#13 - Connectedness
Hey friends!
This week, we’ve been thinking about this post on IndieHackers from Rob Fitzpatrick. In particular, the idea of increasing “connectedness to customers”.
In the past, we hadn’t properly prioritized connectedness to customers. For example, we didn’t launch Raminders with an email address for users to reach us at. We added it later and this week, we got a couple emails from users providing feedback and inquire about our roadmap!
Also unexpectedly, Nick got a message on Facebook Messenger from about SpaceTime!
We’re not 100% sure how to increase connectedness to customers, but this week, we spent a lot of time thinking about a market that we’re passionate about serving - early career developers and technical entrepreneurs. And we found one repeatable way to reach younger devs: Reddit.
This is a new market for us, but one that we know pretty well 😏. We’re exploring a few products that might serve this group (as we aim for our 12 startups in 12 months!) but first, we’re focused on increasing our connectedness.
Changelog
Put SpaceTime on the backburner. As much as we love this app, the world doesn’t need a location journal at the moment
Raminders is on the backburner as well. We got some unsolicited feedback from users who “like”/“love” the app and have told us their concerns. Might address some of these in the coming weeks
Nick finished up an iOS collaboration with a fellow IndieHacker
Worked on growing Software Mentor, a newsletter focused on accelerating the careers of junior engineers. Slowly, via comments on Reddit, we added 70 subscribers. If you know any engineers in the first 2 years of their careers, please share! This newsletter is perfect for them.
Exploring the world of Authentication, Authorization, API Gateways, and JWTs. A lot of learning, some prototyping, and some talking to potential customers. Probably not enough of the latter.
Miscellaneous
🦠 I’ve grown tired of writing about the coronavirus, but wanted to share how I’m thinking about it. Pandemic response reminds me a bit of outage response. In particular, you must separate mitigation from root cause fixes. Mitigate fast, do a proper root cause fix in parallel:
Mitigation
Social distancing - implemented, sort of
Serological tests (aka antibody detection, a proxy for immunity) - in progress
Root Cause fixes
Vaccine - in progress (at least 14 months away due to FDA approval duration)
We’ve already seen the economic costs of social distancing. But we might get some reflief once serological/antibody testing can be done at scale. Then there could be a strange dynamic between the haves and the have nots (where having means having virus antibodies). Until we get a vaccine, we might be living in a weird “soft quarantine” for a long time.
💊📈 There’s a lot of doom and gloom right now - and much of it is warranted. But I don’t want to focus on that. Instead, let’s look at the opposite. Here are some trends that are getting a boost because of the coronavirus:
Obvious beneficiaries: Amazon, Instacart, Walmart
Grocers: Kroger, Safeway, etc. (people stockpiling, but also beneficiary of the decline of restaurants)
Blue Apron - yep, this company was marching towards $0, but the fall of restaurants has resuscitated demand (and a speculative spike in their stock). Could they make a comeback? (I’m not betting on it, but rooting for them to figure it out).
Site2Sheet - a website that lets you make your own website based on a Google Sheet has grown 3x in March. For what it’s worth Squarespace, Wix, and Webflow are all still hiring. This makes me believe the entire No-Code space is doing quite alright.
I went to Square’s hiring page to see if Weebly was hiring, but saw that they had LOTS of positions open for Cash App 🤔 (CashApp vs Venmo doesn’t even feel fair right now, it’s been all Cash App recently)
Remote Work tools (where video telepresence is an entire category unto itself: Zoom, Whereby, Tandem, Tuple, etc.)
Video Games and eSports - eNascar had over 900K viewers, Steam hit a record high 24.5M concurrent players
Midwest Streams - funeral webcasting. "I've had more business in the last 2 weeks than the prior 4 years"
Guns
Medical Supplies
Home Workouts - personal trainers have seen their regular income streams collapse, but have been able to connect with clients via Instagram, Facetime, Zoom, Facebook, etc. (video for news covereage)
What else do you guys see out there that’s doing well? (And if you liked this list of companies, let us know! Thinking of doing an analysis like this more frequently)
Stay safe out there! 😷💪