Content, Product First, Fruits 🍎

Sep 16, 2020

👋 Welcome!

It took Dru Riley three years as an indie hacker to get to the stage where he made money. A software engineer by background, he worked on a number of different content products before launching Trends.vc earlier this year. In August the weekly newsletter made $24k in revenue from subscriptions. His story reiterates the importance of perseverance and consistency. But, as we learn, urgency can also help ignite success. In his interview with Courtland Allen from Indie Hackers, Dru speaks about the difficulty of finding an idea with “product-market-founder” fit, the latest trends in new markets, and how he was able to grow his newsletter to its current success. Listen here.

Courtland Allen @csallen

"Everything can be commoditized except trust and attention." In the past 6 months, @DruRly grew his newsletter from $0 to over $20k/month in revenue. But before that, he tried a bunch of ideas that didn't work. Here's Dru's story 👇 indiehackers.com/podcast/173-dr…

Persisting Through Failures to Find a Winning Trend with Dru Riley of Trends.vcWhen Dru Riley (@DruRly) quit his job, he was more than ready for his mini retirement. Little did he know that it would take him over three years to mak...indiehackers.com

🚀 Maker News

Product First

In his latest newsletter, David Sacks points out that founders usually start with a product idea. They know users will like it but they are still unsure about the “market, buyer or business model”. These get solved as things move forward. He explains that “by launching the product first and learning from its adoption, founders discover the market insight, then build the organization they need to operationalize it.” By reviewing Jack Dorsey’s founding of Square, David looks at this process that led to the creation of a $60 billion company. To learn more read the newsletter.

David Sacks @DavidSacks

New post: Product First Market Discovery at Square and PayPal

Product FirstMarket Discovery at Square and PayPalsacks.substack.com

Giveaways

Great thread by Harry Dry in Harry’s Marketing Examples on how an Instagram giveaway of £8k by Molly-Mae resulted in a return of one million followers across different social media channels. Read the full thread.

Harry's Marketing Examples @GoodMarketingHQ

Last week Molly-Mae did an Instagram giveaway. She spent £8k on gifts. So far it's returned: • 210k Instagram followers • 270k YouTube subscribers • 550k new followers of her brand That's < 1p / fan. Possibly the best ROI I've seen. Let's break it down 🧵

Content Success

Yesterday Steph Smith published her book “Doing Content Right” on Gumroad. Two months ago, she’d asked the community whether they would be interested in learning everything she knew “about writing, creating, and growing a blog to 400k page views in its first year.” They did and the stats below speak for themself! Buy the book here.

Steph Smith @stephsmithio

Today is the day! Just sent out my first ever book, Doing Content Right, to 425 ppl. Some numbers: - Presold $10500 - Took 49 days - Made of 69791 words - From 156k revisions Thank you to everyone that supported this project! I couldn't be happier. ☺️☺️ gumroad.com/l/doing-conten…

💭 Afterthought

I love this analogy by David Perell on developing ideas. The fruits of your labour come at the end, but the reward will be sweet! Take care and see you tomorrow!

David Perell @david_perell

Developing ideas is like building a garden. Your ideas move in three stages: 1) Seeds: Messy personal notes that you don't publish. 2) Trees: Cleaned-up summaries of ideas that build upon each other and develop over time. 3) Fruits: Published work like essays and books.

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