Stallions & Persistence 🌟
☕ Good Morning!
As we read in the recent post by Jennifer Alsever, only 0.6% of the 10,000 companies that receive funding every year ever become unicorns. With that goal in mind, writes Vineet Jain in VentureBeat, many founders raised as much as they could to quickly grow their userbase. The business model often came later. Vineet is advocating for a new kind of startup, “Stallions.” Businesses that don’t look sexy but that are fiscally responsible. Following the current crisis, this trait will be in high demand in the coming years. It is something bootstrapped Makers already do, focusing on revenue growth and especially profitability at an early stage. Consequently, Vineet argues the rules for building a startup change. He believes startups should start off with a viable business model and delay raising funds for as long as possible. This will place them in a much strong position later. Read more.
Photo by Gene Devine on Unsplash
😺 Products of the Day
June 22, 2020
🥇 Fluently Beta: Write fluently in any language.
🥈 OldRobo: Fun gamification to increase employees' engagement at work.
🥉 Done With 2020: Cards Against Humanity meets 2020.
🚀 Maker News
Persistence!
Great thread by War on Weakness summarising a brilliant webinar with David Perell and Pomp (Anthony Pompliano) on how to grow an online audience. Pomp currently runs four digital assets: His Twitter account, a newsletter, a podcast and a YouTube channel. He began with Twitter in early 2017 with around 2,000 followers. By the end of the year, he had over 100k. Later in 2018 did he began his newsletter followed by the Podcast. YouTube came in 2020. For him, “persistence is the most important thing,” as it takes time (years) and patience to build your assets. He recommends building them one by one, focusing on one platform at a time. First twitter and then the newsletter etc. For content production, Pomp prefers “high frequency” and “good enough content.” Quality and speed will come with focus and time. Finally, “you owe the audience everything.” Reply to every comment, every DM, every email. Read the thread or watch the video below.
Solve Valuable Problems
Pete, the founder of No CS Degree, shares with us his learnings on how he’s made $10k online so far. To begin you need to get your mindset right, as “believing is the first step.” Then learn from Indie Hackers Podcasts from experts such as @levelsio, Steli Efti or Lynne Tye. Look for problems in your own life and find solutions. The key is to try and “solve valuable” problems” as “not all problems are created equally.” Find a supportive community from which to find help. When starting to build, use easy NoCode tools, start a newsletter, then begin to monetize and sell to businesses. Be public and share your successes and failures on Twitter. Importantly, have a balance in your life and most of all have fun! Read thread.
Slack & Community
Steve provides us with a brief analysis on why Slack is not made for community building. It’s a great tool for real-time messaging which creates long threads. But the 10k free message limit creates the problem. It means that at a later stage valuable content the community has built up is lost. He recommends looking for alternative solutions such as Discord or Mattermost. My newsletter from yesterday on online communities also revolves around this ecosystem. The post finishes with some useful comments on other available options. Learn more on Indie Hackers.
Content Marketing
Oliver Meakings has a written a post on Indie Hackers on how to begin with content marketing. His five tips include: Start now and create something that is valuable to your target group. If you don’t like writing try podcasts or videos. Engage with influencers and experts, curate their content and begin to become an authority in your own right. Lastly, early content is to make people aware of you, sell later. Read more.
🖥️ NoCode & Automate
Automate → Squarespace
Automate.io announces that you can now connect over 100 apps to Squarespace and run smart workflows. This includes automatically synching new orders and transactions to your marketing, sales, and payments apps. Read more.
Integromat Production
Kieran tweets a summary of the Integromat workflow he used for making the latest Growth Lessons. Other touchpoints within the workflow include Airtable, Wordpress, MailerLite and Twitter. A very hypnotizing process! He says he will produce a tutorial on how it is done shortly. View Tweet.
Business App Challenge
thunkable is launching a NoCode app-building challenge for the summer. The goal is to create an app for your business or team that helps with operations, productivity, or remote work. The winner will receive a $200 Amazon gift card. Learn more.
Payments for SaaS
NoCodeDevs recommends to check out payhere if you need to accept payments for your SaaS projects. Their tools allow you to accept re-occurring payments, one-off payments, donations and storefront payments. They charge 2% on top of your Stripe fees. Learn more.
💭 Afterthought
To finish the day some poignant thoughts by Dave Nemetz on the future of media companies. Like many creators of newsletters and podcasts, he believes direct-to-consumer media will be the winner. They won’t need to rely on SEO, social media or aggregators for distribution. Instead, they’ll own their customer relationship! Take care of each other and see you tomorrow.
If you enjoy my newsletter, please spread the word to other interested Makers, NoCoders or aspiring entrepreneurs. Let’s grow SpringUp Stories and the Maker community together. You can also find me on Twitter and contact me via DMs or by replying to this email. I'll be back tomorrow with another newsletter. If you're getting value out of this newsletter please consider buying me a coffee. ☕
