What's New: Lesser-known user acquisition opportunities

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Don't limit yourself to "popular" acquisition channels only:

• Some of the most obscure, lesser-known user acquisition channels can actually be the most successful ones for indie hackers. Below, we explore some of these channels, and show you how to start identifying acquisition opportunities everywhere!
• It's already the end of the first month of 2023, but these tech trend predictions are just getting started. Check out what top analysts believe is next in tech, including new ideas for founders.
• Founder Steven hit $1,000,000 in annual revenue by leveraging the power of cold email. Here, he shares how he overcame nearly being (falsely) criminally charged in his previous business, and his steps to making cold emails count.

Want to share something with over 110,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🕵️‍♀️ Exploring Lesser-Known Acquisition Channels

from the Growth & Founder Opportunities newsletter by Darko

In researching which acquisition channels work best for indie hackers (check out the top channels here), I noticed that a lot of channels were only mentioned once or twice, but still worked like a charm.

Below, I'll explore some of those channels, and show you how to start thinking about acquisition in a way where you'll suddenly start seeing opportunities everywhere.

Job boards

A job board is essentially a directory of listings where various companies offer job positions. Those companies have their contact details openly listed. You'll often see the email addresses listed as well.

DesignPac ($20K MRR) is a marketplace where you can hire vetted designers and developers. The company used job boards and emails to acquire its initial users:

I collect email addresses of companies that have job openings for designers, developers, or marketers, and send them pitch emails. Eventually, we created a template for these...so far, it seems to be working.

Niche forums

These days when we say "online community," we often think of sites like Reddit or Slack. What many of us forget is that there are thousands of web-based, niche communities that are still alive and kicking.

You may remember Warrior Forum, an online forum of people looking to make money online. This forum still has hundreds of thousands of users:

WP Courseware ($23K MRR) is a learning management system for WordPress. It used a niche forum like Warrior Forum to get its initial users:

We had never launched a premium plugin before, so we decided to launch our product as a Warrior Special Offer on the Warrior Forum. We initially sold the plugin for $19.99, which included unlimited updates and support. Warrior Forum has a pretty big base, and gave our initial traffic the boost we were looking for.

API directories

API directories are huge. One of the biggest API directories, Rapid API, has over 1.7M users.

Exist ($14K MRR) is a personal analytics service that helps you better understand your life. It had success with a public API:

Something else that helped us out was having an API from an early stage, particularly for developers or users who like to tinker with their data.

We have a small community of users who are creating their own integrations, setting up experiments or analysis of their data, and sharing tools created with our API among our user base.

If you think about it, some of the biggest companies in the past 10 years have had an amazing API. Take Stripe, for example. It started as one simple API, and now it's a multi-billion dollar company.

YouTube and TikTok video mentions

I'm sure you've seen the videos entitled something like: "Five software tools you won't believe exist!"

There are thousands of those videos out there, and the reason is simple: They work.

Chessable ($6K MRR) is a science-based chess education tool that has had success with YouTube mentions:

As we've grown, and more authors have signed up to our platform, referrals and word-of-mouth have become our biggest sources of growth. Prominent YouTubers...often mention us. These referral sources are very valuable to us.

Tactiq, a tool that transcribes Google Meet notes for students, got 150K+ users from TikTok due to people mentioning the company in videos.

Local magazines

Local media wants to feature stories from founders who were born and raised in that particular city (or are residents). This is your opportunity to get free reach, backlinks, and early users.

Honey is a mobile app that helps parents teach their children about money by assigning them chores to complete. Honey got its early users via local media:

We reached out to a couple of local parenting magazines, and they covered us. [This] gave us the best ROI, since it was free.

Smaller cities are best for this strategy. If you're trying to be featured in a New York City magazine, the competition is much greater.

GitHub

When's the last time you used GitHub's search function to find a particular library?

