Trends, Audience, Validation, Sales 💥

👋 Welcome!

We kick off the week with a great article by @thenextweb on the value of long-term trending topics. As they rightly point out “trending topics aren’t always short-lived.” In fact, if you can identify the right kind of topic at the right time, they are worth tapping into and building content around as they are likely to stick around for a while. Findings show that they can actually last for years on average. Consequently, you want to be able to identify a relevant trend in your industry, build quality content around it and ideally become an authority for it. This would benefit your Google page rankings and increase engagement and organic traffic for years to come. Read the full post to learn how you can try to execute such a strategy. You can also, checkout Exlpoding Topics to keep up to date with rapidly growing topics.

TNW @thenextweb

The content gold mine your brand needs to leverage: Long-term trending topics

tnw.toThe content gold mine your brand needs to leverage: Long-term trending topicsWhen you hear “trending topics,” you probably think of Twitter or other social channels where they show what topics are most buzzworthy on the platform at that moment. Trends can be quite fleeting, with everyone talking about something today and moving on to something completely different tomorrow.…

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🚀 Maker News

Audience

Substack shares the latest newsletter by Petition, explaining how they built their massive readership and became one of the leading paid publications on their platform. And they did this although they are anonymous, had no sales function and didn’t spend any money on customer acquisition. As they rightly conclude, if you have a good idea, “a differentiator”, and the energy to stick it through, do it and “don’t listen to the naysayers.” Read the newsletter to learn more.

Substack @SubstackInc

Anonymous publication, @petition, shares how they built an audience of thousands and a spot in the top rankings of writers on Substack without any social media presence or sales funnel.

petition.substack.comYes it can workNo you don’t need a built-in audience

Validation

This helpful Indie Hackers post by Ihor Stefurak explains how you can use Reddit to validate your startup idea. But once you find the right subreddits using this strategy be careful how you communicate. Start by trying to contribute as much as you can, and then carefully and not directly mention the product you are working on. Read the full thread or the post and comments to learn more.

Indie Hackers @IndieHackers

How to validate a startup idea using Reddit. With 1.5B visits a month, it's accurate and fast, says @ihorstefurak Here is how Ihor researches subreddits and evaluates them for idea validation. 👇

SaaS Sales

In this post, Chris Bakke shares his playbook on how he grew his business from $0 to $2m in less than two years with founder-led sales. This advice is especially helpful to any Maker building a micro-SaaS business. Read the full thread to learn more.

Chris Bakke @ChrisJBakke

Here's the quick story of how we went from $0 -> $2m ARR in <2 years. We did this with founder-led sales, and this also helped us become profitable. We then used a lot of these same techniques to build out our sales team. Let's go.

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💭 Afterthought

To finish the day, a useful post by Vivienne Chen from Bubble, sharing a list of requests for startups from top VC funds. Maybe your idea fits in there? And if so, you can build your MVP using Webflow or Bubble. Alternatively, check out Side Project Stack to view a range of NoCode tools you could use. Read the post to learn more.

Vivienne Chen @ViviennexChen

A little resource I put together for @bubble's entrepreneurs and aspiring founders: a list of tech startup ideas from top VC firms like @a16z @ycombinator @homebrew @TwoSigmaVC and more! Many of these can be built with Bubble as a #nocode web app:

bubble.ioStartup Ideas From Major Venture Capital Funds in 2020 - BubbleFind out what major VC firms are looking to fund in technology and new startups.

Take care and see you tomorrow.

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