What's New: Maximize your luck surface area

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

How can you maximize your "luck" as a founder?

• If you're focused on doing (building) more than telling (marketing), or vice versa, you're stunting your growth. The solution? Do more of what you dread.
• AI headshot generators give you studio-quality photos without a physical photo shoot. Choose a great niche, and build in public to collect feedback.
• 41K views. 69 signups. 12 hours. After previously building without validating, Lufutu now has one rule: Only build when the waitlist hits 50+.

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Maximize Your Luck Surface Area ✨

by Jay Tan

We've all heard this cliché: "Luck is when opportunity meets preparation." But what can you do to become "luckier?"

Luck Surface Area

My favorite definition of "luck surface area" is this:

It's when you're both sufficiently doing (building and creating), and sufficiently telling (marketing) about what you're doing.

Sounds simple enough, but most of us either lack in the doing, in the telling, or both.

Doing more than telling

When you're doing more than telling, you're not harvesting the value you created. The bigger danger is that you may be creating something that the market doesn't want.

You need to tell people what you're doing to know if it's even worth doing.

Telling more than doing

This is when founders insist on marketing and promoting a product that's not ready, or simply not good. In other words, good marketing is wasted on bad products.

When you aren't adequately focused on building a killer product that changes the game for your customer, your marketing will be wasted effort. Your product needs to be able to stand on its own merit.

Constantly telling when you're not doing creates more harm than good.

The litmus test

Here's a simple litmus test to audit what you're lacking at the moment: Ask yourself, "What do I dread?"

Do you dread creating your e-book? Researching? Talking to people? Whatever you hate is exactly what you need to do more of.

Wrapping up

This isn't about creating luck out of thin air, but about knowing what to do with luck when it presents itself.

Do, tell, do, tell, do, tell...there's no other way. Keep grinding away, soldier.

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In the News 📰

from the Growth Trends newsletter

💻 Discord will start running ads soon.

🍪 Five strategies for PPC success in a cookieless world.

💲 Link to your product here. Our most affordable ad.

🛍 Bulk product optimization: Tips and tools for e-commerce SEO.

🕵️‍♀️ Here's how to spy on your competitors.

🌎 How to reach a global audience.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

Trend Alert: AI-Generated Headshots 📸

from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley

Problem

To get professional headshots, you need great lighting, wardrobe, and a skilled photographer.

Solution

AI headshot generators give you studio-quality photos without a physical photo shoot.

Players

AI headshot generators:

• HeadshotPro: Professional business headshots, by Danny Postma.
• Photo AI: Create beautiful AI photos without using a camera, by Pieter Levels.
• Secta AI: Turn selfies into professional headshots with AI.
• Aragon AI: The most realistic AI headshot generator.
• InstaHeadshots: Turn your selfies into professional business headshots, by Magic Studio.

Build your app

• Train your own model to gain a competitive edge. More realistic, precise results will lead to positive word-of-mouth.

• Lower the time to value. Let clients get their first results fast.

• Crowdsource challenges to solve problems. You’ll build faster with help from the community.

Pick your monetization strategy

• Charge a subscription to get predictable revenue.

• Charge per photoshoot to lower mental overhead.

Find your first customers

• Build in public to build trust, get early customers, and collect feedback.

• Use side project marketing to drive traffic to your paid AI headshot generator. Snap Headshots has a free profile pic generator.

Build trust

• Showcase social proof by sharing reviews from happy customers.

• Build trust by sharing sample images. This helps convert visitors to paid users.

Capture leads

• Make a demo video to show your app’s workflow before asking for payment. Creative Studio by Try it on AI has a video tutorial.

• Use scarcity to boost conversion. Pawify AI has themes that you can apply to pet photos. They are different each month.

Boost brand awareness

• Use programmatic SEO to rank higher in Google. Target long-tail keywords to reach a higher-intent audience. Pet Booth has pages with popular dog and cat breeds.

• Use affiliate marketing to scale your marketing efforts.

Become a Trends Pro Member to get the full report on AI-Generated Headshots, or get the next free Trends.vc report here.

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Harry's Growth Tip 🧠

from the Marketing Examples newsletter

Lead with your benefit. Tie that to your feature:

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.

69 Beta Users in 12 Hours 🚀

by Lufutu

My brother, Tuan Truong, and I are both born coders. We spent a lot of time building products based on ideas that weren't validated, and of course, made no money. So, we changed our process: Now, we only build an MVP when we have at least 50 interested people on the waitlist.

Coming up with a new idea

While working on an AI email editor project, we were doing a lot of data hoarding from templates, content, and emails. I was getting lazy, so I decided to take full use of AI, optimizing the best models for keyword extraction. That's how I realized that many are facing the same problems when scraping the web in the old way.

So, we decided to create a tool! We used this prompt as the challenge: Scrape the top 50 products from Amazon with the product title, description, rating, product price, and image. Run it at 6 AM every day, save a copy to my account, and send a copy to my email.

Building a quick demo

We built the demo in 48 hours using the Vercel Generative UI concept. Our landing page was built with the ShipFast boilerplate, and we included a screen recording demo.

Promotion

We only had ~200 followers each, so we turned to Reddit. I went to r/DataHoarder, and the rules around posting videos seemed unclear. I decided to post when it was nighttime in the US, hoping that the mods would be asleep so the post could live a little bit. We got 16 upvotes within one hour, and five users signed up for the beta. Then, this happened:

We then posted in r/OpenAI, and made it to number one!

We got 41K views, 100+ visits to our website, and 69 signups within 12 hours.

Now, we know there's demand, plus we have lots of detail about user pain points. That will help us release the exact MVP that our users want!

Discuss this story.

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 Jay Tan, Darko, Dru Riley, Harry Dry, and Lufutu for contributing posts. —Channing