🚀 MakerList #1: Marketing, Pricing, and 3 Startup Stories
What to do and what not to do when launching a new business
Welcome to the inaugural issue of MakerList! Thank you so much for subscribing, you’re awesome 😄.
Without further ado, here are the top five articles for this week:
1. How Seth Godin Would Launch a New Business With $1,000 And 90 Days to Spare
Seth Godin is one of the top marketing minds out there, and this article contains invaluable tips on how to get your initial customers. One trap that a lot of indie makers tend to fall into is that we market at people instead of with them. It’s important to involve people in the process of building the product, and to provide them with so much value that they can’t help but trust you.
2. Creating And Launching A $6000/Month Course As A Stay-At-Home Dad
Bram Kanstein’s story of how he started his No-Code MVP course provides interesting insights into what his early stages looked like. One great takeaway is that even though it took him 1.5 years to make the course, he continued to validate the need for his product throughout this period by doing workshops at companies and sending reminders to his email list.
3. Community Coders: Failing to build a profitable business while in University
We often don’t hear enough about failed businesses, even though these failures tend to contain really valuable lessons. Like many other failed businesses, Community Coders’ lack of product-market fit and limited founder expertise turned out to be their downfall. It’s also interesting to read about the successful strategies they used to grow their business, including partnering with organizations and hosting offline events.
4. SaaS Pricing: Lessons from 4 Pricing Changes
A lot of people treat pricing as a set-it-and-forget-it type of thing, but it’s something that needs to evolve constantly throughout the lifecycle of your business. In this article, Sarah Hum from Canny takes us through 4 different pricing changes that she made and shares her learnings from each attempt.
5. Turning side projects into profitable startups
If you haven’t already read (or watched) the very inspirational story of Pieter Levels and how he started Nomad List, I would highly recommend doing so. It’s an entertaining and insightful look at the framework he uses when building projects, which allowed him to go from an almost-broke college graduate to making $25,000 a month from Nomad List at the time he gave the talk.
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