Indie Year - Issue #3
Ok here we go with issue 3. This will be a juicy one.
Trip to Bali and other cool places
I am just back from the first Boxy Team retreat, an amazing one-month trip in SE Asia. We explored for a month visiting Vietnam, Malaysia, Bali (of course) and Singapore.
We got a lot done, made some big decisions, enjoyed ourselves and most importantly came back to Italy supercharged to kick asses on our projects.
Boxy Suite
While there we hit 1k paying subscribers for Boxy Suite. That’s a huge milestone to sustainability for our main project and an assurance that we will be able to fund future projects and keep traveling the world.
It has been quite a ride and I can't wait to bring the project to the next level with the upgrades we have in the pipeline.
Unreadit
We also started working on another ambitious project called Unreadit Pro. This service will allow you to create and receive your own personal newsletter with content coming from sources such as HackerNews, Reddit, Product Hunt and RSS. We are experimenting with a queuing and referral system to give people access, powered by the awesome ReferralHero (👋 Manuel). We have 250+ people in line with ~40 referrals and we haven’t even launched yet. You can request early access for the upcoming free beta on the official site.
Unreadit, the Reddit-based newsletters that I talked you about in the previous issue, hit 3k+ subscribers and started making money via sponsorships. We created an innovative UI to book multiple slots with discounts and reach estimates. This has paid big dividends with many sponsors booking a ton of slots. We are not really happy with the growth of these newsletters and are trying various things to make them grow with not much success: most days we get 5-10 new subscribers and that’s it.
We are also thinking of outsourcing the light editing of the newsletters that we do to make the business fully automated. Right now this takes us about half an hour per day, since there are multiple newsletters getting published Monday to Friday.
Indie Hackers Meetup
I am organizing the third Indie Hackers meetup in Italy, together with Omar. It will happen in Milan on April 24 at Talent Garden Merano where I will give a talk on turning side projects into businesses, telling people a bit about my story and experience on going full time on my side projects.
There is not much else going on in my life right now. I feel energized by the trip that just ended and will be head down working on projects for at least a month before traveling again, who knows where.
What about you? What have you been up to? Remember that you can just hit reply and start a conversation.
Until next time,
Francesco