Happy Thursday! 🎉

My goal every week is to provide as much content as I can to help you grow your SaaS product.

To that end from now on you’ll get the same awesome content, but in a new format:

1. The Best Links - The top SaaS resources, news and stories you need to know about.

2. The Breakdown - A weekly deep dive into a SaaS growth, marketing or product development strategy.

3. You’ll want to see this… - Extra resources and useful content to help get started with the week’s strategy.

Let’s jump in… 👇

The Best Links 🔗

The Ideation Flywheel - An excellent breakdown from StackFix on how to choose the best product ideas to pursue.

Get Better At UI/UX - Watch the founder of Glide critiquing mobile apps and talking about the importance of good design.

“How I Built Coinbase” - A (surprisingly) candid interview with Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase about how it all started.

The Breakdown

How Blogging Can Become Your #1 Growth Channel

Blogging is one of the top 9 ways to grow your SaaS that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. But most SaaS founders see it as a chore.

Without the SEO know-how or existing audience to leverage, blog posts can easily fall flat and rarely deliver any meaningful traffic.

However, by ‘syndicating’ (adapting and re-posting) your blog posts on platforms that already have high traffic, blogging can become your #1 organic growth channel in a matter of weeks.

This week I’ve broken down the top 3 platforms, what style of post works best, and some little-known tips to boost your posts to the front page.

1) HackerNews

The Platform

HackerNews (HN) is one of the top tech community platforms for sharing links to content hosted on external sites. With over 15M monthly visits, it’s a perfect place to market your SaaS product.

What Works

Timely newsworthy articles perform best. Be prepared to quickly spin up articles summarising the main points of any new story and where your SaaS fits into the picture. Then post the link to the article (hosted on your site) to HN with a catchy title.

For example, this post about a 1Password breach hit the front page this week. If I was building a cybersecurity-focused SaaS I would have been sure to jump on this straight away!

Tips To Hit The Front Page

ShowHN is where founders can share a direct link to their products for the community to try out. These posts regularly hit the front page and can create engaging discussions.

However, sharing a link to a paid-only product is frowned upon and could get flagged.

Therefore the best use cases for ShowHN are:

• Getting feedback on an early version of your product

• Building a waitlist

• Driving traffic to free tools

2) IndieHackers

The Platform

IndieHackers (IH) is a large, community-driven blogging platform with a focus on solo-founders and small teams. If you’re bootstrapping a SaaS product then you need to be posting here.

Unlike HN, content is hosted directly on the platform, but you are free to link back to your product or other blog posts as you see fit.

What Works

Longer, more detailed storytelling posts perform best. Here are some common topics that consistently hit the front page:

• A story of how you crossed an MRR/active user milestone

• A breakdown of an interesting new feature

• A strategy you’ll be using to reach the next phase of growth

And don’t worry, you don’t need an existing audience to get started. Plenty of posts like this one hit the front page showing off small products that simply acquired their first customer.

Tips To Hit The Front Page

The editors at IndieHackers are looking for content that fits into specific categories they’ll actively boost. Here’s the full list but the common themes are:

• AI products (duh…)

• Building open-source products

• Founders juggling building multiple products

Additionally, high-performing posts in these categories can get featured in the IndieHackers newsletter sent out to over 80K subscribers.

3) Dev.to

The Platform

Dev.to is a developer-focused blogging platform. If you’re building a SaaS product aimed at technical folks then posting on here is a must.

However, as all posts are categorised into tags that users follow, there are a number of sub-niches that could be relevant to your product.

Like IH, all content is hosted directly on the platform but you can still share links back to your product or blog posts.

What Works

This is highly dependent on the tags you assign to your posts. But technical deep-dives commonly hit the front page and can be applied to most products.

Like IH, storytelling posts can also perform well. For example, this post about growing a SaaS to 5,000 users got over 70 likes and 18 bookmarks.

Tips To Hit The Front Page

The front page has reserved spots for the following tags:

• #discuss

• #watercooler

Therefore adding these tags to posts will help you get more traffic.

For #discuss, ask a question in the title and answer it in your post. This is perfect for framing a problem and telling readers how your SaaS can solve it.

On the other hand, #watercooler is best suited to more casual storytelling posts.

You’ll want to see this…👇

Learn From The Best - A list of the best product-focused SaaS blogs to draw inspiration from.

How To Rent Other Peoples Traffic - Neil Patel lines up everything you need to start writing guest posts on high-traffic sites in your niche.

See you next week!

- Charlie

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