(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)
91% of US businesses expanded their plans for digitization in 2020:
Want to share something with over 75,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley
91% of US businesses expanded their plans for digitization in 2020. But there are not enough trained workers to support this transformation, particularly in certain regions. Online courses can help bridge that gap.
Coursera’s latest Global Skills Report shows that the digital skills gap has widened during the pandemic. There are 77M students on the platform, and Coursera believes that this access will help stimulate recovery:
Access to a variety of job-relevant credentials, including a path to entry-level digital jobs, will be key to reskilling at scale and accelerating economic recovery.
This report helps governments and employers assess skill gaps in their workforce, identify roles that can be filled with diverse, non-traditional candidates, and details the specific skills that are needed for these roles.
Creators can stop trading time for money by helping students land their first software development jobs, get raises, launch businesses and more.
There's a gap between where you are and where you want to be.
Online courses are bridges that help you fill these gaps. You can find your way via trial and error, or learn from someone who's done it before.
Course platforms
Tools
Courses
These are fragmented, micro-monopolies. There are many options and many winners. Course creators have pricing power. Feature parity applies to SaaS not pros.
Markets are taking over. Colleges can't keep up with talent needs. Companies like Salesforce and Google take it upon themselves to train employees.
Consider tradeoffs:
"I don't know enough to teach a course."
What do you wish you knew three years ago? Teach that. You may be better than an expert because you don't suffer from the expert's curse. Or, teach as you learn. This is what Tim Ferriss and Shane Parrish are doing, along with yours truly.
"Most people don't finish courses."
The same goes for books and other form factors. Cohorts and interactive, adaptive platforms can help with this.
"Education should be free."
It is. Quality and cost aren't always correlated. You'll still have to pay attention.
"Course revenue is spiky."
This applies to most digital products. There are ways around it, like memberships, value ladders, and evergreen funnels. Or you can embrace the spikiness through open and closed enrollment.
"Courses are just money grabs."
You can find bad intentions in any market. Time is smarter than we are. Be a late adopter and let the chicken come home to roost. Ask how the person's reputation performs over time, or look for reviews in unmoderated environments.
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.
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from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
❓ Instagram head clarifies "misconceptions" about the algorithm.
🤭 One customer caused the widespread internet outage on Tuesday.
💰 Crypto startup Solana raised $314M to develop faster blockchain.
🏛 President Biden reversed Trump's order to ban TikTok and WeChat.
🤑 Facebook revealed new ways for creators to make "extra cash."
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
from the Exploding Topics newsletter by Josh Howarth
Search interest in business coaching is up 142% in the past five years. There are many opportunities for founders to explore in this emerging field, as particular niches continue to rise.
The trend: IBISWorld estimates that the US business coaching market is worth $11.6B. Aside from a dip caused by the coronavirus, this field has been growing consistently since 2013.
The examples: Interview Kickstart coaches programmers to ace technical interviews. This platform has helped engineers get jobs at Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix.
To help maintain scalability, the bootstrapped company teaches in small-group cohorts. The startup reports that approximately 500 students per month “graduate” from their programs.
Interview Kickstart is part of the “knowledge coaching” meta trend.
What’s next: We’re seeing increased interest in many other knowledge-based types of coaches as well.
For example:
We’re also seeing a rise in professional coaching platforms like BetterUp, CoachHub and HireClub.
The opportunity: Founders can take advantage of the increased interest in coaching in a variety of ways. With the intermittent lockdowns during the pandemic, gaming platforms like Twitch saw increased engagement. Gaming tutorials, guides, and other related products are in demand.
Searches related to negotiating and closing major deals have increased with the growth of the creator economy. Creators consistently seek help with navigating brand deals and sponsorships, as well as contract services for their growing brands. Founders with experience can create products around coaching for creators in various niches.
Finally, health and wellness coaching is on the rise. Personal training, yoga, breathwork, and the like are popular searches. Opportunities exist in creating products such as apps, communities, and physical equipment, as well as targeted newsletters.
What do you think of this trend? Share in the comments!
Check out the full post to see this week's other two exploding topics.
