HN user
What was the bounce rate, avg visit time and conversion rate (email signup) between people who came from the non-designed vs. designed ad though?
A higher clickthrough rate isn't necessarily better if more of the people who came from the non-designed ad didn't do much or anything on the page and mostly clicked out of curiosity.
One of the most useful design-related tools I've found is this color picker which generates complimentary colors for you based on model of your choice (triadic, analogous, etc.):
https://www.sessions.edu/color-calculator/
I always struggled with picking complimentary colors and found this worked a lot better than most of the pre-defined color palette suggestions out there.
What made the biggest difference for me was using a text to speech reader to proofread and edit. You are able to catch a lot of phrasing that looks ok but sounds wrong or awkward this way.
Agree the post over-complicates this.
Also, the message and approach should be very different depending on who you're reaching out to and for what reason (example: getting a job versus getting a client).
Providing value is important, but the goal of the first email is simply to get someone to reply, not overload them with info upfront (like what was suggested as one of the examples, a 13-page PowerPoint deck with data analysis).
I find providing 1-2 specific concrete ideas related to your product, service or ask and tailored for your prospect's business is enough to get an interested reply. Some good templates for this here: https://artofemails.com/new-clients
Finally! Whenever Netflix features a scary show or movie on their homepage and their preview auto-plays, it always make me jump.
Chaz, great work creating this.
My only thought is, I wonder how well these ecommerce emails perform. The majority of them are very image heavy, which affects deliverability and conversions. Some of them have most or all of their text and buttons directly on the images themselves.
Of course, if you're offering a discount, the email may convert better than average, but since the majority of stores only send this type of ecommerce style emails throughout the year, I'm curious how they perform in general.
Search Engine Roundtable conducted a survey after the medic update, here are the categories of websites that were affected: https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.seroundtable.com/google-medi... (Health accounted for the biggest percentage but there were many other verticals that were impacted as well.)
There has also been several core algorithm updates since then that have caused ranking drops and volatility across the board.
As other people have already commented, Gumroad raised venture capital (https://medium.com/s/story/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build...) before. Sahil had to revert Gumroad to a solo lifestyle business after it didn't grow fast enough to raise another round.
My question is, without having been venture funded for a period of time, would Gumroad still be able to $350k/mo now?
During the time Gumroad had a team of engineers, designers, etc., they shipped a lot of features, made improvements and presumably had a decent advertising / marketing budget. Gumroad likely wouldn't have reached the point where it is today product and awareness wise if it had just been one 'indie hacker' grinding away.
It would be really cool if you could paste the url to an image, have a generator overlay the fire effect on top, and you can save that as a gif.
I would actually look up mid-size businesses you'd like to work with (who can use your skills) and email the owner or manager who works in an area related to your services.
Let's say you're a developer. In this email, briefly describe a few specific ideas or improvements you can implement for them using your skills. For example, maybe you can create standalone landing pages for all of their lead magnets or set up A/B testing on their key pages.
Some templates for this you can reference: https://artofemails.com/new-clients
It's ok if you can't share your previous work, you can simply mention 2 relevant projects you've worked on and specific results you helped them achieve.
To add to this, it may take a long time to build a big enough audience to make money off ads. But you can use these educational articles as content marketing and lead generation for programming services (example: extract email addresses meeting specific criteria).
Believe it or not, really realistic looking computer generated Instagram influencers already exist.
Example: https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/ - 1.2m followers
Your story really resonated with me. I think one of the biggest issue education / society has not adequately addressed is, even with a curious mind, as a teenager, you don't get too many chances to learn what is out there and what is possible. You have to know it exists to start looking. Unless you grew up in a certain household (generally higher income, educated) / environment / peer group that exposed you.
For example, I started coding in my early teens but I never really knew all the career paths it opened up until my twenties. My parents never showed me. My school never showed me. I ended up studying something unrelated in university.
I think it would be a huge boon to our collective future if schools focused more on showing students all the possibilities out there and supporting them to explore it, so they can discover their passions earlier and better maximize their potentials.
From 'shadow an employee' programs, counselling assistance, co-ed programs to extracurricular programs. Instead of letting them decide their future career paths (at least postsecondary choices) based on the limited subjects and materials they're learning in classrooms and what their parents and peers showed them (and did not show them) is possible.
Have you taken a look at his main site? He's selling a course on growth marketing.
I'm pretty sure being a freelancer journalist is not his main gig. Rather, this article was supposed to demonstrate one of the ways he was able to 'growth hack' his way into publications.
Maybe the time and effort demands of both wouldn't have allowed it but given how Patrick's personal debt grew, it seems it would have helped to do at least a little bit of consulting while he was working on Appointment Reminder.
Doing freelance / consulting work on the side while bootstrapping your product to profitability seems increasingly common now. Though this is definitely more sustainable in locales with lower costs of living while you also don't have to provide for a whole family.
Random: I'm surprised that Boosted Board is still using "perfect for the last mile of your commute" in their marketing slogan.
All the influencers I've seen with it (like Casey Neistat) use it to commute pretty long distances! Their biggest benefit is, you can quickly travel from point a and b, especially in a conjested city, on something that you can carry under your arm or in a backpack. No need for bikes, public transit or cars.
I just created a separate email address to receive all the newsletters I enjoy reading but don't want to mix with my work/personal emails. I check it 1-2 times a week. Works beautifully.
Interesting how she pushed hard her book GirlBoss while her business was alreafy floundering. And now it's filing for bankrutcy. Can you trust any of the advice from her book?
If anything, she knew her business was in trouble so she hatched a backup plan: turn herself into an authority on how to be a successful businesseswoman while Nasty Gal still existed.
In a similar spirit, it could be cool if some coffeeshops and restaurants explicitly designated one of their communal table as a 'talk table'. Where if you sit at it, it means you are open to chatting with your neighbors.
I know that many places already have communal tables but I find that unless there's some explicit display a place is meant for a certain purpose, many people who want to chat / meet new people won't initiate because they can't be sure their neighbours are open to it. If they purposefully decide to sit at a 'talk table', then you can be sure they are.
A lot of the students enrolled hoping to get a job later.
The scam aside, this goes to show that too many people still believe in the old system: learn skill in school -> get job. Especially that one student who lamented now he can't prove he completed the lessons from this bootcamp. Would a no name bootcamp impress any employer?
Learning in a classroom (or via Slack chats!) is not enough. It's just the first step. The key is applying it as soon as possible by doing projects, for yourself or for someone else. For free in the beginning if need be. Employers now want to see proof you can do something, not a piece of paper showing you can. Plus publishing these projects online can help employers / recruiters discover you.
Too many parents are still teaching their kids a paint by the numbers formula they knew for life: go to school -> land job. Work there -> rise through the ranks. The good news is, there's a hundred different ways to land a job now. The bad news is, trying, failing at, trying again at those different ways can be hard.
If you read the interviews of a lot of investors, many of them mention they invested because they believed so strongly in the founder. Afterwards, when their crazy concept works (example: Musk with SpaceX), these founders are lauded a visionary. When their concept fails (as is the case with Homles and Theranos), these founders are branded a fraudster.
As a regular user of all the main email marketing services:
I feel Mailchimp is missing the boat by focusing entirely on email and not offering a way to contact customers via:
1. In-app messages 2. SMS 3. Push notifications
It's also difficult / impossible to set up advanced automation sequences with it. For example, if Customer X does Y on your site, direct them to another branch with a different sequence.
Of course, their main target customers are small businesses so they may not need these advanced features but these customers would benefit tremendously from being able to for example text certain messages to customers instead of only being able to email them.