The flywheel that's getting Kevin Indig close to his $1M/yr goal

Kevin Indig is the creator of Growth Memo, a newsletter making $100k/year. He spent 10+ years leading SEO/Growth at Shopify, Atlassian, and G2, and now he's a strategic advisor for Snapchat, Riverside FM, Nextdoor, Bounce, and more.

Needless to say, he knows a thing or two about growing a business.

I caught up with him to talk about growth, SEO, and how he built a 6-figure newsletter flywheel. 👇

The not-so-silver bullet

James: You’re a growth expert. What’s the silver bullet?

Kevin: It very much depends on the company and market. But, as somebody with a strong SEO background, I actually don't think SEO is always the best play.

James: Why not?

Kevin: SEO can be the best play for aggregators who scale with user-generated content or product inventory. Think online retailers and marketplaces.

But integrators, who have to create content themselves, often find themselves with 20-40% revenue contribution from SEO.

It's not nothing, but it's also not the next S curve for the company. Slack is a great example. Product-led growth is a much stronger motion for them than SEO.

Referral loops

James: So what is the best play for indie hackers?

Kevin: Community plays and ambassadorship work really well these days. Figure out who the multipliers in your industry are and give them free value until they promote your product.

James: Anything else?

Kevin: Overall, I don't think the classic growth playbook has changed much over the last 10 years. What has become harder is getting attention.

The playbook for smaller products is still: Build a small but loyal customer base and leverage their help for a bigger launch that gets more attention.

So as an indie hacker, I'd figure out how to build referral loops into the product. And make it so the product becomes stronger from having more users.

James: How do you build a good referral loop?

Kevin: You look for elements that users can share. Maybe it's a form they embed on their site. Maybe it's an invite to a software app (e.g. Slack). The more native to the experience an invite is, the stronger the referral loop.

Atlassian is a prime example because you need to invite your colleagues to Jira for it to become valuable. The opposite of that spectrum is a referral loop where you incentivize users with money, for example when you reward a user because they invited another user. That's what we did at Shopify.

James: Tell me more about the product needing to get stronger with more users.

Kevin: In SaaS, you can also build strong network effects, but you need to find the feature that gets better with usage.

Sometimes, you get scale effects from integrations with other products.

Sometimes, users generate more data that lets you train proprietary algorithms or refine processes to make features better for everyone.

Other times, more users can generate content for other users, like templates.

Programmatic SEO plays

James: If someone wants to go the SEO route, what do you suggest?

Kevin: Figure out free tools (widgets, calculators, etc.) and programmatic plays. Everyone is investing in blog articles, but you want to fish for more scalable approaches.

James: Tell me more about the programmatic plays.

Kevin: Programmatic SEO plays are interesting because you can cover lots of keywords relatively quickly and often use AI to write the content.

James: What’s a good example?

Kevin: In some cases, you find a keyword pattern where you can create content with a repetitive structure.

An example is email templates: People search for email templates for different purposes like "out of office", "cold emails" or "reminders". If you were a SaaS company in the space — say, Mailchimp — you could create a gallery of email templates, optimize each template for its respective keyword, and then create content about each template (what it is, what you can use it for, etc.).

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Differentiated strategies

James: Is SEO your expertise?

Kevin: My expertise comes down to crafting differentiated strategies.

So many growth strategies revolve around operational efficiency but don't have an ounce of differentiation in them. I often see things like "double throughput" or "achieve target X" in strategy decks.

Those points are valid, but they don't explain the unique challenge the company faces or how it can do things differently than competitors to get an advantage.

James: How can indie hackers create differentiated strategies?

Kevin: Richard Rummelt formalized it best with his book, "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy":

1. Spend a lot of time clearly articulating the problem. Analyze what people want and what's already available.

2. Find key insights that allow you to develop differentiation hypotheses. Maybe there is a product-led growth angle the company can leverage, or unique relationships. Maybe it can lean on its customers for growth or give away a lot more value for free than competitors. There are lots of options.

3. Systematically test them.

For me, I noticed that there are lots of newsletters with curated links, but not much in a commentary or editorial style. So, I pivoted to that and now I'm pretty much the only one.

James: Simple, but hard.

Kevin: A lot goes back to actually talking to potential customers. Most people just don't do it.

James: Makes sense.

Kevin: But don’t just focus on the customer. Customer groups are too fragmented, and it's too difficult to express exactly what an optimal solution looks like.

So, while customer insights are deeply valuable, they won't get you all the way. Instead, it takes someone with experience and immersion to eventually make a judgment call on the product and what they think is missing in the market.

You need to learn as much as possible and then display good judgment.

Universal (business) truths

James: You’ve worked with (and researched) lots of big companies. Have you found any universals?

Kevin: That's a good question because I’m focusing all my speaking engagements this year on answering exactly that. There are tons of patterns in all of these conversations: I'll give you two.

