, pricing strategy, and her advice on successfully closing deals.
Want to share something with nearly 85,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
🦉 SendOwl's $4.5M Funding Round
from the Indie Economy newsletter by Bobby Burch
Fintech giant Stripe is strengthening its creator economy cred with an investment in SendOwl, a startup that helps creators sell their digital goods. This latest investment is an addition to Stripe's long list of creator economy bets, and creates a new avenue for founders to monetize.
A new platform
The news: SendOwl raised $4.5M from Defy, Stripe, and other investors to offer new products that aim to capitalize on the $100B creator economy. SendOwl is in direct competition with Patreon and Gumroad in the battle for creators.
SendOwl 101: SendOwl enables creators to sell digital products including e-books, podcasts, courses, and memberships directly to their audiences from blogs, social media, websites, or anywhere you can paste a link. The company reports that it has enabled the sale of more than $1.8B in digital goods, and has customers in more than 50 countries. Founded in 2011, SendOwl was acquired in 2020 by Matt Plotke, a former Stripe employee.
Differentiators: Matt told TechCrunch that SendOwl offers more flexibility than Patreon and Gumroad because it allows users to sell on multiple platforms through payment links, integrations with Shopify and Stripe, and SendOwl’s API.
SendOwl’s most successful digital products are in music, books and writing, health and beauty, apps and software, and professional development.
No cut: Unlike Patreon or Gumroad, SendOwl doesn’t take a cut of creator sales or memberships. Rather, it offers a variety of memberships on its own platform, ranging from $15 per month for a basic membership, to $99 per month for businesses.
Investor influence
Why SendOwl? Early-stage investor firm Defy said that it backed SendOwl because the existing e-commerce infrastructure was designed for selling physical goods. It sees a major opportunity in enabling creators to sell digital goods, manage customers, and enter the world of NFTs and crypto.
Stripe Capital’s impact: Firms that received financing from Stripe Capital grew revenue 114% faster than their peers, the company recently reported. Stripe’s financing was particularly meaningful for smaller businesses. Firms making less than $100K per year saw revenue grow 140% over their peers that hadn’t used Stripe Capital, demonstrating a link between cash infusions and revenue growth.
Stripe’s creator investments: Stripe has invested significant resources into its creator economy tools. It has built an array of tools that are widely used by platforms serving creators, including ticket sales, tips from fans, subscriptions, memberships, and other financial services.
In October, Stripe released data on how it has fueled the creator economy and the platforms that creators depend on. The San Francisco-based firm looked at monetization data across 50 platforms, and learned that creators will soon surpass $10B in aggregate earnings.
Edu is hot: Stripe’s data indicates that education is the fastest growing sector within the creator economy. That makes sense, considering the fact that online courses, sold on platforms like Kajabi, Gumroad, Teachable, and SendOwl, were one of the first avenues through which creators could earn money for their content.
Spreading the spoils: Stripe reported that US creators earning more than $69K ARR has increased 41% YoY. Stripe didn’t provide specific figures on how many people that includes, but it’s encouraging nevertheless.
Would you sell on SendOwl? Why or why not?
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Indie Economy for more.
📰 In the News
from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
📱 Instagram is working on bringing NFTs to its app.
🏠 TikTokers want you to swap houses with them.
🎟 You can nibble on hemp-infused tickets while commuting in Berlin.
💲 Bitcoin's top 1% controls more wealth than the top 1% of Americans.
💻 People are being sexually assaulted in the metaverse.
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
🕹 Trend Alert: Play-and-Earn Games
from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley
Why it matters
Play-and-earn games are onboarding millions (and soon billions) of people into Web3.
Problem
Gamers spend billions of hours and dollars on games, but don't have ownership, alignment, or governance rights.
Solution
Play-and-earn games give players:
- Transferable assets,
- Strong property rights,
- The ability to participate in governance,
- The ability to exit and remix games via forks, and
- The ability to build and monetize assets and experiences.
Play-and-earn games give developers:
- New business models,
- Deep alignment with players,
- New ways to acquire and retain players, and
- Faster development times with user-generated content.
Players
Play-and-earn games:
Predictions
- Play-and-earn games will build increasingly complex economies. Axie Infinity has $AXS, $SLP, $RON, Axies, land, and other items. Players can breed, battle, trade, lease, flip, and govern virtual worlds.
- Learn-to-earn models will become more common. Coinbase pays users to learn about DeFi concepts and cryptocurrencies.
- Engage-to-earn models will become more common. Brave Browser gives BAT tokens to users that opt into ads.
- The play-and-earn movement will birth new game studios. Incumbents like Ubisoft face backlash from traditional gamers. The same applies to Discord. New companies will attract aligned users and work from first principles.
- There will be crossover between in-game and non-game economies. $SLP is used to pay for everyday products and services, like home internet.
Opportunities
Explore new monetization models as a gamer or developer:
Create content and onboard players to play-and-earn games:
Risks
- Complexity: Play-and-earn economies are becoming more complex. Game designers may not grasp the second-order effects of design decisions. Your assets may suffer.
