(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)
Google is the modern-day Yellow Pages, but Facebook is coming for a piece of the action:
Want to share something with nearly 85,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
from the Growth & Acquisition Channels newsletter by Darko
Google has become the new Yellow Pages, but Facebook is coming for a piece of the pie. This September, the company announced several new features to its Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook apps. If at least two of them succeed, we can safely assume that Facebook will become a viable Yellow Pages alternative for the web. Read on for the updates!
Facebook has expanded its Business Explore tool to users in the US, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, and the UK. Here's what it looks like:
How it works: Let’s say you scroll down your Facebook feed and see a post by a restaurant. If you keep your attention there for several seconds, Facebook will show you a new section under the post called “Explore more." This section will show similar businesses to the one you’re currently viewing. See the video on this post to get a better idea.
Opportunities for founders: Many of us have products that target local businesses. If Facebook succeeds with these experiments (and it seems that it's very determined to do so), it’ll become a pretty major acquisition channel for businesses with physical locations.
In addition, this will create new software opportunities for indie hackers. Just look at all of the “for local business” SaaS products that exist; it’s a multimillion dollar market.
Instagram added a “Map Search” tool, which is currently being tested in Australia and New Zealand. This tool will enable users to discover real businesses on a map inside the Instagram app. Instagram users will also be able to see people who tagged themselves at that particular location.
Here’s how this feature looks:
WhatsApp added a business directory, and it's currently being tested it in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Similar to the Instagram tool, this will allow you to find businesses nearby:
As you can see, Facebook is looking to become a business directory across its social media platforms, and help users discover new places based on what they're already viewing. Founders will likely have many opportunities in this space as these features develop and grow. Hope you found this useful!
What do you think of Facebook's updates? Share in the comments.
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Growth & Acquisition Channels for more.
from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
👶 Facebook has put Instagram Kids on hold due to criticism.
🐹 A crypto trading-hamster is outperforming the S&P 500.
🦑 Korean media stocks are surging due to Netflix's hit "Squid Games."
🤑 Older millennials and Gen Zers are driving the US economy.
💸 Americans are getting back to spending money on things that they've missed during the pandemic.
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
After managing over a hundred software projects in the last decade, I've learned a thing or two about project management tools. Here's a deep dive into the best task managers around, based on my research, the thoughts of fellow indie hackers, and my own experience. Since we're all indie hackers, I'll focus on self-management for solo founders and small teams.
The truth is that a simple to-do list will work just fine for many solo founders. Here are some of the best apps for that:
Built by fellow indie hackers:
If you need to be able to document complex tasks and communicate effectively with other team members, these tools can get the job done:
Check out my post on efficiency for more information!
What are your favorite management tools? Please share below!
Discuss this story.
Creating something always brings on a ton of emotions. Talk about your feelings around what you're creating, as a way to connect with others.
Discuss this story.
Hey everyone! I'm Dagobert Renouf, and three years ago, I left a high-paid software job to bootstrap a startup with my wife, Lucie Baratte. We launched Logology, a tool that creates a designer-quality logo for your startup in five minutes. I code, she designs!
We took a huge risk and decided to use our life savings, and it's been much harder than we thought. Watching our savings decrease monthly was a scary feeling. Also, our family thought we were crazy and didn't always support us. After two years, and little success, we were pressured to give up.
We decided to give it one final shot and focus on the few customers we had at the beginning. What do they love about us? How can we find more people like them? This summer, we finally started seeing a way forward. Thanks to a new marketing approach using Twitter, we started getting some traction.
Ask us anything!
Lucie: Creating a logo system was very exciting! I've been a graphic designer for 15 years, and from day one, I was fascinated by semiology.
My process is always:
Through the years, I’ve invented workshops with clients, used design thinking methods to get to the meaning, and worked to understand the keywords of each project. We used all of this experience to create our questionnaire. The most difficult thing was synthesizing the information into a few relevant personas.
It took me three years to design more than 750 logos. I design each week. For me, designing logos became a bit like calligraphy; the more I do it the more it feels like writing.
Dagobert: We invested $500 into Google Ads. It completely failed; we made zero sales. I think it's because we tried to attach ourselves to a general keyword ("logo generator"), but our tool is actually tailored to startups. The people that came in were lots of students and 12-year-old Twitch streamers, so it wasn't a good fit. I couldn't find a keyword that would be relevant for us, so I stopped.
We sponsored four newsletters ($200 total), and it also failed. Zero sales. We convert more when using organic channels like Twitter, where people are just curious about my product (no intention to buy), than with paid channels where people have a clear intention to buy.
We got our first users by posting on Indie Hackers, Reddit, and lots of startup communities. If I could do it again, I'd have started building an audience from day one. This would have saved us at least one year of having almost no sales. The next thing I will try is targeting long-tail keywords that are highly specific, with low competition.
Dagobert: My Twitter account was a desert for years. I had 150 followers (mostly people from real life), and whenever I tweeted it would have zero likes or engagement.
Then, I decided to start sharing my journey. In 10, weeks I went from 200 to 1.4K followers, and tripled my sales. On Twitter, I don’t talk about my product. My target market is startup founders, but when I talked about my product, they didn’t care. So, I started sharing what I’m going through as a founder.
This got me 10x more engagement. People see my tweets, get curious, click on my profile, and visit the website! For more of my tips on Twitter growth, check out this thread.
Dagobert: Actually, the work part is easy. We both respect and admire each other's work a great deal. We also complement each other.
What's been hard is putting all of our financial eggs in the same basket. It is such a risk to build a startup, and neither of us has a regular job. The biggest problem is disconnecting. We tend to only talk about work, and we lose the "loving relationship" part a bit. We miss the simpler times of just seeing each other every night and talking about nothing. Not disconnecting wears us down.
We're trying to learn to arrange time where we can both disconnect and talk about everything but work. It helps!
Dagobert: I've learned that a lot of people (including my best friend and some family members) feel uncomfortable with the fact that I'm building a company. I think it's because it challenges their expectations of what life is: Get a job you don't like and work it for 45 years. The fact that we're doing it differently makes some feel uneasy.
I don't know how you can prepare for it other than to realize that building a company will trigger some people. I didn't know it would be such a big deal, but it is. Some people will go out of their way to tell you that they admire you, but some will be triggered and try to sabotage you.
We tried actually bringing loved ones in for their feedback and advice, but we saw that some didn't even care to look into what we were building. Unfortunately, my best friend is no longer my best friend now. It can be very disappointing and hard to go through.
Lucie: I have a few favorites, but I would say the winner is the Poppins. I love its simplicity in design, efficiency, legibility, and style. It’s very easy to combine it with my icon designs. Each time, the result looks neat, fresh, expressive, and powerful, yet not too eccentric.
Discuss this story.
I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:
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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, Priyanka Vazirani, James Fleischmann, Ivan Romanovich, and Dagobert Renouf for contributing posts. —Channing
Is anyone else struggling with the (lack of) structure of these newsletters? It's not clear for me if the newsletter has "table of contents" in the beginning or not as some of the topics seem to be listed in the beginning but then at the end of the newsletter you have stuff that's not in the "TOC"....?
hey! the opening lines are not meant to serve as a table of contents, but a preview of the actual articles in each issue. that way, people who may not have time to read the entire issue can still get the highlights of the tech news that we cover. hope that helps!