A while ago, I wrote an article about how app stores are powerful search engines. Here's an official statistic from Apple:

I wouldn't be surprised if it was similar for GitHub. MoonMail ($700 MRR) is an email client with1.9K+ stars on GitHub:

The most important source of hype for MoonMail has been the fact that we have open sourced our tool.

I bet a large number of people found MoonMail from typing "email client" on GitHub. GitHub has over 100M users, and a lot of them likely use the search function on the site regularly.

Slashdot

You can think of Slashdot as Hacker News 1.0. It's incredibly popular, and allows you to submit stories for approval.

FireFTP is an FTP add-on for Firefox that got its initial users from Slashdot.

Yelp

Yelp is full of people who are already ready to purchase. Here's what the founder of MyClean ($750K MRR), a cleaning marketplace, noticed:

Right now, our paid ads focus on retargeting customers who have found us before, and public review sites like Yelp. These customers have shown a clear intention to purchase, and quality is important to them.

Sponsoring meetups

If you're a bootstrapped founder, you're probably a bit short on cash. Try sponsoring local events or meetups to reach your target audience.

rmotr ($17K MRR) is a remote programming bootcamp that had success with sponsoring local meetups:

We've set up different scholarship models with associations like WomenWhoCode and DjangoGirls, which has given us a lot of exposure to paying customers.

Changing your thinking about acquisition channels

You've probably heard of "long-tail" in discussions around search engine optimization:

Long-tail applies to acquisition channels as well. Don't limit yourself to just a few channels: The most popular acquisition channels always go through the law of sh*tty clickthroughs. It's the obscure channels that not many people think about that can be effective for you as an indie hacker.

An acquisition channel is just a place or thing (a website, part of the page, a billboard, etc.) that can be viewed by one or more people:

• In cold email, it's the email message that gets viewed.
• In Google Ads, it's that "sponsored" ad in the search results that gets viewed.
• In an Indie Hacker post, it's the Indie Hacker page with the link that gets viewed.
• In a conference, it's that person saying something in front of hundreds of people that gets viewed.

If you think about acquisition channels this way, you'll see that there are a lot more acquisition channels than you think. This means that your opportunities for promotion are endless!

Is there a place on the internet, viewed by one or more people, that's related to your product? Then get the ball rolling, and find a way to put yourself out there!

Have you had success with lesser-known acquisition channels? Share below!

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

📰 In the News

from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko

📱 Instagram has added lead forms for business profiles.

😊 When it comes to the issue of taste, the customer is always right.

💸 With inflation looming, brands are promoting affordability in their marketing strategies.

🥊 ChatGPT competitors.

💻 Yahoo is making a return to search.

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

🔮 Tech Trends Predictions for 2023

from the Hustle Newsletter by Ethan Brooks

The Signal: Every week, our analysts unearth dozens of hidden business opportunities based on concrete, data-backed insights (here are 300+ to get you started).

But, once a year, we set aside our hardcore research and ask the team to offer up their best gut feeling predictions for the changes that lie ahead.

Last year's predictions successfully guessed that BuzzFeed stock would continue to tank (down 84% YoY at the time of this writing), and foresaw ongoing interest in science-based health optimization (here's looking at you, Huberman fans).

But we didn't get everything right. For example, we predicted the return of coworking spaces, but never foresaw the phoenix-like rise of Adam Neumann.

Meanwhile, our bold prediction that crypto would reach 50% penetration seems to have gone up in a puff of smoke (along with, oh, about $2T in investor value).

Gazing into the crystal ball is an imprecise science, but hey, who needs precision when you're still basking in the glow of the resolutions you set a few weeks ago? Let's dive in!

Julia: Trends Analyst

Currently, clinical trial participation is notoriously low. For many diseases, like cancer, <10% of eligible patients enroll in a trial, and ~80% of clinical trials fail to meet enrollment timelines, resulting in the termination of many studies.

But the rise of decentralized clinical trials (DCT) is changing the game by making the process much faster and cheaper:

*Data as of August 9, 2022. Source: CB Insights

As the name suggests, DCTs do not take place at a single, centralized location like a hospital or laboratory.

