What's New: Clubhouse rolls out no-fee creator payments
(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)
Currently, only a small test group of creators can receive payments:
- Clubhouse Payments will be widely released once the company has fine-tuned its learnings from the pilot program. With Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Slack all planning audio-only feature launches, Clubhouse is attempting to hold onto market share by making it easy for creators to monetize.
- Airfocus cofounder Malte Scholz reduced churn by encouraging users to vote for new features and sharing his roadmap. A good product roadmap keeps your audience in the loop about where your product is heading and makes them want to stick around. This practical guide will help you create your stickiest roadmap yet.
- 54 people met in a Discord room last week, formed a decentralized autonomous organization, and pooled more than $500K to buy four NFTs in a matter of days. User-owned networks can form and take action insanely fast, and Dru Riley predicts that they will become the norm. For founders, creating XaaS products to help guide others through the field could be the next wave.
Want to share your ideas with over 70K indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
💰 Clubhouse Rolls Out No-Fee Creator Payments
from the Indie Economy newsletter by Bobby Burch
Clubhouse is testing a feature that will allow creators to receive payments directly from supporters. Best of all? Creators get to keep 100% of it.
Clubhouse Payments
While only a small test group will be able to receive payments to start, a widespread rollout of "Clubhouse Payments" is soon to come as the company collects feedback and fine-tunes the feature.
What it means: The wildly popular social audio app (which is still available only on iOS) wants its creators to have the tools to directly monetize their content. The decision is part of Clubhouse's broader focus on differentiating itself as it contends with a growing number of big tech firms building rival audio-conversation platforms.
Clubhouse hopes that the payment feature will strengthen the alignment between its business model and its promise to creators by helping them monetize and thrive on the platform.
How it works: To send money to a creator, tap on the profile of a user who has the feature enabled and hit "Send Money." Set your payment amount, register a card, pay the processing fee, and voila! All users have the ability to send payments.
Stripe is Clubhouse’s payment processing partner, and it takes a small fee from each payment to creators.
Valuation soars: Clubhouse's valuation is currently $4B, quadruple what it was in January. The company is reportedly courting investors.
Competition rises
The battle for ears: LinkedIn is the latest in big tech to create a rival audio conversation platform, along with tools like newsletters, Stories, and video broadcasting.
Twitter began testing Spaces in December, and hopes to publicly debut the feature in April. Facebook is also reportedly working on an audio platform, and Slack's CEO confirmed (on Clubhouse no less) that the company plans to also add an audio chatroom feature.
Accelerating conversations: In March, Clubhouse announced its first accelerator program. Clubhouse Creator First will support 20 Clubhouse creators by providing resources to grow their audiences and revenue.
The bottom line: While Clubhouse has experienced a historic rise, it’s hard to see how it can win long term. Its heavy-hitting competitors can iterate quickly, support Android compatibility, and boost features on their already well-established network effects. Nevertheless, Clubhouse has helped usher in a wave of creator-oriented features from social media giants that may further boost the creator economy: This is a win for creators and indie hackers overall.
What do you think of Clubhouse Payments? Have you gotten any value from the platform overall?
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Indie Economy for more.
📰 In the News
from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
📌 Pinterest launched a $500K Creator Fund to pay influencers.
💴 Japan is experimenting with its own centralized digital currency.
🏛 The UK created a new regulatory body to curb Big Tech's dominance.
🧐 Mark Zuckerberg's leaked number reveals that he uses Signal, a direct competitor to Facebook-owned WhatsApp.
👄 Playboy will foray into the NFT space and offer erotic art as collectibles.
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
🛣 A Guide to Creating Your Best Product Roadmap
Strategic planning and documentation don't always get a lot of love from indie hackers, makers, and early-stage businesses. Who needs it when you're working by yourself? Enter product roadmaps: These high-level plans keep your features on track with your business goals (and inform your customers, too).
What is a product roadmap?
A product roadmap, or product plan, is a high-level summary that maps out upcoming features. It merges the purpose of the product with business goals and features. If you don't have features that customers want, they may go to your competitors. But if they know that you're heading in the right direction, they'll often hang out a little longer.
"High-level" is key here; this is not a hyper-detailed document. A great product roadmap is simple and approachable.
Here's an example of a product roadmap that's set up as a timeline:
7 steps to a great product roadmap
- Start with your "why:" Why are you building this product? Your roadmap must be aligned with your business goals, so focus on those first.
- Consider your target audience: What do they want? Your roadmap needs to resonate with them, so ask them personally or send out a poll. At the very least, take a look at the feedback you've received from them and use it to guide your strategy.
- Group everything into themes, then features: Themes are broad ideas that will solve a problem for your customer and also move the needle for your business (Example: "Improve onboarding flow"). Now check out your backlog of features and ideate new ones. Group them under specific themes. As you can see, we're taking a top-down approach here.
