What's New: Lead magnets for massive growth

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Lead magnets can bring you tons of traffic:

• Give people something free to attract them to your site, then make it worth their while to sign up. Repurpose paid content into a shorter, free version.
• AI agents can boost your productivity and free up your time. Let them handle basic tasks for you by setting goals for them to execute.
• Every SaaS should be open source says Nevo David, founder of Github 20K. Using open source as a marketing strategy helps him trend consistently.

Many founders have to send cold emails, but few founders want to. Most email software solutions are really expensive, but not Salesforge. It uses AI to help you send cold email sequences that keep your costs low, while keeping your email deliverability high. Try it out! #ad

Want to grow your business? Try running a promo in the Indie Hackers newsletter to get in front of nearly 80,000 founders.

Lead Magnets for User Acquisition 🧲

by Karthik

We built LaunchPedia at the start of this year, and used lead magnets to gain major traffic within three months. Here's how!

Lead magnets

Lead magnets are digital products that you build and distribute for free to attract your target audience to your website. These can be e-books, guides, templates, etc.

We created one lead magnet each month for three months: A Reddit launch e-book, a Product Hunt launch guide, and a directory on places to promote your startup.

Here's how we used our lead magnets to bring consistent traffic to LaunchPedia:

1. Launched on Product Hunt:

We created a launch page for each of our lead magnets, promoted the launch for a week, then actually launched it. We got 4.3K+ visitors to our website, and 100+ newsletter signups, from Product Hunt launches.

2\. Shared in online forums and communities:

We repurposed our e-book into a blog post and a directory, and shared them on Reddit with links. Since it was completely free, and didn't violate the "no self-promotion" rules, our lead magnets stayed on Reddit without any takedowns.

We got 5.6K+ visitors from this.

3\. Grew our email list:

One way to bring consistent traffic and new users to your website is to grow your email list.

Here's how we used the lead magnet on our website to increase email signups:

• Added an exit intent popup:

• Added download forms: We added a download PDF form of our directory pages and blog posts, landing us 500+ subscribers in one week:

• Social media giveaway: We gave away our Reddit e-book on Twitter and LinkedIn to people who commented and retweeted our posts:

This brought us 100 downloads in less than 24 hours.

Since this lead magnet strategy worked for us, we're now offering this as a service. We launched GrowthChefs this week!

Discuss this story.

In the News 📰

from the Growth Trends newsletter

✅ Pre-register for ChatGPT for Android.

💬 Twitter will restrict how many DMs you can send if you don't have Twitter Blue.

💲 Low cost payment processing Stripe alternatives.

🧵 Maximizing Threads engagement.

📒 The ultimate GA4 setup and migration guide.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

Trend Alert: AI Agents 🤖

from the Trends.vc newsletter

Why it matters

AI agents can boost your productivity by making decisions on your behalf.

Problem

Your productivity is limited.

Solution

AI agents = Limitless productivity.

They can think, plan, and complete tasks 24/7, without your supervision.

Players

AI agents:

• Auto-GPT: Open source project that can connect GPT-4 to the internet and use apps.
• Jarvis: Collaborative AI agent that automates workflows and manages code changes.

No-code AI agents:

• AgentGPT: Thinks of tasks to do, executes them, and learns from the results based on a goal you set.
• AgentRunner: Searches and browses the web for data.

People building AI agents:

• Yohei Nakajima.
• Andrej Karpathy.

Predictions

• AI agents will speed up scientific discovery. They can analyze large amounts of data to find new patterns and insights.
• We’ll have easy access to expert advice. AI agents can make informed decisions and offer personalized support based on domain knowledge.

Opportunities

• Get AI agents to do everyday tasks.
• Create content at scale.
• Automate stock trading with AI agents, as they analyze market data to make trades in real time. (This is not investment advice.)

Risks

• Cost: Since AI agents make API calls on their own, excessive usage can lead to a surge in costs.
• Misuse: Bad actors can use AI agents for scams and hacking communication networks.

Hot takes

• We will have less critical thinking skills. We will rely on AI to make everyday decisions, and lose opportunities to think on our own.
• We will have deeper relationships with AI than humans. We will rely more on AI agents for companionship and emotional support.

Haters

“Mass adoption of AI agents will pressure workers to be more productive. We’ll have worse work-life balance.”

Using AI agents will help you accomplish more work in less time, freeing up time for people and things that you love.

“AI should not be regulated because it will stifle innovation.”

Regulation is needed to prevent catastrophic harm.

“With the rise of open source models, regulation will be hard to enforce.”

Open source is an unstoppable movement. It’s up to us to raise our concerns and support regulations that prevent misuse.

“People shouldn’t be fully liable for the actions of AI agents.”

If you delegate an AI agent to represent you and do things on your behalf, you are liable for the actions of that agent.

Links

1. Looking for AI Agent Projects.
2. The Complete Beginners Guide to Autonomous Agents.
3. Why AI Will Save the World.

More reports

Go here to get the Trends Pro report containing 200% more insights. You also get access to the entire back catalog, and the next 52 Pro Reports.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Trends.vc for more.

Harry's Growth Tip 🧠

from the Marketing Examples newsletter

What you are not can be just as persuasive as what you are.

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.

Using Open Source as Marketing 💻

from the Growth & Founder Opportunities newsletter by Darko

Nevo David is Head of Growth at Novu, and the founder of Github 20K, a newsletter on how to use Github as a marketing channel.

Here's why he believes SaaS companies should be open source.

Creating community

I had built startups in the past, and had to build the community around them. But when I leaned into open source, everything changed! There was community already, and other indie hackers were excited to contribute. This created exponential growth. It's one of the best forms of marketing!

99% of the enterprises we signed said they heard of us from a friend.

Stolen code?

Many founders are wary of going open source for fear of their code being used in ways that may not be so honorable. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter! When people take your code, they expand the market. That’s a good thing.

In the end, the best product and marketing wins. As long as you're focusing on those two things, you are on the right track, regardless of your code being used by others.

The background

I joined Novu in 2021 after meeting the founders in a co-working space. They pushed some of their code to GitHub, and posted an article in the DEV community about what they wanted to build. This trended on GitHub with 2K stars in four days, and they raised $6.6M in a month.

I sold the company that I was initially working on in the co-working space, and joined Novu two months later. Since then, we have grown from 2K stars to 20K stars, and we've even signed a partnership with GitHub.

Trending every week

What if you could trend every week on your chosen marketplace? With GitHub, the more engagement you have, the better chance you have to trend. Each time we trend, we get thousands of stars and users. Here's how we do it:

1. Create a draft article on DEV relating to something your product solves.
2. Add a call-to-action in multiple places on the page to gain a star on GitHub.
3. Post during our weekly all hands, and tell everybody to like our article at that time.
4. Send traffic from Reddit to our article, usually from r/javascript or r/react.
5. Two days after the article posts, we start to trend on the DEV community, and it sends traffic to our GitHub Repository. We then contact an influencer to tweet about us for more traffic.
6. Post it on Hacker News.

Hope this helps!

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Growth & Founder Opportunities for more.

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 Karthik, Darko, Dru Riley, and Harry Dry for contributing posts. —Channing