As they don't require in-person visits, and data is collected electronically, DCTs are carried out at the patient's local health care provider. Thanks to advancements in telemedicine, patients can even participate from the comfort of their own homes.

The trend will only be spurred by improvements in (and adoption of) blockchain technology, which puts patients in charge of who can access their medical data. It also gives medical professionals real-time access to a patient's verified, consolidated medical history.

Increased trial participation will result in better health care outcomes. Consider that, under normal circumstances, a vaccine takes 10-15 years to develop. Thanks to fast-tracked clinical trials, the COVID-19 vaccine was developed in just nine months.

Shân: Trends Analyst

The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a key role in motivation, focus, and drive. But our constant use of social media is wreaking havoc in its regulation.

Studies now reveal the importance of dopamine management, and the negative consequences of perpetual access to cheap forms of dopamine, like TikTok and YouTube.

As we deepen our understanding of how to optimize wellbeing through dopamine, tools will emerge to help us along the way. I predict we'll see things like:

• Dopamine management apps: They'll lead users through practices like Randomly Intermittent Reward Timing (RIRT), caffeine microdosing, cold therapy, and behavioral guides to optimize motivation and drive.

• Dopamine detox guides and bootcamps, both in-person and virtual.

*Global Google search interest, six-month rolling average. Source: Google Trends

• Common OTC supplements that microspike dopamine will be branded and sold as such.

• Dopamine regulation for children, particularly as it relates to screen addiction, will come under the spotlight. Parents will turn (even more) to activities that get kids out into nature and reduce screen time.

Ethan: Trends Analyst

This year, smart founders will start taking Discord more seriously as both a marketing channel and a place to build incredible companies.

*Source: Business of Apps and Levvvel

Most of the marketing people that I know are excited about LinkedIn for audience building. That community has been so starved for good content that anyone with a decent voice can amass followers fast.

But Discord is a far more interesting place for building an actual business. Here are a couple of quick reasons why:

• With 350M+ users, it's already bigger than Twitter (and growing fast).
• Gen Z is native to it, so its importance will grow with their buying power.
• Discord is investing heavily in community building features, including the recent rollout of its paid subscription tools.

In the coming years, I expect Discord to displace major names like Facebook as the primary "digital commons," and brands who act this year will still be early to the party.

So, where are the opportunities?

• Marketing: You can build a community around your brand and own a direct line of communication with them. As with every marketing channel, there will be an opportunity to build agencies, communities, and courses that help other brands tackle this task, too.

• Discoverability: For all its fans, it's still quite hard to find cool Discord groups to join (a problem that Trends member Cameron Zoub is tackling with Whop).

• Apps: Discord recently introduced its own app store. There is a huge opportunity here to build the next generation of $100M apps (similar to opportunities we pointed to in Zoom and Slack). There will also be an opportunity to acquire apps as a marketing channel, similar to the way Noah Kagan grew AppSumo using WordPress apps and Chrome plugins.

Kristin: Trends Community Manager

It's no secret that homeownership is a major challenge for most millennials, and it's looking even bleaker for Gen Z, as institutional investors scoop up more inventory.

In 2022, Propy and Roofstock minted NFTs for the purpose of transacting single family homes, and Tirios and RealT created SFR syndicates using tokenization.

Applying blockchain technology to residential real estate raises a lot of legal questions, all of which will need to be answered by both legislation and case law.

However, the dissenting opinions on the digitization of real estate transactions aren't coming from the lawyers; they're coming from real estate professionals who earn fees from antiquated processes that Web3 hopes to improve. These fees drive up the cost of transacting, thus driving up the cost of owning a home (hello, closing costs).

Millennials are being squeezed financially from every direction, and they're starting to get pissed. Once they realize that Realtor Rhonda and Title Terry on the city council are stonewalling progress that would make homeownership easier and more affordable, they'll push back...hard.

2023 will be a big year for Web3 regulation, in a great way.

