Indie Hackers

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AI will create more successful founders. This is what a recent discussion by people who work at YCombinator suggested. Here are the reasons why: 1.) AI reduces the cost of starting many businesses by 10x. Suddenly, you can create something that wasn't imaginable 10 years ago. Here's an example from the eBay era: Pre-eBay, if you wanted to sell something, you'd have to rent a storefront, bring your items to the store, and start selling. Not cheap. Now take this and multiply it by 10 for AI. 2.) To spot opportunities, follow "weirdos on the internet" (this is their phrasing; not ours). You could argue that we (indie hackers) are one of those weirdos ) You also have a bunch of people on Twitter who follow what's going on in the AI world. 3,. In AI, the key word is "headcount. " You can do things that would require way more headcount that you would otherwise with AI. If you code, AI can generate code for you. If you create music, AI can generate music for you. If you do marketing, AI can write for you. We also regularly feature successful bootstrapped founders who started AI SaaS companies in our newsletter: https://lnkd.in/dXCYSq2d Some of those SaaS companies reach $10k or more in a matter of months.

AMA with Noah Kagan happening as we speak! 🚀 Don't miss this chance to get answers from the founder of AppSumo ($80M/yr) and author of Million Dollar Weekend.

AMA with Noah Kagan happening as we speak! 🚀 Don't miss this chance to get answers from the founder of AppSumo ($80M/yr) and author of Million Dollar Weekend.

How to 10x your productivity as a founder: 1. Don't try to do everything everyday. Heard of the "switch cost effect"? Your brain takes a while to switch between tasks. This makes you unproductive. Here's how to get out of this "switch cost" habit: a) Note the recurring tasks you do: - Writing - Sending emails ...etc. b) Organize them into batches Can you do all articles on Monday instead of doing 1 article per day? Tuesday could be for sales and Wednesday for planning. c) Do the quickest task first. The reason: Momentum. You could organize your tasks by how much time each one is likely to take: - do the 5-min task first - then the 15-min task - then the 1-hour task - and finally the 3-hour task h/t to Joshua Tiernan (JT) for sharing this. For more insights on how to be productive as an indie founders, check out our newsletter: https://lnkd.in/gz4PDXjb currently read by over 75,000 founders

How do you grow from $10k/MRR to $60k/MRR? 3 ways: - Affiliates - Resellers - Transitioning form one-to-one to one-to-many This is the exact approach one founder took and got to $60k/MRR. Here's the story: Mac Martine Mac M. was doing pretty well with his SaaS. He was making $8k/MRR by mostly doing one-to-one sales. What took him to $8k wasn't going to be the same thing that got him to $60k/MRR. So he started exploring alternative approaches. Mac started to look for resellers and affiliates who'd sell his SaaS and get a commission. By the time he sold, his $61k/MRR was made up of: - 24% direct customers - 76% sales via resellers You can read more about Mac's story on Indie Hackers: https://lnkd.in/gq-6mqpz If you want more stories like these, subscribe to our newsletter: https://lnkd.in/gdYu3dhE Thanks for reading!

If at first you don't succeed, try again. Here's how a fellow indie hacker made $27k in 2 months from his 2nd startup: Donald Ng (Donald Ng) made a mistake with his first startup: He believe in the mantra "Built it and they'll come". They never came. Actually, the first customer came after 12 months of building. It took another 12 months to reach $1k/MRR. Not ideal. Three months ago, Donald started http://Mida.so, an A/B testing tool. This time, he took a different approach: 1st month: Built an MVP and got as many users as possible to try the prototype out. 2nd month: Launched on AppSumo (mainly for product feedback) and made $17k in revenue. 3rd month: Closed first few customers and reached $10k ARR within 3 days after the AppSumo campaign. Daniel goes into more detail about his AppSumo strategy here: https://lnkd.in/dG__Zit9

Getting 16,000+ signups by trending on Reddit 26+ times Here's the approach that worked 1. Test the waters using niche subreddits Vivek (the founder who did this) started targeting local city subreddit and interest-based groups. He then moved to bigger subreddits after validating his approach with smaller audiences. 2. Manage multiple accounts According to Vivek, this got him (shadow)banned, so be careful with this. You can post on different subreddits using different accounts, then do the initial upvoting using the other accounts. 3. Repeat every 6 months You can basically repost the same post(s) every X months or so on the same (sub)reddits. Vivek goes into more details here: https://lnkd.in/ddGHkUV5

A smart person learns from his mistakes. A truly wise person learns from the mistakes of others. Here are 5 mistakes made by really successful entrepreneurs that you can learn from: 1. Brand-name customers churn if you don't focus on them "My biggest mistake was letting brand-name customers become too significant in terms of usage and share of revenue, and not converting them into long-term Enterprise contracts." This is why many SaaS businesses have a "customer success" team; to convert enterprises. 2. Set up product analytics or risk having a big knowledge gap about your users "Setting up Posthog and finally learning what my users were doing was the turning point in my life as a SaaS creator. I learned what was causing churn and how to win churned users back." 3. Ideas don't matter. The earlier you share them, the faster you know if they're worth your time. One successful founder had a great idea about creating a "Tinder for sport lovers". He spend a year creating it. The idea didn't survive the first contact with reality. 4. Treat your business as you would your mental health (put yourself first). One successful founder hyper-focused on his competitors, while ignoring his own users. This caused MRR to stagnate. 5. Don't focus on outsourcing sales prematurely One founder did this and spent $36k with 0 results. The reason for the failure: If you don't understand your marketing messaging, positioning, etc. you can't provide accurate instructions on what to sell.

Sold a habit tracking app for $10k on Twitter. This is the story: Marc (Marc Lou) is the founder of Habit Garden, a gamified habit tracker he built in March 2022. He started with 200 Twitter followers and no income. Marc met Dan (Dan Kulkov) who taught him about being product-obsessed. This helped Habit Garden grow to $800/MRR and Marc's Twitter followers grew to over 10,000. In March 2023, Marc decided to tweet that he's moving on from Habit Garden. He tweeted that Habit Garden hit 100k visitors and made $4k in revenue for 1 year. One person DMed Marc on Twitter and made an offer to acquire the app. This thread was inspired by this Indie Hackers post: https://lnkd.in/d62ynXmS where Marc shares more details on how he sold his app.