The Indie Creator🎨 - Issue #27

Hey there👋

This is Ayush🙏

How’s it going?

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

Welcome to The Indie Creator issue #27.

Small update: I'm changing the format of this newsletter slightly, I'm going to use this space to expand on the ideas in some of my weekly tweets.

But still, keep them under 3 minutes.

Will pick the top 2 or 3 tweets every week.

Today I'm talking about:

  • Why do memes work?

  • Hot take on "habit-forming products"

  • Update on my paid newsletter

  • Announcing a course.

  • Weekly recommendations.

Let's go👇

A Meme that went viral🚀

This tweet went viral this week 👇

It's garnered 32000 impressions at 3.7% engagement rate.

I try a couple of such memes every week, but not all see the same kind of success.

Some factors that make a viral meme:

  • Relatability - How much does the audience relate to the idea in the meme.

  • Taste - Not all kind of comedy is for everyone. It's very hard to make something yet not offensive. (I've had to delete a couple of memes in the past coz they got very offensive to some people)

  • Timing - Literally the time when a meme is posted, how many people are online at the time, and how funny the find it. The initial velocity of a tweet matters a lot. I bet if I had posted this same meme at some other time, it would have bombed.

It's a lot of hit and trial, but I try to get these 3 factors right with the memes that I make.

When it works, I do get a bunch of followers.

And since they are mostly about entrepreneurship, so I get the kind of followers that I actually want.

So that's cool.

Hot Take🔥

So I tweeted this earlier last week 👇

So I've seen many people read Nir Eyal's book "Hooked" and try to apply its lessons in their products.

There's nothing wrong with building habit-forming products.

But I see this with founders building their MVPs, the 1st version of their products.

I think at that stage it's more important that startups focus on solving real burning problems for users, rather than building in habit forming elements.

If they don't solve problems, they won't be able to get enough users interested. And the habit-forming elements would become useless.

Capturing this nuance was hard in a Tweet, which lead to some misunderstandings 😅

Anyways, this gentlemen spoke from experience and elaborated my point well -

Paid Newsletter 🤑

My humble newsletter got another paid subscriber this week 😀

It's not a lot of money, but it's some validation that there's a market for this kind of content. Let's see.

Ill keep adding more quality content to the site and try to improve the value of the paid subscription. Hopefully subscriptions will pickup with time 🤞

BTW, I got this sale after adding a massive 60% discount on the annual plan.

You can check it out here -

Hey there 👋 After 40+ posts, 1850 subscribers, and 400+ hours of research, I'm launching Listen Up Pro. A few reasons - When you don't pay for something, you're the product being sold. As a researcher/writer my objective is to serve you the reader to the best of my abilities.

Course registrations open

If you're looking to go from employee to entrepreneur, then this might interest you.

I announced a course for you this week. This is a move I made recently and I think and have had to teach myself a plethora of skills. This is the kind, of course, I wished someone had taught me 4 years ago. I wish to help folks like that now.

You can find more details in this thread -

You can join the alpha group and even get to pick your own price. Just fill out this form.

Weekly reading recommendations.

Stuff I’m consuming:

This conversation between David Perell and the Pomp is the best content around audience building on you will watch.

It's from 2020, but still very relevant.

I'm re-watching the video for the 3rd time now, watch it every 6 months or so. Just to imbibe the ideas. Good stuff -

Stuff I created recently:

#132 | An update on the Ukraine crisis

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🙏

And if you’re new, just hit reply and tell me what’s the biggest challenge you’re facing this year?

I might have a personalized recommendation for you 🤗

Cheers,

Ayush