What's New: Facebook's data leak is a field day for marketers

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

533 million Facebook users were affected across 106 countries:

• Facebook has declined to notify people who have been compromised, claiming that it's unnecessary since there's no way to fix the issue now. This expert warns that those affected should prepare for an onslaught of cold outreach from marketers.
• The low- and no-code industry is expected to hit $21 billion next year. Dru Riley's advice? Don't waste time reinventing the wheel. Use low-code tools to solve non-unique problems so you can focus on bigger things.
• Founder Simon Høiberg launched his first startup, and...no one cared. Deciding to focus on audience-building before launching again, he grew a dedicated following of 50K in 9 months by posting every day across platforms. That ended up being a game-changer.

Want to share your ideas with over 70K indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

👀 Facebook's Data Leak is a Field Day for Marketers

from the User Acquisition Channels newsletter by Darko G.

Following last week's data leak of 533M Facebook users across 106 countries, the social media giant has declined to notify those affected. Marketers will likely take advantage of this wealth of leaked information, as it presents a new audience for cold outreach.

Facebook's breach

What happened: The personal information of 533M Facebook users was leaked last week. The data includes phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and email addresses.

Users can check this website to see if they were affected by the breach. Facebook has declined to notify users, claiming that it doesn't help to let people know since the information is publicly available and users can't fix it themselves.

Marketers using this data: Remember when you could create a Facebook custom audience using publicly available profile IDs? T-shirt companies used this to create custom audiences of people with the same name, and then run ads selling t-shirts showing the person's name on it.

Using profile IDs to create custom audiences is no longer possible, but with leaks like these, I have a feeling some marketers will find creative ways to use some of these tactics.

This is a gray hat tactic, but I've seen it used a lot. For example, when businesses do cold outreach, they may enter the emails as a custom audience, run ads to familiarize their prospects with the company, and then do the outreach.

If a marketer gains access to such a database, they could potentially find people with the same name and create an ad that only shows the first letter of their name (since Facebook no longer allows you to target by a specific name). The more people identify with the ad, the more likely they are to click on it.

Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers will shut down on May 4, 2021. In case you've been living under a rock, Yahoo Answers is one of the world's largest Q&A sites, with approximately 20M indexed pages.

What this means for you: Yahoo promises that the site will remain in read-only mode, but people are rushing to back up the data just in case it vanishes. How many of those 20M questions could be relevant to your industry?

If you're looking for content ideas, go to Yahoo Answers and do a keyword search. Take note of the most popular questions and answers. This could be a one-time opportunity to gain customer insights that may not be available going forward.

Were you impacted by Facebook's data breach? What are your thoughts on Facebook's silence? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Subscribe to User Acquisition Channels for more.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

🍕 Domino's began autonomous food delivery via robots in Houston.

💍 Investor believes that NFTS could be worn like jewelry one day.

🌳 Uber is considering cannabis deliveries if the US federal government legalizes it.

🎮 PlayStation games could be coming to your smartphone soon.

🧐 This Facebook loophole allows world leaders to deceive their citizens.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

💻 Low-Code Tools Solve Non-Unique Problems

from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley

The low- and no-code industry is estimated to hit $21B next year. No matter what industry you're in, from fraud to bottles of gin, here's how founders can benefit from the low-code tools boom.

Why It Matters

Low-code lets us focus on unique problems. This leads to leverage and specialization, the same forces behind million-dollar, one-person businesses.

Problem: Reinventing the wheel wastes time.

Solution: Use low-code tools to solve non-unique problems.

Focus on what you do best. Let WordPress, Stripe, Shopify, AWS and others do the same.

Players

Platforms

• Shopify - Build online stores
• Heroku - Deploy and manage apps
• Webflow - Build websites

Tools

• Retool - Build internal tools
• TextRetailer - Shop by text
• Bildr - Build full-stack web applications

APIs

• ScrapingBee - Scraping API
• Segment - Collect and manage customer data
• Plaid - Connect financial accounts

Frameworks

• Ruby on Rails - Web framework
• React - Front-end framework
• Angular - Cross-platform framework

Libraries

• OpenCV - Computer vision
• TensorFlow - Create and evaluate ML models
• Moment.js - Manage dates and times in JavasScript

Predictions

• "Full-code" is here to stay. Low-code tools allow developers to work on new problems. We can build brain-computer interfaces instead of CRUD apps.
• Lawyers, accountants, and other professionals will be impacted by low-code-like phenomena. Low-law (Termly), low-accounting (TurboTax) and low-podcast-editing (Descript) are on the rise. This is a low-pro movement.
• DeFi will embrace low-code. Token standards (ERC20, ERC721) "ensure" security. Billions of dollars staked in standards are implied, uncaptured bug bounties.

Opportunities

• Build the first version of your app with no/low-code tools. Shoutout started on Bubble.
• Equip non-engineering teams (marketers, product managers and customer support) with low-code tools to reduce internal dependencies. Tara Reed did this at Google.
• Use low-code tools to help businesses. See Clutch Software and Anything as a Service (XaaS).
• Democratize new form factors. Wine Text sends daily deals via SMS. TextRetailer gives anyone the ability to run daily deals.

