What's New: Consumers spend more time on mobile apps than ever
(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)
Globally, mobile app consumption is at an all-time high:
- Smartphone users spend 4.2 hours across various apps per day. For founders, this means more eyes on your product. Looking to target ages 18-29? YouTube and Instagram are your best bets. If your audience is older, fire up Facebook.
- More founders are seeking cofounders online than ever as the pandemic drags on. This list of resources takes the guesswork out of where to look, including 400 Slack channels that could lead you to your perfect match.
- This couple quit their jobs to launch a travel-based business right before COVID-19 hit. They turned what initially seemed like the world's worst timing into a new business altogether, using no-code tools.
Want to share your ideas with over 70K indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
📱 Consumers Spend More Time on Mobile Apps Than Ever
from the Indie Economy newsletter by Bobby Burch
A new report found that global consumers are spending about 1/6 of their day on mobile apps. This means more captive eyeballs and opportunities for founders to curate engaged audiences.
Phone home
Smartphone users spend an average of 4.2 hours across various apps per day, a 30% increase from 2019. In some countries, including Indonesia, Brazil, and South Korea, the average is above five hours per day.
Top categories: Trends vary between countries, but these are the top app categories being used:
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Private Messaging: The secure messaging apps Telegram and Signal have helped lead the increase of app use in the U.K., Germany, France, and the United States. Telegram was the fourth most popular app downloaded in the first quarter of 2021. Signal was the first quarter’s fastest-growing app by downloads and monthly active users.
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Investing: Trading and investing apps such as Robinhood, Coinbase, and WeBull boosted mobile usage around the world. Binance, Upbit, and PayPay also drove app engagement in France, South Korea, and Japan, respectively.
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Video sharing: While YouTube and Facebook rank No.1 and No. 2 on the overall download charts, other video sharing apps are catching up. In China, the fastest-growing apps in Q1 2021 by downloads were TikTok and Kwai, a social network for short videos and trends.
A field day for advertisers
Advertisers are capitalizing: Marketers spent about $240B on mobile ads in 2020. It is expected that mobile ad buys will grow to $290B in 2021 as consumer in-app purchases continue to rise (it increased by 40% in the past year).
Game time: Gamers continue to spend the most on apps and in-game purchases. In Q1 2021, gamers downloaded around 1B games every week, and spent a total of $22B. Gamers spent $13B on iOS (up 30% year over year), and $9B on Google Play (up 35%).
Social media trends: The PEW Research Center recently released a report on social media use, finding that a staggering 81% of Americans regularly use YouTube.
About 50% of older Americans (65+ years of age) report using Facebook and about 49% use YouTube. Americans 18-29 still dominate the highest percentage of users on YouTube (95%), Instagram (71%) Snapchat (65%), TikTok (48%), and Twitter (42%).
Head, shoulders, screens and phones: Apparently, hunching over a phone for hours isn’t great for your health.
Neck and shoulder pain resulting from poor smartphone posture is increasingly showing up in health data, according to a study recently published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Medical experts have the following recommendations for smartphone users:
- Look forward while using a phone, keeping the device at eye level.
- Maintain good posture and ensure a natural curve in your low back when sitting to use your device.
- Take frequent small breaks to move or stretch your neck and back. Try chin tucks, seated lumbar rolls, and scapular retractions to stay loose.
Have you noticed an increase in app usage? Which apps do you use the most? Please share in the comments!
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Indie Economy for more.
📰 In the News
from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
💋 OnlyFans premium content is being illegally distributed online by scammers.
🦠 GE phones will detect coronavirus through sensors.
🎧 Twitter held discussions for $4B takeover of Clubhouse.
📳 Facebook is testing Hotline, a Clubhouse competitor with video capabilities.
🧟♂️ "Zoom zombies" are zoning out while driving, leading to more car crashes.
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
👋 Where to Meet a Cofounder Online
As a follow-up to our recent IH post about finding a technical cofounder, we wanted to offer more information on where to look for a potential match (technical or otherwise). As the pandemic drags on, meeting cofounders online is the most accessible option, and founders can explore several avenues to find the right fit.
Founder compatibility
We dug into this in detail in part one, but before finding a cofounder, make sure you're ready for one. One of the top things to look for in a potential match? Whether you actually like the person.
Meeting cofounders online
- Indie Hackers: Indie Hackers is full of places to meet like-minded people. Plus you're already here, so it's convenient! Get active and check out the Looking to Partner Up group, which has nearly 16K members.
- Building in public: Boost your signal by publicly posting about what you're working on, why it's valuable, and which milestones you've already reached. Either cofounders will come to you, or you can put out the call when you're ready.
- LinkedIn: Your personal network on LinkedIn is already an asset you can utilize to find a match. You can also check out LinkedIn groups like On Startups - The Community for Entrepreneurs, CoFounder, and Ideas Seeking Co Founder.
- Freelancers: If you hire someone to work on your MVP, they may want to explore a full-time role if the two of you are a good fit. In fact, working with someone in a freelancing capacity is probably the least risky way to learn if you have chemistry. Who's to say they won't want to join in on the indie hacking fun?
- AngelList: One of the world's biggest startup communities. It's not specifically designed for finding co-founders, but you can make it serve this purpose by simply registering as a recruiter and posting a position.
- reddit: reddit is a place you'll definitely want to check out. With 23K members looking for cofounders, it's well worth joining r/cofounder. Also check out r/startups, r/Entrepreneur, r/EntrepreneurRideAlong, and r/SideProject.
