🚀 MakerList #5: Your business can be successful even in a bad economy
Hey there! 👋 Hope you’ve been doing alright this week. Here are five articles for you to check out:
1. Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
With the economy down, Paul Graham’s 2008 essay has become particularly relevant today. It may seem counterintuitive to do as he suggests, but Microsoft, Apple, and many other hyper successful startups were actually started during economic recessions. The truth is that your company can be successful regardless of the state of the economy, and it can actually be easier for indie businesses since they don’t have to worry about raising money.
2. How To Use Direct Sales To Validate Your Startup Idea
Direct sales is one of the most potent tools you can use to get customers in the early days, as it’s a very feedback-rich channel and allows you to iterate much more quickly on your copy, pricing, product, and target audience. One thing that helps a lot with direct sales is to do research on the people you’re selling to and to personalize your outreach to those people.
3. The Tenets of A/B Testing from Duolingo’s Master Growth Hacker
This is an in-depth and insightful look at four different A/B tests (delayed sign-up, streaks, badges, and the in-app coach) that the VP of Growth at Duolingo ran to increase their daily active users. She oversaw Duolingo’s growth from 3M to 200M users.
4. How to Upsell Your Customers Without Annoying Them
This is a neat collection of eight strategies you can use to upsell your customers, along with examples of companies that use each of the strategies. I quite like the idea of including informational content that users can look at on the login page (shown below), as it’s a subtle way of introducing your users to new features.
5. The Small Things That Will Kill Your Indie Business
For people who are just starting down the indie maker path, Joel Griffith from Browserless outlines five small things that might seem okay to do in the moment but could actually end up in your business failing. One of them—not selling a painkiller—is a great one to keep in mind, since it’s hard to sell a product that fixes a problem that isn’t actually that painful.
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Happy indie making 🚀