Key Lessons

• Focus on what you do best. Don't rebuild AWS, Twilio or Stripe. Use them. Innovate on another front.
• There's a tradeoff between customization and abstraction. Low-code is "opinionated."

Haters

• "You can't build everything with low-code."

Sure. That which can be, should be. Work on unique problems.

• "This isn't customizable."

It's all relative. Abstraction isn't free. Nothing is.

• "This will take developer jobs."

Developers will work on unique problems. See creative destruction.

• "Functions, libraries, frameworks and APIs are not low-code."

Each is an abstraction. i.e. Low(er)-code

Links

1. Trends #0033 --- No-Code - Low-code tools are less abstract versions of no-code tools.
2. Trends #0027 --- Million-Dollar, One-Person Businesses - On the power of leverage.
3. Creative Destruction - The net-positive process that prevents stagnation.

More reports

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.

Do you use low-code tools? What do you think of the emergence of this option?

Subscribe to Trends.vc for more.

🤥 Marketing Lie: If Your Ads Aren't Working, Your Product is Broken

By James Fleischmann

The lie: If your ads aren't working, your product is broken.

The truth: Most startups never get ads to run profitably.

They're usually worth testing because they're quick to experiment with and scale.

But if they don't work, don't be afraid to ditch them entirely.

Focus on SEO, referrals, product-led growth, and social content.

Discuss this story.

🗓 How Simon Høiberg Grew a 50K Following in 9 Months

By Simon Høiberg

I'm Simon Høiberg, founder of FeedHive, a content scheduling tool. Here's how I grew a 50K following in nine months to successfully launch my product!

My first saas product: failure!

I started building my very first SaaS Product in February 2020. I made a lot of mistakes, but the biggest one was underestimating the value of having an audience. At this point, I had around 250 followers on Twitter and barely used LinkedIn.

I launched in June 2020, and... no one cared. It got close to zero traction, and I had to practically drag users onto the platform by force.

So I stopped everything else and made it my primary goal to grow a dedicated following as fast as possible. At the time of writing this post around nine months later, I have 40K followers on Twitter, 7K on LinkedIn, 3K on Instagram, and 3.5K subscribers on YouTube.

My second saas product: success from day one!

After building my audience, I started building FeedHive.

I made a public announcement about FeedHive in a tweet on January 3, 2021, and another tweet announcing the beta launch on February 6. The tweets got almost 3K likes in total and a lot of comments!

When I launched in beta, I got the first 50 paying users in a few hours, and I went straight to $250 MRR within the first 48 hours. Today, FeedHive has more than 120 paying users and a total gross revenue of almost $4K. It's been live for 10 weeks.

There's no doubt: Having a dedicated audience change my game completely!

Building a dedicated audience fast

Provide value

Ask yourself:

• Is my post actionable? Does it give anything that people can apply after reading?
• Is my post helpful? Does it have any takeaways that people can benefit from?
• Is my post interesting even if you don't know who I am? This is especially important when you're still small.

Don't ask for anything in return

I've seen people start growing and as soon as they reach 2K followers, they want to sell their ebooks, courses, etc. That's such a shame! Wait way longer before asking for anything in return.

Be very careful with giving people the impression that you're only building followers to monetize them. It's a huge turnoff.

Give, give, give! Relentlessly! Without asking for anything in return. When you've built up trust, credibility, and sympathy, then you can start promoting your products.

Post consistently

Yes, that means every day. Multiple times a day. And across multiple platforms.
On average, I post 4-5 times on Twitter, 2 times on LinkedIn, 1-2 times on Instagram every single day! I haven't missed a day on Twitter in more than 300 days now.

I know it sounds like a lot of work! It is in the beginning, but trust me, it'll ease up over time.

A couple of hints:

• Use a scheduling tool. Schedule a whole week ahead, so you can spend your time on something else during the week.
• Recycle. When you begin posting, you'll notice that you can easily recycle a lot of your content. You'll get new followers all the time, and it's perfectly fine to recycle a few times to let all the newcomers get a chance to see the post as well.
• Save drafts. As soon as you get a good idea, write it down as a draft. When you get to your content creation session you'll have a lot of great drafts to work with.

(In fact, I built FeedHive to make these routines easier!)

Engage with big accounts

In the very beginning, it's worth spending a good deal of time engaging with big accounts. When big accounts post on social media, their posts often go viral. You can use the comment section as a broadcasting channel to get yourself noticed.

Most social media platforms move the comments with the most engagement to the top, which makes it much more likely that the big profile's followers will notice you.

Be helpful and humble

Lastly, keep being helpful and humble even after you reach a huge follower count. Don't stop saying thank you when people compliment you. When your followers appreciate your content, tell them how happy you are that it helps them.

Replying to every single comment and DM can become an overwhelming task, but do your best to keep it going as long as you can. And when you hit the point where there are too many comments for you to realistically reply to, pick your comments in favor of small accounts. Big accounts get plenty of attention already. Focus on replying to small accounts instead. It means so much more to them.

I hope this was helpful to you. Please feel free to AMA!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

Forward it to a friend, and let them know they can subscribe here.

Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.

Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Nathalie Zwimpfer for the illustrations, and to Darko G., Priyanka Vazirani, Dru Riley, James Fleischmann, and Simon Høiberg for contributing posts. —Channing