I might have lost my $250k

A lot of things happened last week. And the next 1 year might be a defining one for us indie hackers.

We’re taking on the big old corporations, boys!

I have 2 things to tell you:

1 good news. And 1 bad news.

Good news -

Feather.so transaction is complete 🎉🎉 and I have all the ownership now. Time to grow this thing.

Bad news -

Notion might have killed my $250k investment with the launch of Notion sites.

That’s right, less than a week after I announced the acquisition — notion released website hosting of their own.

And now - I’m in direct competition with them.

Is this scary? Yes.
Have I done scary things before? You bet.

If you’ve followed my journey for a long time — you might remember when Elon almost killed Tweet Hunter when he increased the Twitter API costs from $0 to $42,000/mo!

That’s how powerful platforms are.

You can control and move all the businesses that use your infrastructure as the base of their business.

And EVERY business that grows on top of another platform should mitigate that risk very early on in their roadmap.

But here’s the best part:

Platform businesses are risky, yes BUT they are highly rewarding as well.

As you tap into an existing audience and customer base and make their life easier — you can attract people much faster than building something from scratch.

This is how all of my successful businesses were built! Here’s a breakdown:

Tweet Hunter

Tweet Hunter saw the problem of creators with scheduling and growing on Twitter. Got a huge interest and steered the product in the direction creators wanted to make it better over time.

Taplio

If a problem exists on 1 text-based platform — if will also be true for another.

We understood that and started work on Taplio less than a year after Tweet Hunter.

Result? a $10m acquisition.

Feather

Notion is much more than a software. It’s a cult of productivity and organization nerds (like me!)

And with a writing experience as good as notion — building a blog software on top of notion is a brilliant idea.

Bhanu accurately did that and scaled the business to $7k MRR. Huge!

Revid(.ai)

Revid.ai taps into the TikTok audience and helps them solve their platform needs. From finding topics to creating amazing videos to scheduling them from right within the software — it has it all.

The main takeaway remains the same:

Solve the problem 10x better than the platform.

How to mitigate platform risk?

This is simple to read. Not so simple to do. Most of your business is dependent on how the platform behaves.

But it boils down to 3 things:

1 - Diversify

We started Taplio because we didn’t want to remain dependent on Twitter alone.

2 - Double down

Build something the original platform can’t (or won’t).

Twitter/X had scheduling features already. But I bet less than 1% of people use it. So no way they double down on it. This means something.

3 - Own the distribution

If you have the audience and attention, you can take on challenges much better than most people.

I hope this edition explains what it means to run a platform-based business and the things to avoid (or the things to do!).

Any questions? Or feedback?

Reply to this email and I will read that 👇👇

Tweet of the week

If you run a business and struggle with marketing, read this:

That’s it for this week!

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See you next Thursday!

Keep building

Tibo 💻