First, product experience always matters. Customers in 2024 can live with limited functionality, but the product must look good and be intuitively easy to use. That principle stretches from the website to the product itself.

Second, growth is never linear. It’s the result of many milestones over time. As a result, don't get demotivated when you hit a plateau. Instead, ask yourself how to reach the new S curve with a new approach to customer acquisition, activation, or retention.

A 6-figure newsletter

James: Let’s talk about your newsletter.

Kevin: I write a weekly newsletter called Growth Memo with over 11,000 readers.

James: How did you grow it to 11,000?

Kevin: Free subscribers find the newsletter through Linkedin, X, Google Search, and referrals. Paid subscribers are often free subscribers who want to upgrade their experience and find a link at the bottom of the free newsletter.

James: So you’re monetizing though paid subscriptions.

Kevin: Yes, I have a premium version that offers company deep dives paired with insider insights. But I also have a free version with a top ad. Together with the paid subscriptions, I'm on track to an annualized $100,000, but the year is young!

James: Is $100k normal for a newsletter with 11,000 subs?

Kevin: It's a bit higher than usual because a huge part of my audience is executives and investors. So, advertisers can reach a lot of people that are usually hard to get.

James: How much of that revenue comes from the paid tier vs ads?

Kevin: Currently, about 50% of revenue comes from the top ad, 50% from premium subscriptions. Over time, I'm hoping to tilt it more in favor of subscriptions. My goal for this year is to reach an annual run rate of $90K with subscriptions alone.

James: Where do you source your sponsors??

Kevin: I use Passionfroot for booking management. Advertisers typically reach out to me, which is a very lucky position to be in. I’ve had the pleasure of working with big brands like Wix, Ahrefs, and Demand Curve.

Integration and flywheels

James: I’m guessing your newsletter pays dividends beyond that $100k/yr.

Kevin: Yes. All the different aspects of my business integrate with each other.

James: How so?

Kevin: When I started, I treated each like a silo because I wanted to experiment, and I wasn't aware of how much there was to gain from bringing everything together. But now, every effort I make has ripple effects across my services, from free newsletter to paid newsletter, speaking, and advisory.

I’m working smarter instead of just harder.

James: How does it work?

Kevin: I share my thoughts in the free newsletter, which attracts more paying subscribers and advisor clients. I craft deep dives for paid subscribers, which is information I share with my advisor clients, but also when I speak at conferences. I build my network at conferences and through the newsletter, which helps me find new companies to write deep dives about.

James: Solid flywheel.

Kevin: Yeah, you could call it a flywheel. The beauty of flywheels is that they create focus.

This is the first time I'm building one for myself, but every company I worked for had at least one flywheel at its core:

• Atlassian: New users invite other users

• G2: Reviews rank in search and attract more reviews, all while increasing intent data we sell to companies.

• Shopify: More merchants lead to more integrations and partnerships, which lead to more merchants

James: What makes for a good flywheel?

Kevin: To me, flywheels and network effects are almost synonymous.

It brings me back to Hamilton Helmer's book, "7 Powers", where he says there are seven competitive advantages:

• Economies of Scale: Do something more often.

• Network Effects: Do things with exponential returns.

• Counter-Positioning: Be the opposite.

• Switching Costs: Be hard to leave.

• Brand: Be known.

• Cornered Resource: Be the only one with access.

• Process Power: Do things better / faster.

Network effects, economies of scale, switching cost, and process power can all be flywheels.

James: How are you building yours?

Kevin: For me, everything begins with research, connecting the dots, and telling stories. I start with newsletter content and develop it into presentations, frameworks, and workshops.

James: And how can indie hackers integrate their work like you do?

Kevin: Good integration answers three questions:

1. How do all the pieces work optimally together?

2. How can you create ripple effects?

3. Where does value creation start?

Parting words

James: Alright, any parting words?

Kevin: Avoid venture capital. Being a venture founder is often not worth the stress and money.

James: Not many indie hackers would disagree with that. Tell me more.

Kevin: I know a lot of founders and have spoken to many of them. When you take venture, you better be prepared to work day and night for at least 10 years until you exit. It's something we don't like to acknowledge, but you likely need to prioritize your company over everything else. And even then, it's not guaranteed that you hit a big exit and get rich.

Things can go wrong with the timing or hires, your equity can be diluted, investors push you to exit earlier than you want to, you realize you're not a good CEO, etc. etc. Even when you exit, you might have to keep some of your wealth in shares instead of in cash. There are tons of failure points along the way.

James: For sure.

Kevin: So, rather than wondering how I could make $10 million and more over 10 years, I’m thinking about how to make about a million a year in cash while keeping my margins over 80%.

James: How's that coming along?

Kevin: Let’s say I’m close.

James: Where can people find you?

Kevin: You can find me on X or check out my newsletter, Growth Memo.

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