What's New: On hiring family and friends

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Is hiring family and friends a recipe for disaster?

• You already have trust with family and friends, which is hard to build with strangers. But when you hire people you know, you are also taking away their ability to talk trash about their boss.
• Are you a European founder searching for the best platforms to start building in public? These tips can help! Hint: You probably want to stay away from TikTok.
• Founder Marie Martens hit 30,000 users with no marketing for her form-builder, Tally. Here's how she differentiated her product in a very crowded market.

Want to share something with nearly 95,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🏠 Hiring Family and Friends

by Sam Well

My business is to the point where I need to hire help. It feels a lot easier, and more meaningful, to hire someone that I already know than to hire out. But people keep warning me not to work with friends and family, and I've also heard a few horror stories. Is it really that risky?

Reflect on the communication skills

Justin Chu believes that it really depends on the people involved:

If both you and the people you hire have good communication skills and empathy, and are willing and able to talk through difficult things, I think it is mostly upside.

If both sides aren't prepared, or don't have all the needed tools, then problems can be greatly magnified since there are deep personal attachments. I think it makes a lot of sense to approach this cautiously and thoughtfully, but if you feel confident that it would work well after that, I think it can be really positive.

A few tips come to mind:

• If you and the friend or family member has ever had a serious conflict as adults, how was it handled? Do you feel that both sides were treated fairly and with respect?
• Don't look for red flags just from them, also look for red flags in your own behavior. Sometimes if the other person is more passive, you might actually be overly aggressive without realizing it. It could lead to unspoken hurt feelings.
• What is their work ethic like? Does it align with your own? A good test is to work on a small project with them and see how well you work together.
• Remember that every relationship is different. Reflect on each one individually instead of jumping in with sweeping assumptions.

Avoid informality

Jeremy Olson partnered with his dad and brother for six years on a mobile app company, Tapity, and also hired several of his best friends along the way:

Despite some tremendous ups and downs, I made it through with stronger relationships with everyone. But, at the same time, there are several points where things could have gone horribly wrong. Although it can be rewarding, it's also incredibly risky. Going down this road will almost certainly lead you into situations where you need to either compromise your relationship, or your ability to make completely objective decisions (i.e. if they aren't performing well).

Avoid the trap of informality. With friends and family, it's even more important to put things in writing so that everyone goes in with the same clear expectations. It is very easy to be loosey-goosey, then realize that you're really not on the same page, which can put your relationship at risk in a major way. Do you think that you could give candid feedback to them (and vice versa) without it becoming dramatic? Do they actually have what it takes to add real value to the business?

If things go south, both sides need to be prepared to forgive and forget if the relationship is important to you. Business and money can bring out the worst in people, including yourself, so go in with your eyes wide open. Imagine them making a mistake that causes the worst case scenario to happen. If you don't think that you could forgive such a thing, and you value your relationship, it's probably better to not get into it in the first place.

On the other hand, there are lots of examples where things do work out. You already have trust, which takes time to build with strangers. You also get to spend a bunch of time with people that you love, which can deepen your relationships.

The hardest part

Anil K. makes a good point: When you hire friends or family, you are taking away their freedom to talk behind their boss' back.

Have you hired family or friends? Share your experience below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

📱 NFTs are coming to Instagram this week.

📉 Bitcoin has fallen to a 2022 low.

🧟‍♂️ Companies once called "unicorns" are becoming "zombies."

🎧 Spotify will use emotions and AI to create your listening experience.

👩‍🏫 Colleges are offering TikTok classes for influencers.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

💻 Tips For Building in Public as a European Founder

by Vasco Monteiro

Building in public is challenging, but it's an extremely powerful marketing strategy to get any startup off the ground. Here's what I've learned from a year of building Vettted, a productized services marketplace, in public!

Why you need to build in public

Things get easier when you show the world what you're creating:

• You get to create your own narrative that an audience can follow and get behind.
• Putting yourself out there builds trust, transparency, and authenticity.
• You get immediate feedback from people following your journey.
• You can attract talent and customers to your business.

Where to build in public

You can do this literally anywhere:

• Indie Hackers: +1 for a supportive community.
• Twitter: +1 for a lot of makers.
• TikTok: +1 for the crazy organic reach.
• Reddit: +1 for a super loyal community.

Don't focus on more than two at once. You don't have time to learn the algorithms of more than two social media platforms. Pick two and go for it!

I chose Twitter and TikTok: Twitter, because I could just snap a picture of whatever it was I was working on (my desktop setup, a Figma mockup, etc.), and TikTok because of its organic reach. But I later learned that, for EU-based founders looking to reach a worldwide audience, TikTok might not be the best idea. More on that below.

The issue with TikTok

Even though the organic reach can be insane, there's a downside to it.

