🗞 What's New: A simple method for landing your first users

So, you've got an MVP. What's next?

• This simple, efficient method can help you find your first users, get feedback, and leverage relevant key leaders in your niche.
• Unpopular opinion: Don't worry about scalability at all. By hyper-focusing on product-market fit, and using the right tools, your product will be scalable without you having to focus on it.
• As an indie hacker, joining and contributing to communities can be a gamechanger. Here's how Arvid Kahl, Molly Wolchansky, and Ben Orenstein leveraged their networks to build profitable businesses.

Want to share something with over 90,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🤝 Try This Simple Method to Land Your First Users

by Malte Hecht

Are you looking for ways to attract your first users? The following steps helped me find about 350 daily active users for my project, worksheet.digital, and kickstart search engine rankings along the way.

What I did before marketing my product

1. I interviewed a couple of teachers.
2. I built an MVP: A web-based worksheet builder.
3. I did nothing for about seven months, and hoped that users would find my product somehow. I had between 0-5 visits per day, probably due to the teachers knowing about the product from the interviews.

After that, I was about to give up on the product. Luckily, I had started to learn about SEO and the importance of backlinks. I thought that it was worth a try to email a couple of bloggers that had posts like: "10 Tools to Build Digital Worksheets." I'd then ask them if they would mention my product.

Three simple steps

1. I Googled relevant search queries for my product, like "how to create a digital worksheet" or “build interactive worksheets.”
2. I picked five articles that ranked in the top 10, articles written by people who seemed approachable.
3. I emailed the writers letting them know that I considered them to be experts in the space of digital tools for teachers, and politely asking them to test worksheet.digital. At the end of the email, I asked them to include my product in their articles if they liked it.

The result

Three out of five bloggers answered my email. One of them gave me feedback for improving the tool, telling me that she would list it on her page once implemented. Another one answered that she would look into the tool and write me back. Last, but not least, one site included the tool in a Christmas newsletter for teachers, and even created a video explaining how it works.

Outcomes:

• 300-400 daily active users.
• 142 people giving long form feedback through a Google Form.
• A couple of teachers recommending the tool on Twitter.
• Mentions on other teaching related blogs.
• Improved search engine rankings for relevant search queries.

Here, check out my plausible metrics that resulted from sending five emails.

The analysis

Gökçe Ozan Toptaş broke down my approach, which consisted of:

1. Clear product positioning: "Digital worksheets for teachers." When you have clear positioning, it makes your marketing so much easier.
2. A defined target market: "Teachers." Know who your target customer is. Remember, "everyone" as a target market is the enemy of marketing.
3. Relevant key opinion leaders: Contact very relevant key people who are in your niche.
4. Unmistakable benefit statement: This is the highest level of messaging when you arrive at a website. Don't leave anything to the imagination. Here, the benefit would be: "Create, distribute, and evaluate a digital worksheet in a few minutes."
5. A super simple CTA: "Create a worksheet now." Just like that. Extremely relevant for the target market, simple, and elegant.

Final thoughts

I avoided marketing completely for two years, and still struggle to do it consistently. For me, the process of building gives me a sense of satisfaction, and it became an excuse for me to not market my projects. However, it's even more rewarding, and highly motivating, to see actual people using what I've built.

It is so important to tell the right people about what you're building. Before I started to do that, I was about to abandon the worksheet, but marketing was the missing piece of the puzzle for me. Now, through feedback and metrics, I know that some users are using the worksheet multiple times a week!

What are your top tips for acquiring new users? Share below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

🚫 China has cancelled H&M, and other companies need to understand why.

🎶 Slogans and ad jingles are becoming irrelevant.

🧐 The climate spillover of Russia's war against Ukraine.

💻 Instagram's 3D avatars could be a metaverse gamechanger.

👕 Here's why men's and women's shirts button up on different sides.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🚀 How to Scale Without Worrying About Scalability

by Salvatore A. Romeo

In 2013, Paul Graham published an article: Do Things That Don't Scale. In it, he argued that a startup should be hyper-focused on specific things, such as customer service or niching down, as opposed to focusing on scaling. I'd take this advice one step further: Founders should not worry about scalability at the beginning at all. Here's why!

How to scale without worrying about scalability

Paul cited some examples of startups that didn't care about scalability, choosing to focus on something else instead. Here's how they determined what to focus on:

• Work as closely as possible with the customer.
• Observe what works and what does not.
• Iterate the product to deeply satisfy the customer.

By following this process with many customers, new patterns emerged that showed the startup what to focus on. Focus on achieving strong market fit before thinking about scalability.

I fully agree with what the article says for this simple reason: A product cannot survive without a market. However, almost 10 years later, scalability must be approached differently.

Why doesn't a product have to be scalable right away?

10 years ago, worrying about scalability meant spending an enormous amount of time on:

• Infrastructure.
• Architecture.
• Network and systems issues.

If you spend a large amount of time on any of these aspects, you will have to take time away from others. That would be a mistake, especially at the early stages when you're still trying to find product-market fit.