Jacob: The Hustle Writer

In 2023, we'll see the rise of brands that make no sense. People will try to replicate the success of Liquid Death and its $700M valuation by taking the company's nonsensical branding strategy to other aisles of the supermarket. What's stopping someone from making the Liquid Death of rice cakes? Put them in a Pringles can. Make the branding rainbows and butterflies, but call it Murder Rice.

Jorden Souza: Trends member and founder of The TikTok Lab

An influx in unconventional organic campaigns will be coming in on TikTok.

This will take form in large brands running "comment campaigns" on viral videos, or influencers catching steam.

It's an easy way to get brand awareness, and usually the creator will make a video responding to the comment in shock, further propelling the brand. It also humanizes the brand and gives it some personality!

Along with this trend, brands are going to start putting their ad dollars behind organic TikToks picking up steam with their product.

This is a double win for both the brand and the consumer, since the brand gets to stop guessing which creative will work the best, and the consumer gets to watch an ad that they don't feel is invasive to their TikTok For You Page.

This happens in the form of Spark Ads. Glossier is a company doing a great job at this, with the campaign around its "you" perfume.

Tam Thao Pham: Trends member and founder of 6Pages

This past year, investors funneled $200M+ into synthetic media startups. Hyperreal synthetic media, from imagery, to voice, to video, will soon shift into the mainstream.

With DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, we're already seeing more expansive use of generated imagery for marketing and design. We'll also see more realistic voice synthesis for games, movies, and personalized business messaging.

Synthetic video is improving, though it can fall into the "uncanny valley" (artificial to the human eye and ear). But the tools are still useful in the creative process, helping teams ideate faster on concepts. Once off-the-shelf synthetic media starts seeming more real, all bets are off.

Abhishek Shah: Trends member and founder of Psychology of Marketing

In 2023, YouTube will come alive as one of the most cost-effective marketing channels in India. With 450M+ active users, the country is already home to the largest number of YouTube viewers globally.

With a rise in Indian income, access to mobile phones, and internet connectivity, I only see this going one way: Up.

What are your predictions? Share in the comments below!

Subscribe to the Hustle Newsletter for more.

🧠 Harry's Growth Tip

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

Don't sell speakers. Sell Keith Moon playing drums in your room.

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

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.

🗓 Steven Hit $1M ARR in 18 Months

by Steven

Hi, indie hackers! I'm Steven, and my API, Proxycurl, is almost three years old. We are heading towards $5M ARR! In this post, I will tell you exactly how we got here.

Proxycurl is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and we sell data enrichment services on people and businesses to other businesses looking to build data-driven applications. Our customers include brand name VC firms, top US banks, and various pre-IPO startups. We are happily bootstrapped and profitable!

Did I also mention the cryptocurrency exchange that I built and failed in, or my paywall-busting Reddit alternative that almost got me criminally charged?

Boy, do I have a story for you!

Humble beginnings

A common theme in the startup world is that founders who do well come from money. However, I most definitely did not come from money.

My mother works as an assistant at a humble hawker store, and my estranged father works as a delivery guy at foodpanda. I am based in Singapore, and grew up in subsidized government housing. I stopped taking money from my parents when I was 15.

However, I am very lucky. I have had access to computers since I was a teen, and am also a programmer. I have been coding since I was 12, graduated from university when I was 26 with a computer science degree, and I built a few products with millions of (freemium) users and five digits in MRR less than a year after.

I am on my fourth company. My previous companies have shut down. With a significant appetite for risk, I invested my savings in cryptocurrencies in 2017, and sold them for my first pot of gold in 2021 at the peak of the crypto-mania.

I also sold a partial stake in my last venture, NuMoney, to a partner. On top of that, Proxycurl is generating healthy profits.

Sure, I did not come from money. But today, I am financially de-risked from the outcome of Proxycurl or any future endeavors. My point is that successful outcomes do not necessarily require old money or pedigree.