If you're in a European country and want to reach the US, it's virtually impossible. TikTok's algorithm shows your videos to people that live in your country, and it's impossible to change this. This guy explains how he tried and failed.

You can use a VPN, change your location in the App Store, or remove your SIM, but it still won't work. So, if you want to reach an audience outside of your country, note that it'll be difficult with TikTok.

Twitter

Twitter is a great place to #buildinpublic. Just look at the organic reach that I was able to get in a short amount of time:

We delayed our launch because I wanted to add more features. Eventually, we just decided to launch with an unfinished product, and that was the right thing to do.

Tips for building in public

1. Embrace your accent: Assuming that you want to reach a global audience with your startup, you'll be speaking in English. The first thing you need to know is that, if English is not your native language, people will judge you for that. But keep pushing through!
2. Face, face, face: Make sure to show your face. People connect with people, and while building in public, you are the face of the business. Don't be afraid to be on camera. If you want to be in the 1%, you need to be willing to do what the other 99% aren't doing.
3. Consistency: I know it sounds cliché, but consistency truly is the key to success. (This isn't just for European founders, of course.)
4. Know what to post: Your goal is to document the process. Share wins, losses, and all the boring stuff. Share every little thing, from registering your company and buying your domain, to setting up an SSL. All of that matters when you're building in public. You are looking to tell a story.
5. Replies: Reply to every single comment. Try not to use low effort replies. When people take time out of their day to leave a comment, make sure you also take time out of yours to properly address them. The people who interact are your most valuable followers.
6. Tie it all up: Leverage everything that you've been posting to create a piece of longform content. You can also compile everything that you've been posting and launch a mini-docuseries narrated by you. Check out mine here on YouTube!

Just get started! If you're currently building a startup, go to your camera roll and post something on Twitter. Open Instagram and record a video update. Just start.

What are your tips for reaching international audiences? Share below!

Discuss this story.

👥 10M Users, Zero Funding

by Aytekin Tank

Leadership:

The more you delegate, the more you’ll succeed.

You can be great at some things, but not everything. If you delegate your less proficient tasks to others, you can dedicate more time to your best work. Start with small projects. Let people learn and develop confidence, and don’t expect them to improve instantly.

Discuss this story.

📝 Marie Martens Hit 30K Users With Zero Marketing

by Marie Martens

Hi indie hackers! I'm Marie Martens, and in summer 2020, me and my cofounder Filip decided to build the simplest way to create forms for free. We wanted a simple, powerful form-builder that allows users to create any type of form without breaking the bank.

We just reached 30K users and $17K MRR! Tally is a freemium product where we offer 99% of our features for free, combined with a small subset of paid features for teams and companies (Tally Pro).

AMA!

How does it work?

We entered a very competitive market, and as a bootstrapped team of two, we don't have the marketing budget of the big players out there. This is what our growth flywheel looks like:

Here's how it works:

1. Offering Tally for free lowers the barrier to trying it out, and creates positive word-of-mouth.
2. Free users have a "Made with Tally" badge on their forms, which turns them into our biggest promotors.
3. About 3% of our free users upgrade to Tally Pro, which is how we make money.

How do you manage the costs of the free users?

We spend around 50% of our time (team of two) on customer support for both free and paid users, and the costs to run Tally are relatively low. I shared a breakdown of our monthly costs here. It's a bit higher now, and doesn't include our salaries, but I hope it gives you an idea!

How did you acquire your first users?

We mainly used cold outreach in the first few months. We sent a ton of DMs. We also kept sharing our progress and product updates on Indie Hackers, Twitter, Reddit, and many wonderful no-code communities. Building in public helped us to spread our story and reach other startups. We learned a lot from the Indie Hackers community, and love that we can contribute by sharing our learnings in public as well.

Whenever we'd see someone asking a question about an online form-builder on social media or forums, we would try to mention Tally. As our user base grew, people started recommending us as well, which is even more powerful. I described how we got our first users more in detail in this post!

What's your tech stack?

Tally is made with TypeScript, React, Next.js, and Express, and runs on GCP's Cloud Run. Feel free to ask my technical cofounder Filip for more details!

What's your churn rate?

We have 30K total users, with ~650 of them being paying users. Our monthly churn is around 8%. It hasn't really stabilized yet. It's relatively high for SaaS, but from our understanding, it's not uncommon for form-builders since there's lots of project base usage.

How long did it take you to become profitable?

Tally, as a product, was profitable quickly since our costs are low. But that doesn't include our living costs. We just started paying ourselves a (small) salary this year. So, it took us around a year after launch to become profitable.

What is your competitive advantage?

I think that three tactics really helped us grow:

1. The product being largely free.
2. The product is very simple to use.
3. We have a heavy focus on providing personal customer support.

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

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 Sam Well, Priyanka Vazirani, Vasco Monteiro, Aytekin Tank, and Marie Martens for contributing posts. —Channing