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from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry
Don't think about capturing emails. Think about creating something worth subscribing to.
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from the Indie Economy newsletter by Bobby Burch
35% of cloud spending is wasted every year thanks to mistakes, poor visibility, and infrequent monitoring. That equates to nearly $95B thrown in the garbage in 2020. For founders short on time, managing AWS is often put on the back burner in favor of building and marketing the best product possible.
Founder Tony Chan built CloudForecast, a monitoring and forecasting tool that helps engineers identify AWS cost anomalies in 30 seconds or less. Tony sat down with Indie Hackers to share tips for founders about managing cloud costs.
There are a few main reasons why we started CloudForecast. Our team members worked on distributing systems throughout their whole careers, and managing AWS costs in an accessible way was a problem at each of their previous companies.
They found that the majority of the tools available to high-growth startups and mid-market size companies overcomplicate solving this problem by implementing complex features and dashboards. They do this to justify their extremely high costs and require traditional enterprise software contracts.
When you’re an engineer, your time is best spent focused on technical priorities that move the company forward, not financial modeling or reporting. With that in mind, this seemed to be the right problem to try to scratch the startup itch we had at the time.
AWS cost management is a very complex problem that is both technical and non-technical in nature. It’s not only finding the areas of optimization with potentially wasted resources, but also managing and monitoring for cost anomalies amongst your teams.
With the non-technical side, making sure your organization across the board are on the same page (finance, engineering, C-level, accounting) in terms of governance, ownership, and expectations is as important as the technical part with reducing cloud costs.
We’ve been on sales calls where the person has said “I can build this over the weekend." The problem is not that simple where someone can just do this overnight. The best companies we’ve seen do this well, and solve the problem thoughtfully, see this as a journey for their whole organization.
We make our features easy to understand so that engineers can understand and answer potential AWS cost issues in less than 30 seconds. We also proactively push all our reports via email and Slack so it's not another app or dashboards the engineers need to log into daily. We know how busy engineers are, and the last thing they should be focused on is financial reporting.
Business model-wise, we are open and transparent with our pricing and how we work with our customers. The traditional model offered by our competitors includes a 1-2 year contract and a percentage of your AWS cost. Is that really looking out for your best interest? Our subscription plans, on the other hand, include flat-pricing with month-to-month options available. Our customers have really appreciated this about us since we’re focused on earning their business.
Lastly, we work with our customers directly because we’ve been in their shoes. We relate directly to their problems with AWS costs. If there are any issues or problems, even if we don’t have features to solve them, we’re always willing to try to help or find the resources to do so.
My biggest marketing advice early on is to do things that don’t scale, nail down your buyer persona, and have conversations with your target audiences. You want to learn how they make decisions in buying products that solve their problem.
You’re essentially working your way backward to figure out what channels to possibly leverage, and how to reach users.
We’ve done a good job of being able to have tough and productive conversations about our business, which is often the point of failure for other early-stage startups.
Another reason we’ve been successful is our customer-focused approach. We’re customer-centric with everything we do, and we try to extract insights from our customers directly. After all, they were our first investors as a bootstrapped startup. Through those conversations, we’ve been able to learn more about their problems. We can then iterate on our product and build new features to ensure product-market fit.
We passed six-figures ARR in 2020. We’re a profitable, mostly bootstrapped SaaS startup that is looking to hire our next full-time engineer to contribute with product and feature development.
Engineering teams are moving towards adopting container orchestration systems like Kubernetes, EKS, and ECS to help manage, deploy, and scale their applications. It’s important to continue to stay updated with the latest trends and developments as adoption increases.
You really need to stick with it through the highs and lows. The low points are the toughest to get through, but those are also the biggest learning opportunities for you as a founder.
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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Nathalie Zwimpfer for the illustrations, and to Dru Riley, Priyanka Vazirani, Josh Howarth, Harry Dry, and Bobby Burch for contributing posts. —Channing
Wow. Awesome writeup.
Takeaway: I need to be signed up for the Indie Hackers newsletter!
Thanks, Kyle! Glad you enjoyed. Welcome to the IH newsletter fam! :-)