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News
Hubspot acquires StarterStory
Big news in the indie hacker space as StarterStory, founded by Pat Walls, has been acquired by Hubspot. This comes off the back of Hubspot acquiring TheHustle/My First Million and Stripe buying IndieHackers in 2019.
I guess building a blog or a newsletter isn't such a bad idea!
Cloudflare makes a NextJS alternative
Lots of people want to use NextJS but don't want to use Vercel, for a variety of reasons. Well Cloudflare just dropped a huge update! They've built a new version of Next with Vite. They call it vinext and they did it in one week using AI . https://blog.cloudflare.com/vinext/
Typefully hits 10,000 paying customers
Typefully, the indie social media scheduler, has hit 10,000 customers. As someone who has followed them from the beginning, it's cool to see them grow so much.
Here's an affiliate link: https://typefully.com/?via=pete-codes
Interview with Catskill Crew founder
I had a really fun chat with Michael Kauffman. He's making six figures with his Catskill Crew newsletter, which has evolved into a bit of a local media empire. Now he's putting on events and selling merch, not just slinging newsletter ads.
Here's an excerpt from our chat. Unfortunately, the video failed but you can listen to the audio on YouTube.
You can also read it on the website if you're a newsletter subscriber: https://www.highsignal.io/catskill-crew-founder-local-media-empire/
Do you want to give a brief intro about Catskill Crew?
I'm a dude that lives in the middle of the Catskill Forest who had an existential crisis, and after 15 years of running startups I wanted to build something that lit me up. And I started Catskill Crew, a local newsletter. Well, it's like a little bit of a hybrid. It's a local media company, a local products company, a local events company, and it's a platform for a local holding company. And so really a subscriber-first media company that brings the subscribers and really lets them take the wheel.
It has 42,000 subscribers and I send it once a week. I try to send something super high value, something interesting, something different, something that sticks out in a sea of noise. You know, your inbox is filled with mostly garbage.
How have you grown it so fast?
Growth is easy in local media. I'd never started a local newsletter before. I've been building all different types of startups for 15 years but I wasn't a writer.
I had never been in the Meta dashboard before and so I was really intimidated on growth. I boosted a couple things on Instagram but I don't like social media, so it'd be like a picture of a river or me catching a fish and I was like, I'll boost that. That's cool. That's a nice looking trout. Everyone's gonna love it and so it grew organically to about 4,500 subscribers.
I also started throwing events, making Canva templates and highlighting different events that were happening - tagging the businesses, saying, "if you want to know what else is going on in the Catskills and beyond, subscribe to Catskill Crew."
So it was really around riding the coattails of established businesses and making them look good. If you don't make them look good, why are they gonna reshare it? I may have mentioned that throwing events is always good. When you're driving traffic to those venues, they are gonna take photos of your events, they're gonna tag you etc.
Finally in August, 2024 I let my buddy Philip, who runs the Orlando Signal, convince me to run Meta ads. And it was just rocket fuel. I mean, the number just went straight up into the right. I was spending $35 a day and I finished 2024 with like 11,ooo or 12,000 subscribers.
I've actually turned ads off since November but you should be starting out with a customer acquisition cost from 8-20 cents. You know, even at 42,000 subscribers, I was sitting around 25-40 cents on average, and I wouldn't even look at Meta ads for weeks. It's very simple to grow these lists, but that doesn't mean people are gonna stick around. So that's where you need good content.
Do you want to talk about monetizing with ads vs products?
Yeah, when I started I knew ads were gonna be boring for me but a kind of key piece of the puzzle. I know a lot of people in the Catskills, just kind of being a social creature. The only thing that stayed the same since I launched was the font that I wrote Catskill Crew in. I really tried to make something that was special even when I was just aggregating events. But it resonated. People liked it. So I spoke to friends who were business owners and was like:
"Hey, Sam, Jeremy - you guys want to advertise in Catskill Crew?"
"How much?"
"I don't know. I got 500 subscribers, like 100 bucks, 250 bucks?"
"All right, sure, why not?"
So it was a combination of them helping me out and I was helping them out. They were just excited for this new thing that was emerging in the market. A big piece of that was even the businesses that said no to me, I still gave them free ads because I wanted my subscribers who are business owners and future sponsors to imagine how they can weave their business into my newsletter.
I needed to think creatively about how to monetize this thing. And I went to a owner of a bar and I was like, "Hey, you guys wanna throw a happy hour?"
"Like hell yeah, we do."
I was like, "All right, do you guys wanna pay me like a thousand bucks? I'll market it for three weeks."
And they're like, "No."
I was like, let's try that again.
"How about this - we'll sell tickets. I'll keep the money from the tickets. You keep the money from the bar."
And they're like, "awesome." I sold 40 tickets at $25 each. That was the cap. It sold out so I was really trying to drive this FOMO. Probably 20 or 30 more people showed up at the door. We just let them in.
The hotel made around $7,000 on a Tuesday night. It was their best night ever so they called this a huge success. And the business owners there were like, "can you do this for us?" And I was like, I guess I can. And so then I really started pushing this direction of events and then merch, discount cards, monopoly boards, puzzles, tote bags and hats that sell out in three hours.
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End notes
I hope you enjoyed the newsletter! Let me know with a reply or you can get me on pete@highsignal.io . You can listen to the full interview with Michael on YouTube or read it on the website.
I'll be back with more news on Friday.
If you know someone who would like the newsletter, you can send them here:
​https://www.highsignal.io/newsletter/​
Cheers,
Pete
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