🗞 What's New: Failure at a $12M VC-backed startup

Patreon recently surpassed $3.5 billion in creator earnings:

• Patreon creators earn more than $100 million each month from more than 7 million patrons across the globe. The company's 2022 hiring initiatives will include talent to help develop its Web3 strategy.
• TikTok-famous products are a great example of people creating demand before supply. Here are three products currently going crazy on TikTok, and opportunities for founders to meet demand!
• Founder Will Goto's time-tracking app, Rize, hit $10,000 in monthly revenue. Here's how failing with his previous startup, which was VC-backed and valued at $12 million, jumpstarted his bootstrapping journey.

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

💰 Patreon Creators Have Made $3.5B So Far

from the Indie Economy newsletter by Bobby Burch

Membership platform Patreon recently surpassed $3.5B in creator earnings since its launch in 2013. For founders and creators, Patreon is a top platform to successfully monetize your audience.

Plenty of patrons

The news: The Information reported that Patreon users, which includes artists, musicians, podcasters, bloggers, and more, raked in $1.5B in 2021, representing a 50% uptick in annual earnings when compared to 2020.

The context: It took six years for Patreon creators to collect $1B in earnings, the company reported in 2019. This means that more than 70% of total creator earnings have amounted in the last two years. In other words, the COVID-19 pandemic has skyrocketed earnings for creators on Patreon.

Where it goes: Although it's facing competitors from every direction, San Francisco-based Patreon is still one of the creator economy’s top platforms. Patreon creators earn more than $100M each month from more than 7M patrons across the globe. The company, which takes a 5% to 12% cut of creator subscription revenues, plans to more than double its workforce to nearly 1K employees in 2022.

Web3 future? Patreon CEO Jack Conte said that some of the company's new hiring initiatives could help develop its Web3 strategy, which will have huge implications for the creator economy:

Copious creators: Patreon closed out 2021 with more than 216K creators on its platform. That’s nearly 60% more users than at the end of 2019, per data from Graphtreon.

Funding > IPO: Patreon was close to an IPO in 2021. But instead of going public, the company raised a $155M Series F round, leading to a $4.3B valuation. Patreon is reportedly still considering an IPO in 2022.

Native video: Patreon plans to launch a native video hosting feature that will give creators an alternative to YouTube.

Crunching the numbers

2021’s creator investments: Venture capitalists loved creator economy-focused companies in 2021. In total, investors injected at least $5B into 140 companies that are supporting the creator economy, according to The Information’s Creator Economy Database, which tracks investments in creator-focused firms.

Huge deals: Here are a few of the largest funding rounds in creator companies:

• Online course platform Kajabi raised $550M, hitting a $2B valuation.

• Personalized video shoutout app Cameo raised $100M, hitting a $1B valuation.

• Patreon raised $155M, hitting a $4.3B valuation.

• Audio conversation app Clubhouse raised $300M in 2021, and has a valuation of $4B.

Do you create on, or subscribe to, Patreon? Let's chat below!

Subscribe to Indie Economy for more.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

🎧 LinkedIn is launching Clubhouse-style audio events this month.

🌠 SpaceX's Starlink users are tired of waiting for internet.

🧤 Facebook's new haptic glove will let you feel objects in the metaverse.

🤑 The NFT craze has minted its first billionaires, with OpenSea valued at $13.3B.

🚙 France now requires car companies to tell people not to drive, in an effort to fight climate change.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🚀 Three Products Going Crazy on TikTok

from the Hustle Newsletter by Julia Janks

When we spoke to Craig Mount last week for tips on creating brand loyalty, he said something that got us thinking:

So this week, we're looking into three TikTok-famous products, and exploring opportunities for founders to meet growing demand.

1. Floor furniture

Our favorite thing about the floor sofa trend is that it has the potential to tear Facebook mom groups apart in the same way that The Nugget (AKA "sex couch") did.

*Source: Google Trends

Google search interest for "floor chair" and "floor sofa" is on the rise again after reaching an all-time high in November 2021. The #floorsofa hashtag has ~230K views on TikTok, and #tatamichair (a traditional Japanese floor chair) has ~35K views.

Founders could target a particular niche. Monthly Amazon search interest is rising, according to Jungle Scout:

• "Gaming chair floor" is +93% (this one brings in a cool $413K MRR).
• "Kids floor lounger" is +91%.
• "Floor lounger adult" is +74%.
• "Floor rocker" is +52%.

*Source: Instagram (@harem_sofa, @upcycle_deco, @monteverde.trading)

2. Cleaning slime

If you're obsessed with watching oddly satisfying pressure-washing videos, then you'll probably also love clips of people using slime to clean dust from their cars and keyboards.

And sellers are making bank. This car cleaning gel brings in $242K MRR on Amazon, according to Jungle Scout.

*Source: Google Trends

Cleaning slime (~642K views on TikTok), also known as cleaning putty (~2.7M views) and cleaning gel (~470K views), is enjoying that sweet virality on TikTok, where it's praised for its ability to clean hard-to-reach spaces.

The fact that slime has made its way from kid's toy to Instagram trend to wellness tool for soothing anxiety, bodes well for its staying power.

There is still room in the market for founders to get involved. You could leverage rising interest in high-end, nontoxic cleaning products to create eco-friendly, child-safe cleaning mud (interest in "dust cleaning mud" is up 1,566% on Amazon per Jungle Scout).

*Source: TikTok

3. Pet fountains

First came anxiety-reducing beds, then came personalized food delivery and funeral services. Will the pet product madness ever end? We hope not.

