⚡ IL - Early days: try things that DON'T scale, how to beat big competitors, 180 link building strategies

Hi there.
In August, I redesigned my email footer and I forgot to link Twitter share correctly. So all people that tried sharing this way were not able to share it.

🙏🙏 To compensate all the missed sharing opportunities, can you please retweet this tweet. A humble request to read email after retweet.
Thank You.

Please support by sponsoring an Indieletters issue sent to our 1400+ subscribers (74% US audience), open rate is 46%, CTR is 14.94%.

For a small price.

Book an available slot here 👉 Indieletters Sponsor Calendar

• Use Edit this website extension that allows you to edit webpages so you can see effects in realtime. Best for non-technical people by @aminmemon

• Have you tried Quora ads? They are very cheap. And lead gen forms are now available for all advertisers.

• Streak is the best CRM for Gmail. It offers powerful email tools entirely inside Gmail. It can be used to track sales, partnerships, support, hiring, deal flow, and much more. It has 700K active users.

• Scrapbook is a 250+ SaaS Growth Tactics Database used by hyper-growth startups. These tactics fit to all whether you have million dollars or bootsrapping yourself from scratch. You can filter growth tactics by funnel step, tag, and required budget. And get notified whenever a new tactic gets added. 👉 Get this SaaS Growth Bible now!

• To unlock more snippets, come Inside.

Early days: try things that don't scale by @primer
Even unicorns started by doing things that don't scale. AirBnb. Tinder and all other big guys did similarly.
Mick's tool is in the DJ niche. Last week, he met a guy who was in the band. He was serving him there. But instead of consuming his time, he handover this card to him so he can check in leisure time.

Here is the next-level marketing. ClickToTweet this image. 👇

What is your typical launch strategy? by @rfizzy

1. Build an email list before you launch. (Hint: Read my previous newsletter where I shared how someone got 500 subscribers for his SaaS before launch)
2. Post on relevant subreddits + BetaList
3. Post on Hacker News
4. Post on IndieHackers
5. Launch on Product Hunt
6. Follow up with early potential customers (i.e. those who have provided emails early on to help validate the idea)
7. Cold Emailing potential leads
8. (Sometimes) Experiment with ads
   Always be in "launch-mode" -> launch a new product, new feature, new blog, a new newsletter, etc. You can also relaunch on PH by saying "IndieLetters v1.1"

How to beat big competitors by @karthik_2206
It is very likely that every startup competes with a large behemoth. That's a reality that all of us have to come to terms with.
The bigger company is always going to have greater resources than you. So, competing on features is not a smart battle.
Here are some other battlefields to compete & get the industry share:

• Niche it
  Instead of targeting the entire market, have a narrower focus. This allows you to give a more tailored solution albeit to a smaller audience.

• Use customer service as a weapon to beat big competitors
  Many companies suck at customer service. So leverage the customer service for marketing as well as having loyal customers.
  And I can't stop myself from sharing NameCheap, which provides excellent customer service. And it's the reason I have never purchased any domain from any other registrar.

• Humanizing the product
  Have you ever heard about ConvertKit? They still help each new user to get on-board. And in this way, ConvertKit has grown to $1.6 million MRR.

• Make your startup more loveable
  Start supporting any NGO, such as Onepercentfortheplanet or Onetreeplanted. And add it in the footer. This way you will make your startup more loveable.

Put a welcome mat (pop-up) on your site to increase conversions
Welcome mats are popups that display immediately upon entering a site. Some visitors still may not like it, but the benefits could outweigh the costs.
The hard truth is that 70% of your website visitors won't come back. Get their attention right away by throwing a popup with a strong call to action when they land on your site.
You can display targeted offers, showcase new products, highlight your best content, invite them to join your email list, and so on. Just make sure that you're adding value.
Caution: There's a Google interstitial penalty if you use them on mobile.

How to get user feedback by @kiza
There are three ways of getting feedback on your app:

• Watching how people use your app
  Watching how people use your app will give you tons of insights into how you can improve the usability of your app.
  You will get small insights that are likely too small to be worth submitting a feedback form for but when you fix a bunch of these small niggles you will greatly improve your product.
  The free tier of Hotjar will easily be enough for most indies to get started.

• Talking to your customers
  Talking to customers will give you insights that you would not able to understand just from watching them use your app.
  You can get feedback by sending personalized but automated emails asking for feedback.
  Remember, for every customer suggestion there are likely another 10 with the same issue that haven't bothered to give the feedback.

• Share a roadmap to trigger Cunningham's Law
  As per Cunningham's Law if the customer has a different idea of what they would benefit more from; they would be more likely to correct me than if I was to simply ask for their advice.
  Here's the email you can experiment with:
  ""
  Hi,
  I'm wondering if you could give me some advice, recently I've been focusing on increasing the value that Absentia provides.
  Here are the features I'm thinking of focusing on next to improve Indie Letters:

• Feature 1...

• Feature 2...

• Feature 3...
  Do you have any thoughts on these features yourself, would they be useful to yourself? Or any other advice on how to improve our offering?
  We pride ourselves on being fast to act on our customer's feedback. Being a small company, we cherish any advice we can get from our customers.
  Any feedback, good or bad would help greatly in focusing our efforts on what matters to our customers.
  All the best,
  ""

1 . 180 link building strategies

2 . How to run promotions without deep discounts by @simbar

3 . Patreon CEO shares his most epic failures (35 mins video) by @nscode

• https://altabits.substack.com are short essays on building tech products and companies based on own experience and actionable tips from industry experts by @dcedrych

• https://nocodebriefs.com is a free weekly newsletter that rounds up the latest news, products, and tweets from the no-code universe in a quick bite-sized read by @shahulnocode

• https://www.dpulls.com is a Github app that makes sure your dependents pull requests will be merged in the correct order by @walidb

• https://www.hockeystack.com is an analytics tool for non-technical people. You integrate with one line of code and can see all your users' actions on your dashboard by @michael_fenix

• https://coursemaker.org is a new platform for self-hosted online courses for developers. Slick course creation experience, open-source Gatsby theme if you want to roll your own, affordable hosted option if you prefer to just focus on your course creation by @christophergs

• https://privateequitylist.com is an open database that features over 4000+ PE, VC and angel investors + accelerators, grants and etc. focusing on emerging markets and is aimed at delivering investor lists in 3 clicks without any irrelevant information and registration requirements by @vadimzhirkov

• https://resumemaker.online - design your resume in real time and download a print-ready PDF for free, no sign-up required by @fer_momento

• https://makerthreads.co is a minimalistic startup thread for modern makers by @lachlankirkwood

1 / Increase interest in your special offers with in-app messaging, why are your paid conversions low?
2 / Use GIF & memes for free brand exposure, reach a new audience by purchasing an old Chrome extension
3 / You don't need a million followers to make an impact, get in your customers' head with these 3 questions

P.S I will not share all these newsletter issues here. Subscribe now, so you never miss any of these highly curated newsletters.

• This email may contain affiliate links to products. Please support by sponsoring an Indieletters issue sent to our 1400+ subscribers (74% US audience), open rate is 46%, CTR is 14.94%. Book an available slot here 👉 Indieletters Sponsor Calendar

• I won't lie. I've been working on this for ages! If you're feeling generous please show some love by a tweet🙏

• https://indieletters.com/