The Indie Creator🎨 - Issue #24

February 22, 2022

Hey there👋

This is Ayush🙏

How’s it going?

How was last week? Hope you’re doing good.

Welcome to The Indie Creator issue #24.

  • Marketing + Product both matter equally.

  • Launching (but not launching) a paid newsletter

  • My Best Tweet.

  • Weekly Recommendations - Stuff I'm consuming/creating.

All in 3 minutes.

Let's go👇

Marketing + Product

Loved this Tweet from Donvesh.

For years I thought this:

  • "build it and they will come".

  • "A great product markets itself"

  • "You failed because you didn't build the right product"

Well, marketing is important.

Very very important. I'd say as important as the product.

I've been told I don't do marketing for my products. How can I expect to make money from them?

So, here it goes:

I wrote a book about Twitter last year. It's rated 5 stars, I've made almost $500 from it at this point.

My readers have loved it 💜

I'm planning to upgrade it this year, add on a video course, with live examples of how I've used the book.

I will cut the e-book's price in half when I do add the video course.

Also, folks who've already bought the e-book will get the course for free.

But I'm not going to announce it on Twitter any time soon.

Only announcing it here for now.

(not going to Tweet out the link to this week's newsletter as well)

This offer is just for you dear reader🤗

So if you want to up your Twitter game. And use the platform to it's potential, as a creator, consumer and networker.

Then you can get the e-book at half price, before anyone else, and also get the video course for free later this year.

Use the code "creator" at check out👇

Listen Up Pro

I turned on the paid feature in my newsletter ListenUp IH last week. And 1 reader actually upgraded 🙈

I hadn't announced it anywhere. Still, they found it on the website and signed up. Massive respect to them for that 🙏

This gives me hope.

I really want the paid newsletter to work out so that I don't have to be at the mercy of sponsors to monetize my work.

Especially for Listen Up. Because it takes almost 15 hours of work each week to put it together.

It's fun, but intense research.

It would mean a lot to me if the project was self-sustainable.

For that, I will officially launch it this week, and see how it goes 🤞

If you see the launch thread on Twitter, I'd appreciate your support.

Meanwhile, I did make a paid pro report for that 1 subscriber this week. And this is how I felt -

My Best Tweet of the week👀

Guess what, another one of those instantly thought up Tweets did well this week🤣

Haha, I had actually written an interesting thread as well, which was doing reasonably well.

But it came 2nd best. This meme got plenty of love - 10,600 impressions at a 4% engagement rate.

That's amazing, I guess this is something people can relate to. Most people in my audience are solopreneurs, indie hackers, and indie creators.

Working on multiple projects.

Funny + Relatable.

Going to make more memes on this formula from now.

Weekly Recommendations:

Stuff I’m consuming:

(yea all are paid newsletters, I want to understand how I can make my own paid newsletter great)

Stuff I created recently:

A report on the course platform Podia -

“Faster iterations coupled with perseverance is the best route to have a successful product -- not sleek designs or scalable code.”👆 That’s Spencer Fry’s number 1 insight after running multiple successful startups over the last 19 years. Spencer is the founder of Podia - A platform that helps

A thread about 6 newsletters you must subscribe to:

Important Information

That’s my 3 minutes with you today, will let you go now. But one request -

If you’ve not been having fun with this newsletter, please consider unsubscribing.

I don’t mind.

No hard feelings.

I’d rather you unsubscribe than not open the newsletter.

But if you do enjoy it.

Please do me a favor, please ask one of your friends to subscribe.

It would mean a lot to me🙏

Cheers,

Ayush