What's New: Do founders really need an existing audience?

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Is audience-led growth misleading for founders?

• "You need an existing audience to achieve ___." Here's why this advice may not be true, and why your offer > your audience.
• The average person spends $1,500 after a breakup. These new product ideas can bring you major bucks to help the brokenhearted.
• Indie hacker Fed is bootstrapping Hive Index and GummySearch, while consulting as a fractional CTO and traveling the world. Below, he shares his advice on cash vs. equity in consulting work, and juggling multiple projects at once.

Want to share something with nearly 90,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

⚖️ Product-Led Growth is Better Than Audience-Led

from the Growth & Acquisition Channels newsletter by Darko

Product-led growth. Audience-led growth. Community-led growth.

These buzzwords can mislead founders. Last week, this indie hacker asked a question about finding paying users for founders with no audience, and many other founders are in the same boat.

Founders with no audience, community, or super duper product that sells itself are actually the rule, not the exception. But here's the thing: I don't agree with the standard advice that you actually need an audience. I've analyzed how over 450 founders got paying customers (see Zero to Users for more details), and the majority did it without having an existing audience.

Top channels

Here are top channels for getting your first X users, in order of success:

1. Marketplaces and app stores. I recently wrote an Indie Hackers post on this.
2. Product Hunt.
3. Reddit communities.
4. Cold email outreach.
5. "Powered by" marketing. See this Indie Hackers post for more on this.
6. Hacker News.
7. Having an existing audience.

Note that having an existing audience ranked seventh on the list of most successful channels for founders. Most channels tapped into someone else's existing audience. One way to do this is by reaching out to people who follow an influencer in your niche. You can also use a directory to cold email relevant prospects.

Don't allow yourself to be limited just because you don't have an existing audience. You can get paying users without that. In my experience and research, what matters the most is your offer. What product do you provide? What problem do you solve for people? Lead with that, and see if there's some interest.

Examples of clear offers

Take Exploding Topics, for example. Here is the offer:

It's pretty specific, and it's something that you could put in front of 200 people to see if they're interested.

Support Shepherd also has a great example of a straightforward offer:

Another example is AirHelp:

These are all examples of 1-2 sentence offers that you could present to people to see if they're interested.

There's evidence that this approach works

MarketingExperiments is a team of researchers that has conducted thousands of experiments on what makes people say yes to your offer.

The team came up with the saying "clarity trumps persuasion." In other words, making your offer more clear can increase sales. This before and after illustrates the point:

Here's another example, in which the researchers have taken the most important points from the offer to make it more clear and specific:

Before:

After:

The conversion rate of the original was 4.86%. The conversion rate of the optimized version was 14.65%. That's a 201% relative difference for a concrete offer. Let that sink in.

Expose your offer to a sample of people

Once you have your offer, determine whether people are willing to give you their email and money for it.

Depending on where your potential customers are, you can use channels like Product Hunt, Reddit, Facebook Groups, forums, and even ads (if they're cheap enough) to see if people bite.

Remember, your offer is a set of words. If your chosen channel doesn't accept external URLs, just express your offer in a post. For example, if you were AirHelp, you could post this on Facebook:

Hey guys, I'm making a tool to help you get up to $700 for cancelled/delayed flights that happened over the past three years. So far, I've helped process a few refunds for friends. Looking for a few beta testers to see if this can scale. Let me know if you want in!

I did this multiple times for various products, and it worked well.

Do you think that offer-led growth is superior to audience-led growth?

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Growth & Acquisition Channels for more.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

📺 Substack is testing a native video player.

💍 India's first metaverse marriage.

✋ The "Zoom ceiling" may hurt opportunities for promotion.

🏥 The gig economy wants to solve healthcare's burnout crisis.

💲 YouTube is considering adding NFTs as a revenue source.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

💔 The Big Business of Breakups

from the Hustle Newsletter by Julia Janks

The Signal: We know what you're thinking. Why are we diving into breakups? Let's just say it's been a tumultuous start to 2022 for our analysts, with Taylor Swift's latest album blaring through the virtual corridors of the Trends office.

Breaking up is big business. It turns out that unnamed members of the Trends team are not the only people spending big bucks to mend the shattered pieces of their broken hearts; the average person spends ~$1.5K after a breakup.

Expenses include new clothes, nights out, weekends away, comfort food, beauty treatments, moving out, and even learning to drive. Singles Day in China is the biggest global shopping day:

*Source: CNBC, TechCrunch, and CNBC

Potential to help people navigate the stormy seas of a romantic separation is only rising. Last year was dubbed "the year of the breakup," as many relationships buckled under the pressures of quarantines, long distance, and lockdowns.

Before you shoot the messenger, we're not advocating that you profit off of the misfortunes of the heartbroken. But there are opportunities to help plenty of newly single people, including angsty teens on TikTok who have viewed videos with the #breakup hashtag an eye-watering ~17B times.

*Source: Google Trends

1. Events and celebrations:

Gone are the days of quietly crying yourself to sleep to get over a tough breakup. It's now totally acceptable (encouraged, even) to celebrate in a very public way.

Breakup celebrations, and associated paraphernalia, are trending on Pinterest, with "divorce party ideas" and "breakup cake" projected to be up 55% and 100%, respectively, from last year.

You could get in on the trend by providing breakup-themed gift boxes and cards, balloons, rental neon signs, T-shirts, or (if you're feeling really petty) custom piñatas. Take it one step further by offering all-inclusive getaways and retreats for the newly single.

2. Marketing collaborations and sponsorships:

You don't have to have a breakup product or service to get in on the trend.

Follow in the footsteps of companies like Babe Wine, which collaborated with Bumble in 2020 to provide Instagrammers with the chance to have their breakup costs (up to $700 for furniture removal and Babe wine) covered by the companies.

