In early 2021, MeetEdgar was going through a period of stagnation that forced Laura to make some tough choices. And when she started reaching out to other Founders in her circle about what she was going through, it became apparent that this kind of downturn wasn’t uncommon — it was actually the norm: I think it’s good to talk about because you often don’t hear about any kind of ups and downs with SaaS.
For years now I’ve been obsessed with understanding unique product cultures and how they enable companies to build world class products. One particular product culture that has always fascinated me is Amazon and their unique writing culture. I love talking to Amazon employees about how the writing culture is interwoven into their product development process and the pros and cons of it.
One of the biggest myths/illusions that creatives make who want to build a passive income business is that the market is saturated. The market feels saturated when you’re not making sales. But here is a tip to help you stand out and make more sales: value-adds. Value-adds are features, improvements, or additional material that add utility or desirability to a product.
Notifications are crucial for user retention. But 50% of people decline notification prompts. So to re-engage users, Linkedin uses a clever (yet human) tactic. There is nothing rocket-science-like here, but just meeting users expectations that any app could and should follow.
What do you do when you don’t understand a word or phrase? With over 9 billion searches happening daily, you probably Google it. Considering that a significant percentage of people use search engines as a dictionary, it’s a no-brainer for you to create glossary pages — especially if you use a lot of industry-specific terms or jargon. And that’s exactly what the team at Databricks did. We like to call it the keyword glossary strategy.
4 years later, the answer remains: sometimes. VC = smart money. VC = value add. VC = helpful. This is how the VC industry markets itself to founders. But do founders really agree? VCs think they add about 30% more impact than founders do, with similar gaps in perception across most other areas.
A free experience that suits your product and user base is the foundation of any product-led growth strategy. And when you’re thinking about what product-led model is right for your business, typically only free trials or freemium comes to mind. But there are actually six distinct product-led models you can choose from. And each one has its own set of pros and cons depending on your product and user base.
In the same way that there’s no single industry in which growth couldn’t be applied, there’s also no single timing or strategy of a company that can’t be matched with a growth initiative altogether. However, company strategy and growth strategy must be perfectly aligned.
Unfortunately, this is no quick win story as content marketing does and will take some time. But the results we are now seeing for our client are exponential and we’re seeing hockey stick curvature for organic growth. I wanted to share some of the processes and thinking on how we approach our organic growth with the IndieHacker community.
Let’s do a quick sweeping generalization of all B2B marketing strategies. B2B marketing is... Helping people do their job better OR Helping people get a better job. So few do the second part, but the opportunity around it is massive and growing. Most B2B companies obsess over helping people do their job better. The future of work will focus on skills, not degrees. Skills are an excellent opportunity for B2B brands to build meaningful communities.
Pricing isn’t talked about enough, and yet it’s the key to whether your product succeeds or fails. In this presentation, Janna Bastow shows how pricing is an extension of your product, something that can be experimented with in lean ways for truly profitable results! You’ll hear about pricing vectors and packaging considerations for your product, and how to test and experiment.
In 2002, Amazon launched a side business with little fanfare: cloud Infrastructure as a service. 20 years later, it now makes over $70B in annual revenue. It’s a huge business. In fact, AWS’ hefty profit represents well over 50% of Amazon’s total. It is Amazon’s crown jewel. So, you’d think AWS was a well-known story. It isn’t.
Videodeck is a productized service that helps companies kickstart video production. We launched it three months ago on ProductHunt and BetaList. Other than those two launches we haven’t done any other marketing efforts yet. We’ve spent $0 on marketing and we are currently at 8k MRR and growing. Almost all our leads came from the Product Hunt campaign which is surprising since it only had about 150 upvotes.
Today is my birthday. I turn 70. I’ve learned a few things so far that might be helpful to others. For the past few years, I’ve jotted down bits of unsolicited advice each year and much to my surprise I have more to add this year. So here is my birthday gift to you all: 103 bits of wisdom I wish I had known when I was young.
Roughly — very roughly — you want to be multiproduct in SaaS by the time you have 10,000 customers. As you approach 10,000 customers, you start to need to sell them a second product to keep the engine going. And by $100m ARR, most SaaS companies start relying too much on account expansion. Their new customer count often doesn’t keep up with the ARR growth. A new product is often the answer. If your customers love you, they’ll often buy more from you.