(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)
Yelp has made it easier to advertise on the platform:
Want to share something with over 75,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
from the User Acquisition Channels newsletter by Darko G.
Yelp just announced new updates to its ad platform. Yelp Connect, Yelp's version of Facebook Lookalike Audiences, now allows founders to promote to a wider audience than before.
Yelp recently announced a suite of ad platform updates, and here are the two you should care about:
The opportunity: With these updates, Yelp has removed certain barriers to advertising on the platform. You can now advertise on Yelp in a very similar way to advertising on Facebook.
Example: If you own a software development firm, you can now target the entire US via Yelp. You can also target people who engaged with other software developments firms, and those who searched for those types of companies on Yelp. Previously, you could only advertise to people who lived close to your office location.
This is pretty powerful, and can unlock Yelp as your next major acquisition channel.
A recent report analyzed trends in advertising and came to this conclusion:
Podcast advertising will grow as much in the next two years as it did in the past decade.
Podcast advertising revenues climbed to $842M in 2020, up from $708M in the previous year.
The opportunity: When podcasters grow their audiences, advertisers who place ads on their content typically grow as well. Here are some additional stats on the types of ads that seem to work, according to the report:
Have you thought of advertising your SaaS service or store on podcasts? If not, now might be a good time to consider.
Sprout Social has analyzed posts from its 20K+ customers to discover when people on various social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn) were most engaged.
The conclusion: Weekends suck. Work days rock. But you probably already knew that. Sprout Social has also analyzed the best times to post across nine different industries, broken down by social media channel. The report lists optimal posting times for the following industries:
Healthcare
Media
Education
Nonprofit
Restaurants
Tech
Travel & Tourism
Finance
Hospitality
The opportunity: Many of the "best time to post" articles are outdated, so it's handy when there's an up-to-date article from a company with a large enough dataset. Plus, engagement rates on social media sites are low, so this kind of data always helps.
Do you advertise on Yelp? Share in the comments!
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from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
🚫 Backlash against Elon Musk has given rise to new crypto, StopElon.
🖥 Google wants to build a useful quantum computer by 2029.
👁 Amazon indefinitely bans police use of its facial recognition software.
👽 President Obama says there are things about UFOs that he can’t "tell you on air."
🗣 Google’s "magic window" will let you chat virtually in lifelike 3D.
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
US freelancers earned an estimated $234B last year, according to Fiverr’s recent Freelance Economic Impact Report. 79% of freelancers say that their work gives them the freedom to live wherever they want and control their own hours. Here's how founders can find flexible, pants-optional, work-from-home jobs that will keep the lights on.
If you're looking for freelance opportunities, here are some general marketplaces with gigs that run the gamut of specialities:
If you want something even more stable (and perhaps something with benefits), here are some remote job boards:
And of course, you can find some exciting gigs right here on IH. Check out the Jobs group, or ask around!
Read the full post for more listings here.
Discuss this story.
from the Growth Bites newsletter by James Fleischmann
Tip: Increase sales by letting customers pick their prices from a set of three options.
While it can be benefical at launch, pay-what-you-want pricing often reduces conversions. But with a small tweak, sales can be increased substantially. Consider allowing customers to choose from a predetermined list of prices.
While studying pay-what-you-want pricing, researchers found that allowing customers to pick from three or four prices (as opposed to any price) actually boosted sales considerably. In fact, sales went up so much in the studies that this pricing model was beneficial even when people were paying less for the products.
Put simply, the pick-your-price model gives customers a sense of control, and they feel like they're getting a deal. It also requires very little mental effort (unlike pay-what-you-want).
Want more 30-second growth tips? Click here to see more and get Growth Bites in your inbox.
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Hey! I'm Brett Williams and I run DesignJoy, a one-man unlimited design service specializing in product design and Webflow development.
I’ve scaled DesignJoy to $50-60K MRR without ever investing a penny in marketing.
What makes my service unique is that I handle all requests myself: Client communication, final designs, and everything in between. No team. No outside help. Nada.
I'm back with an AMA to go more in-depth on some of the things we discussed in my previous Indie Hackers interview!
I'm not your normal founder; I hate risk and self-reliance, so I'll always maintain something on the backend. Plus, benefits, retirement, and pensions are nice when the job requires so little of me.
Almost all of my MRR is net revenue, minus taxes. My operating expenses are about $2K per year, and half of that is in a dang Shutterstock subscription!
Between DesignJoy and clients, the request workflow is managed in Trello. Here’s what a typical board looks like.
Clients can only have one active request at a time, which makes managing 30+ clients easier. When a user adds a card to that column, I have an IFTTT workflow set up to add it to Airtable to pull in all the important information. That’s what I work from since all the requests are all in one place, as opposed to dozens of different Trello boards. As for the login area, my site is built on Webflow. I use Memberstack for subscription management and the customer portal. Highly recommend checking it out.
I work in two day sprints most of the time. If you submit a landing page request, you get it in two days. Larger requests can take longer and be delivered in chunks. Revisions are usually completed the very next day, and more minor revisions are the same day, depending on how early in the day they are submitted.
I would say I work roughly 50-60 hours per week. It’s about a 50/50 split between actual product design versus landing page design. Combined, they take up most of my work aside from the branding piece!
Surprisingly, I don’t do a lot of either of those things. DesignJoy is a very accelerated service, and most clients aren’t willing to spend the time on those things since many of them are bootstrapped and pre-revenue.
A part of it is also my experience designing quite literally hundreds of products myself through DesignJoy alone. I can often afford to jump straight to high fidelity with minimal revisions simply because of my speed. It’s not the ideal design process, but it has worked in creating some pretty dang successful products.
No plans to scale it beyond myself. I like the subscription business model because it was far more approachable than other means of design. It’s as easy as signing up for Netflix, and two days later you have your first request.
I’ve been running it this way since 2017, and plan to keep it up for the foreseeable future.
The world tells you that every business should grow, but in reality, it all comes down to your own personal desires and what you want out of life. I've chosen the path of less headaches, less meetings, less managing people, and less constant worry about expanding and growing. At the end of the day, I'm happy making a solid living working for myself. There's no one set way to run a business.
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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Nathalie Zwimpfer for the illustrations, and to Darko G., Priyanka Vazirani, James Fleischmann, and Brett Williams for contributing posts. —Channing