Next steps

NuMoney was a pan-Asian cryptocurrency exchange that funded transfers between Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. I had to shut NuMoney down in 2019 because it was crypto winter, no one wanted to trade cryptocurrency, and we needed to make money pronto! Our Indonesian partner proposed that we do the same for cryptocurrency investments, but for real estate in Indonesia. That meant selling partial equity in real estate to people in Indonesia.

The idea was that Bitcoin is volatile, but real estate is not. The Indonesian partner then took over the reins as the CEO of NuMoney, renamed the product to LandX, and I took a step back to assist with product management and development. Long story short, I stopped believing in the executive team of LandX and its business model. The original NuMoney team that I'd hired followed me to build our next venture.

The following product was SharedHere. The sad thing is that I don't remember what SharedHere does. I remember being motivated by my hatred for paywalls. We built SharedHere for a few long months, and all that I got out of the venture was a fraudulent police investigation. My local newspaper (Singapore Press Holdings) instigated a fraudulent report about me hacking its servers. The investigations were dropped, and SharedHere still was not making any money.

I was funding six employees through the income of my side projects, and revenue was dying. I needed to make money pronto.

Then, I remembered a trick to scrape LinkedIn profiles at scale. I knew LinkedIn data was hard to scrape, and is valuable. What if I could offer fresh LinkedIn data on tap through API access? I took a month to build it alone while my team worked on SharedHere. When it was done, I told my team that our work with SharedHere was done because there was no path to revenue.

Proxycurl was born out of desperation.

Build it, and they will...not come

I have programmer's disease. I like to build, which is why I created the prototype of Proxycurl before I talked to any customers. Building products is the easiest thing to do. The hard work comes after launching.

I knew that I had to talk to as many customers as possible. So, I purchased a Crunchbase Pro subscription, and performed a search for all recently funded companies in the space of marketing and sales automation, recruitment tech, and web scraping. Next, I exported the results in .csv format with their corresponding general emails, and began a series of cold email outreach to their general emails.

It worked! I sent thousands of cold emails and received hundreds of responses. Then, with the help of Calendly and Google Meet, my calendar was booked full of calls for a whole month.

Slowly but surely, we got users. And then, we got some revenue. It turns out that some major venture-funded companies were willing to listen to a nobody pitch a LinkedIn scraping API because they, too, were trying to do the same (and failing at it). In the first few months, we hit a few thousand dollars in MRR.

At the time, I also had a habit of writing a daily blog post to practice storytelling and communication. With the launch of Proxycurl, I transformed my efforts from writing about startup stories to SEO optimization.

With SEO and cold email outreach, we grew the company to our first million dollars in 2021.

Building a moat

Sure, Proxycurl was a LinkedIn scraping API at launch. It is not a sexy business, and one of the many lessons I learned from my failures was to never build my castle on top of another. So, it became my mission to transform our business away from just scraping LinkedIn profiles, to being a data enrichment service provider. Today, we make the majority of our revenue from activities outside of LinkedIn scraping.

Instead of shying away from LinkedIn scraping, we leaned into LinkedIn, and embraced the fact that LinkedIn profile URLs are the best identifier for people and business entities. I cannot think of any other identifier system for people and companies with wider coverage and a global presence.

With LinkedIn profile URLs as source inputs, we aggregate fresh data on these entities from a myriad of sources, make sense of them, and sell access to this rich data to developers.

In the long run, we want to be the richest and freshest (private) data store about people and companies worldwide. We can power use cases such as KYC, credit scoring, investment signal identification, etc., through an easy-to-use API.

Building in public

I am starting to build in public because I want people to know about Proxycurl. I am scaling Proxycurl up as we march towards $5M ARR, and I plan to journal my progress and struggles at every step on Indie Hackers.

I created this brand new account on Indie Hackers and spruced up my Twitter profile. In my next post, I will tell you how well this post performed, and if it moved the needle in our metrics!

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, Ethan Brooks, Harry Dry, and Steven for contributing posts. —Channing