Pete McLeod, founder of NoCSDegree, discusses indie hacker revenue benchmarks and inspirations with host Nathan Latka.
Insight
McLeod: Product Hunt builds steady followings; Hacker News is an all-or-nothing lottery
“I think Product Hunt is probably Better for kind of, like, building up the following, whereas Hacker News can be more of a kind of, yeah, you can plug away at lots of things, and it can either go sky high or nothing, so it's more of a black or white situation,…”
Insight
McLeod: Flight deal newsletters like Scott's Cheap Flights require mass consumer scale
“With Scott's Cheap Flights, which is obviously the original numero uno, I think that works because he's got, like, a vast number of subscribers, and you can, there's so many, so I think It's, he can only, if he, if you have say like a million subscribers, you …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McLeod: Hitting #1 on Hacker News for a day drove 30,000 visits
“I launched on Hacker News. And I didn't have any profile there or any kind of, you know, yeah, any like big kind of following or backing there, but everyone really loved it, and it stayed top of Hacker News for like a day, so that got like, I can't remember ho…”
Insight
McLeod: Exit-intent pop-ups outperform immediate pop-ups by timing asks
“I think a lot of people intuitively now are a little bit, you know, against pop-ups, and I'd say that's true if they're, like, straight away, but an analogy I heard from Harry Dry, who does a great marketing website, is kind of like, If you go into a museum an…”
Disclosure
Pete McLeod: Nomad Flights had Product Hunt traction but no viable model
“There's lots of things that do great on product hunt, and it was like the perfect kind of niche for that audience, but I couldn't really find a business model that worked with that.”
Disclosure
McLeod: NoCSDegree charges in the hundreds of dollars per sponsored article
“In the, like, hundreds of dollars range.”