Reaction, SaaS, Design, Community
May has arrived and to start the month, a useful story by Ryan Kulp, who presents his techniques on how to increase your productivity on a bad day. He rightly points out we can’t control when we’re having a bad day, but we can control how we react. Read the full article here.
🌐 Newsbites
Rob Walling from TinySeed has just announced the second batch of winners of their year-long remote accelerator for bootstrapped SaaS founders. They’re also accepting late applications, with the prerequisite being $5,000 MRR. Watch the video and review the winner startups here.
Figma has just completed its Series D funding round ($50 million @ $2 billion valuation), led by Peter Levine at a16z. Many Makers and NoCoders use Figma or Sketch to design websites which then get built using Webflow or other NoCode software. They are now looking at acquisitions and pondering a push into “Visual Communication”. Peter sees us “moving into the decade of design: One where design, and not just code, is at the center of product development and successful organizations.” This sounds very much in line with the growing NoCode & VisualDev movement. Read the full post here.
🌐 Maker Stories
Ankur Nagpal, founder Teachable shares some great insights into his company’s growth over the first 18 months. The first version of their App was built in a few days and the first cash came quickly thereafter. They only rolled out the SaaS platform after 5 months. It reflects the Tweets in yesterday’s newsletters by Michael Gill and Tyler Tringas on the 5-step product cycle and MVP build strategy. Ankur points out that the increased growth in year two stems from hiring growth guru Andrew Guttormsen, who has gone to found the community platform Circle. You can read the full Twitter thread here.
🌐 Build, Launch, Monetise
A great concise post on Indie Hackers by Gaurav Sharma, founder of Helpwise Shared Inbox. He shares with us how he grew his SaaS business to $6K MRR within 77 days of launch and the importance of having a well designed free vs paid plan. You can read the full post here.
Another great post on Indie Hackers by John Saddington on the importance of communication when building your business and community. “If you stop talking to users… you die” so you should be spending at least 50% of your time talking to them and the rest on building a great product. Read the full post here.
That’s it for this week folks! I leave you with an amazing photo from my wife’s colleague of a rainbow over Berlin from Thursday afternoon. Absolutely stunning! Have a great weekend 🌞
Source: Kimberly Harris