- Slack: The question with Slack isn't whether there are potential co-founders you can find it, but rather where to find them. So here's a list of 400 channels (with descriptions) to get you started.
- Discord: Check out Discord too, specifically its #cofounding channel in /r/startups.
- And as always, of course, there's social media. Don’t underestimate the power of a good ol’ tweet.
Hopefully, this serves as a good jumping-off point for anyone trying to partner up. You could literally find your cofounder anywhere, but these are some of your best bets. Also, keep an eye out for conferences and hack-a-thons.
Are you on the hunt for a cofounder? Share your experience in the comments!
Discuss this story.
🌐 Best Around the Web: Links Posted to Indie Hackers This Week
🧾 Top lessons to get your first 10 customers. Posted by Karthik Sridharan.
🛠 The architecture behind a one-person tech startup. Posted by Anthony N. Simon.
📝 A curated list to keep up with the creator economy. Posted by Eliot Couvat.
💻 20 best user testing tools. Posted by Jim Zarkadas.
🥱 $823 in revenue and burned out. Posted by Allison Seboldt.
📚 What's the best piece of content you've ever encountered? Posted by Channing Allen.
Want a shout-out in next week's Best Around the Web? Submit a link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across an article you think other indie hackers will enjoy.
🎯 This Couple Used No-Code Tools to Pivot From a Travel Business
Hi, I'm Marie, cofounder of Hotspot and Tally. At the end of 2019, my partner and I decided to chase our indie hacking dreams.
TL;DR
🇲🇽 10/2018: Came up with an idea to build a platform that connects hotels & travel influencers.
🏗 06/2019: Started building Hotspot.
💼 01/2020: Quit my job.
🛫 03/2020: We jumped on a plane to Asia to chase our digital nomad dreams. Then COVID-19 hit, and we flew back home to go in lockdown.
🩸 07/2020: We lost half of our clients and realized that COVID-19 wasn't going anywhere.
💡 08/2020: We decided to pivot and build Tally.
🚀 09/2020: We launched our MVP and gathered our first 1.5K users.
🐣 12/2020: Our baby girl was born!
🐱 03/2021: We launched Tally on Product Hunt.
📈 04/2020: 3.5K users and $1K MRR!
The (slightly) longer version
I was the marketing manager at a Digital Product Studio in Belgium. Filip, my partner, had recently left his position when Delta, a crypto portfolio app that he had built, was acquired by eToro. We wanted to build a product for the rising influencer marketing industry while traveling and working as digital nomads.
We got the idea a couple of years ago when traveling to Mexico, a hotspot for travel influencers and bloggers. Hotspot was going to be a platform that connects hotels with travel influencers and sets up collaborations. Our plan was to only build if we could find 100 hotels that showed interest in our idea. We made a landing page and reached out to hotels we found on Instagram. We used a Google Form to collect data, and found 100 hotels that were interested in our product; most of the traction came from Asia.
In early 2020, we had a growing number of hotels and influencers on the platform. We decided to go for it! I quit my job, we rented out our apartment, and we booked a plane to Bali (with a stop in Bangkok). Once we arrived in Bangkok, the pandemic hit. Countries were going into lockdown, and our customers started churning or asking to pause their subscriptions. Flights were being canceled and borders were closing; to be able to stay in Thailand, we had to leave the country to extend our visas. However, there was no way of knowing if we would be able to get back in. We ran out of options and decided to fly back to Belgium.
We felt like Hotspot had the potential to grow and didn’t want to give up on our startup idea so easily. So we decided to keep building and prepare for better days.
Fast forward to summer 2020.
COVID-19 hit Belgium hard, and hospitals were overwhelmed. We decided to organize a fundraiser, and donated free hotel nights to healthcare workers. Again, we needed a form for hotels and healthcare workers to register, and again, we struggled with finding the right one. Google Forms is very functional but it doesn’t look great. Established form tools like Typeform, Jotform, Formstack make you hit a paywall fast, and this can be very expensive for early-stage startups or indie hackers.
By now, we had lost half of our Hotspot customers and still had no idea about when the travel industry would recover. We decided to pivot and build our own form tool. We wanted to make a simple, powerful form builder that allows you to create any type of form without breaking the bank. We set off building Tally, a new type of form builder for makers and no-coders.
We launched our MVP in September 2020 and started asking for feedback from makers, indie hackers, and startups on Twitter and in Slack communities. Tally works like a document (you can just start typing and insert building blocks), and our first users loved the form-building experience we offered. Our user base started growing, and we kept talking to existing and potential users. We went above and beyond to make our first users happy, offered instant support, and shipped new features every week.
In December 2020, we welcomed our daughter, Lucy, and lost some speed for obvious reasons! But we were happy to close the year with a small, yet very engaged community of 1.5K users. By March 2021, we felt ready to share our product with a bigger audience, so we launched on Product Hunt. We lost the race for #1 product of the day after being in the lead for 23 hours. A rollercoaster for sure, but we were still really happy with the outcome of more than 1.4K upvotes, hundreds of positive reviews, dozens of investor calls, and over 600 new users.
We can’t wait to see what the future holds!
How was 2020 for you? Would love to hear your stories! AMA!
Discuss this story.
🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick
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 Nathalie Zwimpfer for the illustrations, and to Bobby Burch, Priyanka Vazirani, James Fleischmann, and Marie Martens for contributing posts. —Channing