- Define and prioritize the features: Put some details into each feature about how it'll function. Prioritize the features in relation to your themes. Here's a simple quadrant framework based on cost and value, and here's a slightly more complex framework that adds urgency into the mix.
- Visualize it: Can your roadmap be understood at a glance? Gantt charts work very nicely for this.
- Share it: If you have a team, make sure they buy in. Then share it with your users. You could create a roadmap page on your website, post a link to an open Trello board, or tweet about what's next. Keep an ear to the ground with your audience to see how it's received.
- Get to work and stay flexible: Your roadmap is going to change. You need to leave room for innovation and new information. As new ideas come up, prioritize them, and determine if they should be tacked on at the end, or if priorities need to be shifted. Review your roadmap regularly.
Sharing with users
When it comes to sharing with your users:
- Don't give them too much info, keep it high-level.
- Don't over-promise.
- If you give a timeline, add cushion (or go by quarter instead of date).
- Consider sharing only two months out, three at most.
Product roadmap tools
Let's talk roadmapping tools! Here are a few free options that will do the trick nicely:
- Trello. This tool wasn't specifically designed for product roadmaps, but it works and it's free. Here's a roadmap template that may come in handy.
- Google Sheets is great for this as well. Here's a good template.
- Airtable. This is a solid option, and it's free for what you'll need. Try this template.
Here are a few advanced products if you want to get a little fancy. Most have free trials:
- Airfocus is a roadmapping and prioritization platform designed to help teams collaborate remotely.
- ProductPlan is an easy-to-use product roadmapping platform that allows for collaboration with audiences.
- Aha! is roadmapping software that lets you crowdsource, analyze, prioritize, and visualize features.
Happy roadmapping! Share how it's going in the comments.
Discuss this story.
🤥 Marketing Lies: Always Include a Message While Prospecting on LinkedIn
from the Demand Curve newsletter by Julian Shapiro
The lie: Always include a message while prospecting on LinkedIn.
The truth: Try connecting without a message—we’ve found that people think you're less fake. People accept the request more often.
In contrast, a templated message looks like automation and triggers people’s reflex to ignore you.
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Demand Curve for more.
🎯 The Power of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley
Last week, 54 people who met in a Discord room formed a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), and pooled more than $500K to buy four EulerBeats NFTs in an auction on OpenSea. This is the most recent example of power of DAOs and how quickly they can take action.
The background
Why It Matters: Networks, marketplaces and nations will become less corrupt, more equitable and more transparent.
Problem: Network effects lead to natural monopolies. Centralization breeds censorship, corruption and rent-seeking behavior.
Solution: DAOs are groups with no central management. Individuals coordinate around a shared set of rules to achieve a common goal.
Well-known DAOs include Bitcoin and Ethereum. These are transparent, unstoppable, user-owned networks.
Players
DAOs
- Bitcoin - Stores value
- Ethereum - Powers ether and decentralized applications
- Decentraland - Governs a virtual world
- BrightID - Social identity network
- Aave - Lending and borrowing
- MintFund - Supports NFT artists
Tools
- Aragon - Create and manage DAOs
- Roll - Create and manage social tokens
- Rally - Create and manage creator coins
Predictions
- User-owned networks will become the norm. Facebook's public shares have 1/10th the voting power of private shares. DAO ownership will apply to equity and governance.
- Politicians will gut the old system from the inside out. They are stakeholders in the new system and incentivized by lobbyists. The mayor of Miami is a canary in the gold mine, followed by members of the US Congress. Also, Biden's second-largest donor. We're witnessing a bloodless war, and politicians are handing over power.
- Negative externalities will go unchecked. Governments can enforce carbon credits on factories. How do you stop a decentralized network from mining Bitcoin?
Opportunities
- Be a network principal and participant. If you use Uniswap, own governance tokens.
- Launch a XaaS around DAOs. Seed Club offers social-tokens-as-a-service. Cooper Turley is a social token manager. Guide others through the frontier.
- Work for a DAO. Lewis Freiberg earns his highest salary ever ($180K) as a community manager for ESD.
Key Lessons
- Less lock-in shifts power from principals to participants.
- Currencies, social networks and nations will have lower switching costs.
- Transparency counters corruption. Smart contracts take us from "Don't Be Evil" to "Can't Be Evil."
- DAOs are censorship-resistant. No one will be able to unilaterally ban buying GameStop shares, downloading TikTok or trading with other nations.
Haters
"Didn't The DAO get hacked?"
Yes. And we're better for it. See antifragility.
"Decentralization slows things down."
Some DAOs seek progressive decentralization. Representative models may help.
"These don't sound very autonomous."
Autonomous is a misnomer. A better term may be DCOs (Decentralized Continuous Organizations) or DUOs (Decentralized Unstoppable Organizations).
"What about private blockchains?"
They're called computer databases. Centralized and censorable. They've been around since the 60s.
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.
Subscribe to Trends.vc for more.
🐦 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, Julian Shapiro, and Dru Riley for contributing posts. —Channing
Why would you NOT buy my product?