If your pet isn't already spoiled enough, you should consider investing in a water fountain, which go for $30-40.

Google search interest in "cat water fountain" is at an all-time high, and the #catfountain hashtag has ~5M views on TikTok.

*Source: Google Trends

There is an opportunity to improve on design to match emerging pet furniture aesthetic trends (yes, this is a thing), like dual-purpose space-saving furniture and abstract architectural furniture.

You could also combine the trend with water-enhancing products (yup, flavored water for your pets) that encourage animals to stay hydrated.

Which TikTok trend seems most promising to you? Share below!

Subscribe to the Hustle Newsletter for more.

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

🗣 Share your startup! Posted by Emeka Johnson.

📝 Daily tasks to help grow your Twitter audience. Posted by Yannick Veys.

🤔 What's your tech stack for web apps? Posted by Sukhpal Saini.

💻 Tell us what your first product was. Posted by Ryan Randall.

💯 Top marketing growth hacks? Posted by GregariousHermit.

👋 This community kicks you out for inactivity. Posted by Rosie Sherry.

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.

⏰ Will Goto's $10K MRR Time-Tracking App

from the Growth & Acquisition Channels newsletter by Darko

Will Goto cofounded Rize, an intelligent time-tracking SaaS. The company is currently at $10K+ MRR, and hopes to hit $1M+ ARR by the end of next year. Check out the interview below!

What's your background, and what are you working on?

I have a background in materials engineering, but made a career switch to software engineering in my early twenties, after realizing that software jobs were more in line with how I wanted to live my life. For the past few years, I’ve been primarily focused on my leadership qualities, startup marketing, and design skills.

Rize is my primary project, and I have been working on it for about a year and three months with my cofounder, Macgill Davis. It’s an entirely bootstrapped business!

What motivated you to get started?

The story of Rize begins with failure. Our last startup, Humble Dot, was a VC-backed company that raised over $3.1M in funding, and was valued above $12M. Some of Silicon Valley’s top investors were on our cap table, including Susa Ventures (Robinhood). We were on top of the world, our name was starting to get out in VC circles, we had an incredible team of eight, and people were beginning to recognize us.

But...we failed. Even with funding, we were unable to find product-market fit over three years. We tried every growth tactic and marketing strategy we could come up with, but nothing allowed us to hit the parabolic growth that VCs demanded. We ultimately shut down the company in the middle of 2020, and returned just over a third of our investment money.

The idea for Rize began to form as we were shutting down Humble Dot. We still wanted to build something cool together, so we started talking to people we knew about their problems at work. The time we spent talking to people naturally formed into ideas that got us excited.

What went into building the initial product for Rize?

We actually started with a landing page, instead of a product, to test our target audience and our value propositions. Our idea was to create a productivity tracker that represented time in a way where users could derive actionable insights to improve their productivity, which was a trait that most time management tools lacked. We built a landing page and began to test it with advertisements.

Here's the early version of Rize's first website with the waitlist call-to-action:

After getting lots of attention and high conversion rates on the page, we decided to start building the tool. In terms of resources, we didn't need any outside help, so our iterations were quick. It was a relatively simple process of interviewing users, analyzing feedback, tweaking the product, and repeating. Because we knew who our target market was, we knew which feature requests to prioritize and which to discard.

I think this is a requirement for startups: The need to execute quickly allows startups to compete with incumbents. Without speed, a startup has no competitive edge, in my opinion.

How have you attracted users and grown Rize?

As we were developing the product, we had a small group of 100-200 beta testers from our waitlist of approximately 1.5K. With every iteration, the product got better, and we began getting referrals from the users who loved it the most. We kept this momentum going as we continued to build the product and onboard more waitlisted users.

After about six months, we launched on Product Hunt. It was a very strategic move: Build a small community of passionate users who love your product before launching. I think in the end, that is what allowed us to reach number one on Product Hunt.

Historically, we saw higher paid conversion rates, but we hypothesized that on Product Hunt, we managed to attract a lot of users who simply wanted to try the product without an intent to buy. The following weeks continued to have elevated signups, as our page kept getting shared among our trialing users through referrals.

The key contributors to our initial success were:

• Have a battle-tested product with a core group of users.
• Strategically email your Product Hunt page to your waitlist on launch day.
• Have content creators or influencers who love your product help spread the word.

After our launch, we focused on using content creators to help get the Rize name out. Combined with our Product Hunt validation, we were able to continue to get a good flow of signups through sponsoring YouTube creators.

How have you grown revenue?

Rize's business model is a relatively simple subscription model. These three tactics helped us grow the business:

• Referral program: We give both the person giving and receiving the referral a free month of Rize. I think this system has worked exceptionally well with Rize due to its aesthetic and brand. People love sharing cool stuff with their friends and colleagues, and providing a monetary incentive behind it helped.

• Content creators: We give the creator a lifetime subscription or a sponsorship in exchange for YouTube videos, tweets, and other pieces of content that have the potential to reach our target audience. We also have an ambassador program for creators with large followings, where we share revenue from referred customers.

• Lifetime and annual sales: Revenue is much more helpful for growing your business when you get it upfront. Our cash flow is more than double that of our MRR, so we can use the money to reinvest in growth initiatives right away.

Have you found any one thing particularly helpful?

Find friends who are also building businesses. The journey can be lonely and isolating, but it doesn't have to be that way, especially if you aren't doing well. Being around others who are going through the same thing helps you stay inspired and motivated to continue.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Growth & Acquisition Channels 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 Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Bobby Burch, Priyanka Vazirani, Julia Janks, and Darko for contributing posts. —Channing