Acquisition Channel Opportunities: Facebook, Ad Networks, Vertical App Exchanges
Want to get more paying users? I've analyzed over 4900 marketing/tech articles from the past week to identify the top 3 opportunities to help you do that:
1. Facebook launches custom subscription links, says you can circumvent Apple's 30% "tax" with it
The news: Last week, Facebook launched a feature that allows you to create custom subscription links. Once users click on your link, they can purchase your subscription with Facebook Pay. Facebook will take 0% fee (until 2023, at the earliest).
Why Facebook is doing this: To go after Apple. Here's an excerpt from the Facebook's official press release:
Creators, however, must still forfeit 15-30% of their earnings to companies such as Apple whenever people purchase Subscriptions within the Facebook app on mobile devices. For recurring payments such as subscriptions, this adds up quickly as that fee is paid every single month.
Bonuses: Facebook also announced that, in addition to taking no fees, they'll pay you in bonuses (between $5 and $20) for each new subscriber you add.
The opportunity: Making more money, of course. If you sell an in-app subscription for $10/month via Apple, you'll make anywhere between $7 and $8.5). With Facebook Pay, you'll make the full $10 + a bonus between $5 and $20 for each subscriber.
2. Everything is (becoming) an ad network.
The news: Zoom has announced that they'll be piloting an "advertising program" to users in their free tier. For now, ads will appear only on the browser page users see once they end their meeting.
The broader picture: This year alone, big players like Lowe's, Instacart, Telegram, Mozilla and Doordash launched ad platforms or announced they'll start serving ads to users. It seems like, sooner or later, every major platform is turning into an ad network.
The opportunity: Use the supply/demand gap once a major platform launches an ad network. Major platforms have huge reach; once they start serving ads, there's a period of time where not many businesses know of the ad network (yet), giving you a relatively cheap access to that platform's users for a certain amount of time.
If you want to learn more about this, see the Law of Shitty Clickthroughts.
Btw, if you want cool opportunities like these delivered to your inbox every week, feel free to subscribe below:
3. Don't underestimate the power of vertical marketplaces
The news: Etsy, an e-commerce marketplace for mostly handmade items, has reported their Q3 2021 earnings.
The stat we care about: Etsy's marketplace GMS (gross merchandise sales) for Q3 2021 was $2.7 billion. In other words, sellers on Etsy sold nearly $3 billion of merchandise during the period of July-end of September 2021. That's $29 million of sales made in a day.
Don't underestimate of vertical marketplaces.
The SaaS alternative: When you hear "app marketplace", you're probably thinking about Apple's App Store/Google's Play Store.
However, there are plenty of "vertical" marketplaces/app exchanges for "smaller" platforms as well. I've talked a lot about their power before. Take the Shopify App Store, for example, which is a set of apps for merchants.
According to Shopify's official stats, its partner ecosystem generated $12.5 billion in revenue in 2020 (p more than 84% from $6.8B in 2019). Most of these partners sell apps and develop themes.
The opportunity: Marketplaces are a powerful acquisition channel, both for e-commerce and SaaS. Don't dismiss a marketplace just because it's not in the top 3 (like Etsy, which ranks #8 globally). Especially if you're an indie hacker, "niching down" helps you get a head start over well-funded competitors.
I remember 2 or 3 interviews on IndieHackers on people who made Slack plugins. One of them even said this has been the major factor that contributed to their (later) success as a stand-alone SaaS.
You prob mean this one:
One risk with platform dependence is, well, the platform. They can suddenly change their API or boot you out. It mostly happened with B2C platforms in my experience (Twitter, FB). B2B platforms (Shopify, Slack) are generally more stable.
Many people on Twitter/here are talking about us getting into web 3.0 and the "creator's economy". Yes, we see huge networks eventually resorting to serving ads once they get big enough. Twitter seems to be publishing hard for creator-made rev, but AFAIK most of their revenue still comes from ads.
That's interesting.
Facebook's custom links feature will be the ultimate test of whether devs lean more into morality vs. profit IMO :) (especially after the "Facebook files" by the WSJ).
That will be interesting to see, yes.