(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)
The solo founder path can be a lonely one:
Want to share something with over 100,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
The solo founder path can be a lonely one. I did a little digging into what indie hackers can do to feel less isolated and more supported. Read on for more!
A lot of this is easier said than done. It feels weird, and it can be hard to make new friends as an adult. But you've just got to bite the bullet. It'll be worth it in the end!
Remember, you are not alone.
How do you connect with others as a solo founder? Let's chat below!
Discuss this story.
from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
📱 Salesforce is coming to TikTok.
🚀 Jack Dorsey is launching a new social network.
🎬 Disney has unveiled its first plus-size heroine.
🤮 Investors detest Mark Zuckerberg.
🌋 Hawaii residents have been warned that the world's largest active volcano could erupt.
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
from the Hustle Newsletter by Shân Osborn
Thanks to high acquisition costs, most e-commerce brands are lucky to break even on a first purchase. So, it's vital to turn first-time buyers into second-time buyers.
One way to do this: Capture your customers in their most excited state via a bounce-back flow. Trendster Michael Galvin takes us through the process.
What is a bounce-back flow?
It's a pop-up or email that fires off within five minutes of a first purchase. It attracts high open and placed order rates because:
*Example of bounce-back flow from The Jelly Bee
Your flow must show the customer specific products that are:
In summary: Relevant offer + well-timed pitch + definite deadline = boost in repeat sales.
A bounce-back flow is distinct from other post-purchase upsells. You can also tweak them to suit your brand, like offering first time buyers a personalized micro-store if your brand stocks numerous SKUs.
*Drop any questions on Michael's post here.
Trendster JJ Skarzynski is blowing up our Facebook group (again). Back in June, he blew our minds with his strategy for automating Reddit to find micro-influencers, with a 70% response rate.
Now, he's talking TikTok. JJ noticed that videos of Reddit posts are popular on TikTok. Why?
Here's how it works:
Sounds crazy, but posts like these get millions of views.
So, JJ figured out how to use Zapier to automate these posts for a TikTok account that he manages for Daily Idea. Some of his videos have thousands of views.
*Source: TikTok
The possibilities are endless here.
Per JJ:
If you sell personal finance courses, scrape content from sources like r/personalfinance or r/leanFIRE. Then, in the comments, put a small ad for your course.
If you sell slime, a super popular product on TikTok, include satisfying footage of you cutting your slime as the background video. And again, just put some engaging content on top.
Will you add these hacks to your marketing strategy? Share below!
Subscribe to the Hustle Newsletter for more.
📝 15 best directories to post your startup. Posted by Xavier Coiffard.
💭 What's your biggest problem as a founder? Posted by TonikeKH.
👀 Share your product and ideal customer profile. Posted by Brandon Strellis.
🤔 What growth tactic have you been wanting to try? Posted by John Ryan.
🔎 Twitter search is more powerful than you think. Posted by Zilvinas Kucinskas.
📚 How did you learn to code? Posted by Zach Ang.
Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.
Hi, indie hackers! I'm Chris Pattison, founder of Squeaky, a privacy-first customer experience platform. We increased our organic search traffic by 19x overnight, and it's stabilized at the new level. Here's the trick we used!
I know this sounds like clickbait, but it's actually comically easy how we did it.
Our blog only has eight articles so far, but it occurred to me that it was enough content to have a "Latest Articles" carousel at the bottom of each post. We added one on October 13, and overnight, our organic search traffic went from ~130 a month to ~2.5K. And it's stayed there!
Although this may not be the exact cause, the odds of the improvement happening immediately after one of the only changes we've made to our blog structure in 7-8 months are vanishingly small.
Ultimately, adding a scalable option that increases internal linking between pages is undoubtedly good advice. After we made that change, our search performance spiked. But, as with all things SEO, there's a lot of ambiguity.
~90% of our backlinks came from our first article exploding on Hacker News, then big domains linked to it from their own posts. Our article was about why we don't use a staging environment. Then, newsletters and websites would write their own articles, like "Should you use a staging environment?" In it, they'd mention that they were inspired by our article to cover the topic. The steady stream of people that still read that article seven months later helped our other articles get discovered and shared.
The remaining 10% came from creating interesting long-form content and sharing it in the right places (i.e. appropriate subreddits). We tend to notice that it then gets added to other people's newsletters, blogs, and websites.
We've also tried reaching out to sites and asking if they'd include our platform in their articles. That sometimes works, but it's not very efficient since many don't reply. We also haven't paid for links.
tl;dr: We got lucky that our first post was somewhat controversial (it wasn't meant to be), and that put us at an advantage from day one. Naturally, some of those backlinks gradually faded away, but we've stabilized and grown after that, mostly by writing great content and sharing it with the right audiences.
We're new entrants in a very established market, including companies like Hotjar, which has teams of writers pumping out endless content. We actually knew there was no hope of Squeaky competing on core topics around the domain.
With that in mind, we took a somewhat different approach: We decided to just write about topics that we're interested in. We took the view that, as a designer and a developer, we have similar interests as our audience. Therefore, we decided to write content for our audience, not necessarily around our product. I actually mentioned it on Indie Hackers at the time.
So, we write about things related to design, engineering, and product development. People who like those topics also need products like ours, and we're much more able to compete for keywords since we're discussing hot topics. It's great for us to write about random topics that we are interested in, rather than churning out generic feature-related content.
We also include product updates in the blog. This is content that we'd write anyway, and it's a nice way to add some product specific content to the blog without selling our features. We're instead just highlighting that we're moving incredibly fast to bring new value to our users!
Discuss this story.
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 James Fleischmann, Priyanka Vazirani, Shân Osborn, and Chris Pattison for contributing posts. —Channing
Get comfortable being alone. You can't engineer meaningful relationships: life knows best when to send the right person your way. There are periods in life when you're alone, there are periods in life that you walk with other people. Try to make the most out of each period of life. Don't try to force summer when it's winter, rather go do some skiing.
agreed! part of life is becoming comfortable with your own company. it's healthy to accept that and embrace it, even. however, it's still a great thing to connect with others, which can be difficult to do as a founder. isolating can become a habit!