The Indie Creator🎨 - Issue #2

August 29, 2021

Hey Folks👋

Hope you're having an awesome weekend.

Welcome to your weekly dose of insights to crush it in the creator economy🎨

Today we will look at -

  • 1 Thread full of lessons from a successful indie creator.

  • 1 Tweet with insights on how new creators can do well on Twitter.

  • 1 Lesson from my Tweets of last week.

And it won't take more than 3 minutes⏲

Lets Go👇

Nathan Barry's Failures And Ladders of Wealth Creation

Nathan Barry is one of the most successful indie creators I know.

He started his journey writing books and info products, and gradually moved into building SaaS businesses.

His email marketing company ConvertKit recently crossed $84m in revenue.

That's a lot of money, but success hasn't been easy to come by for him. And like any other indie creator his journey has been full of twists and turns.

This week he wrote a thread about his 10 failed projects before ConvertKit.

Inspirational Stuff👇

I'm a big fan of Nathan, a few weeks back I wrote a profile of him for my other newsletter - ListenUp IH.

Do read if you have a couple of minutes -

*Listen Up! IH - Episode 17* --- "It takes way longer than you think, and it's worth it if you keep going." 👆 That's Nathan Barry's advice for aspiring...

You should also check out his theory on the ladders of wealth creation.

I recently quit my full time job and moved on to the 2nd ladder that he describes in this image😅

This is an excellent framework for all indie creators to think about their own journey of creating wealth💸

In college I first heard Jason Fried from Basecamp talk about how making money is a skill—like playing the drums or piano—that you can get better at over time. That resonated with me immediately. I wouldn’t expect to be able to sit down at a piano for the first time an

Moving on...

What "guy/gal" are you?

It's hard to grow on Twitter if you're just starting out as a creator.

But one thing that works is to attach yourself to a very specific niche, and make it very clear in the bio.

Become the "X guy/gal".

Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains this with four excellent examples in this Tweet👇

I had tweeted about the same idea a couple of days back as well, and sparked some interesting conversations -

Think about what "guy/gal" can you become, and focus your content around that niche, you can always grow out of it in time.

I have grown into 3-5 niches over time, but I started very narrow. (Let me know if you'd like to see my niches list, just hit reply to this email)

Moving on...

Looking Back🔙

So I thought this would be a good Tweet this week.

Turns out, it didn't do as good🙄 - It got just 655 impressions, 11 likes and no responses🙃

My best Tweet of the week was about a job board for fractional jobs -

That got 2200 impressions, 21 likes, 5 responses and 3 people DMed me talk about this idea😀

I value DM conversations above every other kind of engagement on Twitter.

Magic is in the DMs✨

The relative success of this tweet gives me some ideas of the kind of content that my followers are looking for.

The Week Ahead👀

This is one of the Tweets from my drafts that will be posted this week, and FWIW I think that it will do well🙄

"Trust is the currency of the internet economy💸

Authenticity leads to Trust.

Not large corporations.

Not opaque institutes

Not snake oil salesmen.

Authentic creators building in public will capture the most value in the next decade💪"

Will share results of this one next week.

And that's my time⌚

That's it then folks, I'll get going, and you should get going to creating awesome content💪

(And reading other newsletters😄)

I'd appreciate any feedback you have, or some other kind of content you would like to see, just hit reply. Or click on the thumbs up or down icon at the bottom.

Thanks🙏

Before I go, Some Housekeeping🧹

I’d appreciate the warmth and coziness of your primary inbox😇

Make sure you move me there.

Cheers,

Ayush