The big difference today is that you can focus on product-market fit and still be scalable from the onset. It is no longer an either-or situation. If you use the right tools, your product will be scalable without you having to focus on it.

The psychological factor

There is also another important factor that is often underestimated: The psychological one.

Depending on your background, you may not think about technical scalability. However, a conscientious developer knows, as they are developing certain tools, that some types of systems will never be able to scale. It may seem absurd, but this aspect can unconsciously block the progress of a project.

If, on the other hand, you know that your project will be able to serve many users at the same time, you have one less problem to worry about. Personally, I think that the fear of scaling is one of the reasons that some founders often don't push their products further. Since it is now possible to create systems that are scalable, without worrying about how to implement scalability, my suggestion is to embrace these systems, thus eliminating this fear.

My experience

About two years ago, I developed a product that is still sold to some companies today. Buglink never needed to scale, but in my heart I have always known that it wouldn't be able to. Over the last few months, I have been extracting a portion of Buglink to make it a standalone product. It's called Httply, and is open source. It hasn't been released online yet, but it will be soon.

With Httply, I decided to use a scalable approach from the beginning. The amazing thing is that the development was faster because, after an initial phase to understand how these technologies work, I was able to focus on the functionalities that are really needed.

Developing software is complex. It is always worthwhile to investigate new solutions to minimize risks, and embrace automatic solutions for what previously required a lot of time, resources, and energy.

What are your thoughts on scalability? Let's chat below!

Discuss this story.

👥 10M Users, Zero Funding

by Aytekin Tank

Growing and scaling your startup:

Set and measure the right metrics.

We track all kinds of data, but two targets matter more than anything: Are people using our product? Do our employees love (and feel proud of) working here?

All the pageviews and bounce rates mean nothing if people aren’t actively using what you provide, and if your teams are loath to show up for work each day. Focus on what matters.

Discuss this story.

🔊 How These Founders Leveraged Their Networks

from the Listen Up! IH newsletter by Ayush Chaturvedi

Having a powerful network or engaged audience can be vital for success as an indie hacker. It can be hard to get eyeballs on your project, especially in the early days, and a network helps you build the right product from the start.

Here's how three founders leveraged their networks to build successful businesses.

1. Ben Orenstein: Tuple

Ben's product Tuple, a pair programming app for developers, filled a huge void in the market after Screenhero was acquired by Slack, then shut down.

Developers loved Screenhero because they wanted an app that would help them code in pairs. Before Tuple, Ben worked on multiple SaaS apps as part of his full-time job at a product studio. He was also writing blog posts, and building info products and small tech products.

Over time, he had built an engaged Twitter audience and an email list, mostly consisting of software developers. When he built his startup, he had 5K people on Tuple's mailing list before the app launched.

Most of them were willing to give them money even before there was a product!

2. Molly Wolchansky: The Agent Nest

Molly founded The Agent Nest, an app that lets real estate agents access marketing content for their property listings.

At a higher subscription price, the app lets its users schedule and post marketing content to various social media channels. They can also run Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn ads. It’s the perfect tool for busy realtors.

Molly knew the exact pain points of her users because she had been freelancing as a marketer for them for years. She even ran a marketing agency that served real estate agents. After over six years of running the agency, Molly had built up an email list of 1K+ real estate agents. All of them knew her personally and had met with her in real life, so she had a strong relationship with everyone on her list.

When she launched The Agent Nest, she sent one email to her list and started a Facebook Ads campaign targeting real estate agents. The Agent Nest is doing close to $9K MRR today.

3. Arvid Kahl: FeedbackPanda

Arvid cofounded FeedbackPanda, a software tool that helps English teachers efficiently provide feedback to their students.

He started the company in 2017, took it to $55K MRR, then sold in 2019 for a “life-changing” amount of money.

FeedbackPanda has a very specific audience. Large Chinese companies hire English teachers for young Chinese kids. Freelance English teachers can make a living through these gigs, working from home teaching English. Arvid’s cofounder Danielle was one such teacher. She knew the exact pain points of these teachers, and was an active member in the various Facebook Groups where they hung out.

The biggest problem that they faced was providing personalized feedback to every student on every lesson. Teachers would often teach 20 students in a 10 hour day, then would have to spend two hours just to document the feedback.

FeedbackPanda gave them a template engine to speed up the process of providing feedback. Arvid and Danielle promoted the product authentically in the Facebook Groups that she was already a part of. They started by just replying to people in the comments, and sharing links with people who were already facing the problems that FeedbackPanda would solve.

Danielle’s network helped the product to achieve early growth, and it spread through word-of-mouth. After two years, FeedbackPanda hit $55K MRR, and was sold to SureSwift capital.

Advice for indie hackers

Hopefully, these examples help you to realize the value of a network. As an indie hacker, your breakout success will likely come from the communities that you are already a part of and contribute to. Being active and contributing, or in other words, “being useful on the internet,” can have an infinite upside for solo founders.

Check out Ben, Molly, and Arvid's interviews 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 Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Malte Hecht, Priyanka Vazirani, Salvatore A. Romeo, Aytekin Tank, and Ayush Chaturvedi for contributing posts. —Channing