A Swedish hotel pulled a similar stunt in 2017 when it offered refunds to any couples who divorced within a year of having a romantic getaway at the hotel.

Use your existing product or service to help people get over their separation, while earning some social media cred. You could also combine trends by sponsoring a breakup party or night out on the town.

*Source: Babe Wine's Instagram

3. Breakup services:

Onward is a New York-based breakup concierge that connects customers with a range of services including moving, storage, pet care, and therapists. Its packages range from $200-1,050.

*Source: Onward

Instead of offering the full service, you could niche down on specific pain points. One example: Getting rid of unwanted stuff. You could provide on-demand storage facilities to help people outsource the ever-awkward "returning your ex's stuff" moment.

Not petty enough? You could take inspiration from Never Liked It Anyway, the "eBay of Emotional Baggage," which encourages the newly single to turn mementos into cold hard cash, rather than throwing them out the window.

Other ideas for services include:

• Post-breakup counseling and financial planning.
• Co-living spaces for people who need temporary living arrangements at short notice.
• Legal documents (i.e., cohabitation agreements) for unmarried cohabitating partners seeking legal protection in the event of a breakup.
• Breakup insurance.
• Online emotional support platforms (like Circles, which recently raised $8M).

Would you build in the breakup space? Share your thoughts below!

Discuss this story, or subscribe to the Hustle Newsletter for more.

🧠 Harry's Growth Tip

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

“Things you can’t say literally can often be said laterally.”

— David Abbott

Go here for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.

🌎 Fed Bootstraps, Consults, and Travels

by Fed

Hey folks! I'm Fed, and I've been living the indie hacker life for about a year now. I'm a software developer from NYC, and I left my job at the end of 2020 because I missed building early-stage products. I'm now bootstrapping two products:

• Hive Index is a directory of over 1.2K online communities. Inspired by the supportive power of online communities (Indie Hackers in particular), I decided to make community discoverable for everyone.

• GummySearch is a Reddit audience research SaaS. It's a tool to quickly find online communities on Reddit where your target customers hang out. You can discover what their pain points are, what solutions they need, and what they are eager to pay for. This helps to quickly validate business ideas and find potential customers.

Between the two of them, I'm currently at $500 MRR. I spend about half of my working time on my personal products, and the other half consulting for early-stage startups as a fractional CTO.

I have been nomadic since January 2021, along with my wife and cat. We roadtripped across the US last year, and currently, we're at the tail end of a trip to Florida, Texas, Costa Rica, The Virgin Islands, Mexico City, and California. We're settled in Mexico City for a month at the moment, and we'll return to NYC in March. It's been an incredible experience, and I truly feel that the change of scenery gives me energy and makes me better at my work.

AMA!

How long do you usually stay with a startup as fractional CTO?

The time commitment differs quite a lot! For example, here's the timeline for my current clients, both early-stage startups:

• One is a two year plan, and I'm quite involved as an operator and a co-owner.
• One is a four month active development project, followed by a technical advisor role for two years. It's more like a couple of hours a week spent talking to candidates and participating in architecture reviews.

Now that I'm done with the active part for the second one, I'm thinking of the kinds of projects that I'd like to take on in the future. I think my ideal scenario would be more 2-3 month active projects, and if we have a great working relationship (and I believe in the future of the company), I could stay on as an advisor.

How technical are the startups that you consult with?

My current clients are actually both quite technical, but don't need a full-time CTO or engineering team right from the start. Most startups don't, in my opinion. I provide a sweet spot between getting enough done in a short amount of time so that they can go to market, and buying them the time to find product-market fit before raising gobs of money and hiring a full-time CTO.

One of the startups is a SaaS in the legal-tech space with a really long sales cycle. The product is obviously very important, but most of the current efforts are on the commercial side. The other is a women's health startup that will require a very technical full-time CTO to handle data eventually, but my MVP got them from 0 to 1K customers, and a great round of seed funding. Now that we've got that out of the way, we're hiring the team that will build the long-term vision, which is much broader than what we scoped for the MVP.

Do you find it hard to switch between different projects?

I love working on multiple projects. It has some downsides, but I think it's a great way to de-risk, and also to not get burnt out. If I'm stuck on something for one of my projects, I can switch to another and get my momentum back, while thinking of the best solution for the first one. Background processing is quite a powerful concept.

I actually think that my tech stack is what enables me to work like this! Across my projects and consulting work, they are not always identical, but I try to keep them very similar.

I've developed a boilerplate with my preferred tech stack that lets me get up and going in a very short amount of time. Of course, when working with external clients, you need to make sure that this tech stack works for their products. This really only works if you're starting a codebase from scratch for them (which I am for the most part).

The best thing is, because I work across multiple codebases, I can reuse certain features. For example, I implement transactional email or a subscription billing set of features, and if I need to implement that in other projects, I have a huge head start because I've already built it out. The more projects I start, the easier each additional project is.

How do you determine compensation for a fractional role?

Cash and equity are a sliding scale, and where you would land on that will depend on what you're looking for, and the relationship that the startup desires. The same goes for time.

For active projects, I work between 10-25 hours a week, charging $100-150 per hour, depending on the length of project (more time is discounted). I've heard of some folks charging much more. However, in my case, I'm working with people I know. I'm also taking equity, so I'm happy with my rate.

To determine equity, I'd recommend deciding on your hourly rate and estimating what the project will cost overall. If that doesn't fit within your client's budget, take part of your payment in equity. Personally, I'd never go full equity, but that's just me. For advisor relationships, check out "The FAST contract" for some good industry baselines for time, stage, and equity ratios.

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 Darko, Priyanka Vazirani, Julia Janks, Harry Dry, and Fed for contributing posts. —Channing