- Misinformation: Do your own research. Play games, and engage with communities before investing.
Key lessons
- Earning from games is not new. Traditional games have unofficial secondary markets. HQ Trivia paid players directly. The difference is that play-and-earn games have strong, irrevocable property rights, open-source code, and governance tokens.
- Play-and-earn is a gateway drug to DeFi. In-game assets can be traded, leveraged, staked, and sold. Players will come to play, then learn what crypto has to offer.
- Play-and-earn will hush NFT skeptics. In-game NFTs have utility. You can't right click and save a community or utility.
Haters
"Money takes the fun out of games."
We play the lottery (with negative expected returns), poker, and trade physical sports cards. Games are a form of escapism. Alignment improves these experiences. See PoolTogether, a no-loss lottery.
"Where's the moat if games are open-sourced and forkable?"
We're in the age of user-owned networks. See Wolf Game and Sheep Game. Forks let you choose the reality that you want to live in. Legitimacy must be earned and maintained.
"I already own physical collectible cards."
Now you have digital scarcity, too. As we said in the DAOs report, can't be evil is better than don't be evil.
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.
Would you enter the play-and-earn space? Share in the comments!
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Trends.vc for more.
🛠 Crafting Your Sales Page: Expand Content Structure
by Ivan Romanovich
The structure shows what's inside the product. Make it clear what the buyer gets.
Discuss this story.
🚀 Veronica Picciafuoco Hit $150K in Nine Months
by Veronica Picciafuoco
Hi indie hackers! I'm Veronica Picciafuoco, founder of Eldur Studio, a no-code agency that helps companies design and build digital products. I've hit $150K in revenue in nine months. Most projects that I complete are between $10K-20K, but it varies.
I'm a product marketer by trade, and I worked in tech for many years. I taught myself frontend and backend concepts, and enough code to be dangerous. What changed, and what allowed me to make it into a career, was the type of no-code platforms available.
10 years ago, the best you could do was a crappy website with WordPress or Squarespace. Now, there are tools like Webflow or Bubble. They are young platforms, so I don’t think there’s anybody with more than five years of experience in this very nascent industry! The real experience comes from working in tech and being able to ship a software product.
AMA!
Where do your clients come from?
All agencies are fundamentally referral businesses. You start by helping people you know, and if you do a good job, they normally recommend you to friends and colleagues.
No-code is a bit more challenging because it's new, but it also helps you focus on talking to people who are already receptive to new things.
I started with consulting engagements about repositioning brand messaging, which is usually what you do before launching a new thing. After working on the content and strategy, it was relatively easy to pitch my services to design and build the product from there.
I also recommend starting with a niche. Maybe you see traction in a specific industry, or know people there. Focusing is not a limit, it's an advantage! For example, I'm one of the few people out there who will do no-code apps that are HIPAA-compliant.
Also, don't underestimate cold reaching out to people. No-code Twitter is very active, and there are people looking for help all the time. You can just reply to those threads. I have written to startups saying hey, your website sucks, you should do this this and that, and I can help you!
What tools do you use?
I use Webflow, Adalo, Airtable, Twilio, Glide, Retool, Zapier, and Integroma. The site is done in Typedream. I haven’t done anything in Bubble yet, but I hope to have the opportunity soon.
My philosophy is to not specialize in just one tool, but pick the right tool or combination for each project. That makes me a minority among no-code agencies, since most people specialize in one platform.
What's your pricing strategy?
I personally love fixed pricing based on project complexity instead of time (although they are usually correlated). It’s not perfect, but it keeps incentives aligned. With hourly, you have incentives to bill as much as possible, plus the overhead of tracking hours. When I’ve been client side, I always felt screwed with retainers. No matter what, agencies always billed the max hours.
I think no-code has the advantage of being faster and more predictable. Do I make mistakes? Sure. But it’s never going to take an extra month like with some dev projects. If the client wants to be a bit more fluid, I can price by the week or month. What’s important in my model is that the client feels in control of what we build. I want them to understand that they're not paying for “maintenance,” but only for value-add services.
Do you ever turn down projects?
Yes. Ultimately, no-code can do a lot, but it can’t do everything. If what I do is not a great fit for the product needs and vision, then it doesn’t make sense to take it.
I’m always very clear about the pros and cons of no-code architecture, and I flag all the limits the app will have. In the end, the client is trading speed and agility for scalability and upfront investment.
My advantage here is that I offer a good amount of strategy and UX/UI services that are universally useful, so some clients have asked me to work on that part, then had someone else do the dev.
The client needs to be okay with trusting the platform. A non-technical person can make ordinary changes and deploy with just an internet connection. For teams where devs are strapped by a million requests, or teams without devs, it’s usually a very worthy trade-off.
What's your advice on closing deals?
You close deals by listening to the client's problem and explaining a path to the solution. I find that sales calls are the most fun part of my day. Even if I don't end up working with them, I like helping people.
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 Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Bobby Burch, Priyanka Vazirani, Dru Riley, Ivan Romanovich, and Veronica Picciafuoco for contributing posts. —Channing
