Indie Maker Prediction for 2024-2026, got 10 million links clicks on directories, New Experiment, Google Sheet as DB, IndexGoogle

Dec 18, 2023

Exponential growth of quantity.
Everyone will be a maker.
Maker labels.
Monopolies.
Rip startups.
Influencer+Maker collabs
The exponential growth of quantity

Almost every corporate dev is either building a side project or planning to.

in 2020 there were 10 uptime bots,
in 2021 we got to 20,
in 2022 to 30,
in 2023 to 60,
in 2024 will go to 200+
in 2025 will go to 1000+

We’ve seen the same happening in other spaces. Popular singers act in movies, and commercials, launch their own brands, produce clothes, and more.

Why? Because they have a distribution channel they can pretty much push anything there and it will be bought by their loyal audience.

We’re entering the same world for technology today.

1% of tech is complicated rocket science, but the rest is an easy 2 week project for a good productive developer who uses the right tools.

There is a limit on how perfect can one make a single saas. Eventually, you enter the overengineering phase, when users are happy, but you keep pushing stuff they didn’t ask for.

So most realize this and instead of endless feature releases, they go and build more tools, to the same audience.

Exponential growth of number of products per maker

By the end of 2024, there will be very few makers doing just one product, most will be doing many, some more than 10, and some more than 100.

Corporates will try, but

Corporates will enter this game too. But they won’t launch products within their brand, they will launch new brands, pretending it’s a standalone thing. However I’m totally bearish on corporates in the new world. They got large dev force and little distribution force. In the new world, distribution is 90% of what one needs to win.

RIP VC backed startup world

The old VC-backed startup world will be a thing of the past and it won’t make the comeback. Because money isn’t helping to grow anymore, so nobody needs the VC money in the new world, what everyone needs: is distribution channels. 99% of VC money will be going into “platforms”. Which are impossible to build with few devs. But not the tools, sites, saas, apps...Those all gonna go bootstrapped, self-funded or funded by the “maker labels” (see what it means at the end of the post).

We will see 2 new phenomena emerging

a) Collabs of maker+star.

Influencers/artists/stars will do collabs with indie makers and launch products.

Influencers with over a million followers don’t really make good money anymore. The value of a single follower has dropped 100x over the last few years because the number of people with over 100k followers has grown 100x. The ads and brands don’t pay much. So influencers will go for collaborations with indie makers to build a product targeted at their audience and split the profits. Those who do it first, gonna make millions. It will be the new “hot thing” in the influencer world.

b) “Maker labels”.

This is the same as music labels, movie studios or agents in the sports world. There is nearly zero famous star, that are on their own. All of them belong to an agent, label, or studio. Most of us don’t know about it, because it’s not being promoted much, because it’s not important for the fans. The job of labels is to do all the groundwork, contracts, negotiations, distribution, and a million things. So that the artists could focus 100% on one thing they do the best: their craft. Be it acting, singing, or playing soccer.

The same thing is going to happen to indie makers. We already see this in the form of alliances, and startup studios. holdCOs and more.

These alliances will give 2 primary benefits to the indie makers: they can focus more on the product and users (not on coding, but on UX on talking to users, on promoting the product in a product-led growth way).

The second benefit, the most important one is the distribution potential. If one alliance has 50 makers in it, all these 50 makers’ audiences will be cross-promoted if that is relevant. This is gonna be a game changer, and most likely the 100% independent makers will have hard times because they will be competing against those in alliances. It’s happening already today.

We know many “groups” in the maker community and “friends”. Who supports each other tweets, PH launches etc. This makes them unable to not go viral or unable to lose PH. It’s not bad, I actually respect those groups and look up to them. We live in a capitalism, and as Peter Tiel said: competition is for the losers, and the winner always makes a monopoly.

My final prediction is that this will lead to several monopolies, taking over most of the audience.

2) I really underestimated forced Google Indexing

Turned on indexgoogle.com for internal testing 2 weeks ago and saw this today. Magic. I had doubts, but after this, I’m pretty happy.

It’s been a challenge to get Google indexing API to work for an infinite number of pages due to all sorts of limitations, but finally today Google granted us with large API quota, so we are ready to launch indexgoogle.com next week.

Gonna send invites to the waitlist (10 a day).

Tell me if you wanna get access earlier.

Btw, seobotai.com users are getting this included in “PRO” subscription.

On a side note, we’ve made insane progress on seobot. I’m 100% bullish on our plan on being able to generate articles that humans enjoy reading and Google enjoys ranking high.

I repeat: we’re not in the garbage content business.

We spend almost a dollar on each article, cuz we do numerous cycles of content generation, improvement, research and more.

Reply to this email if you want an early access invite.

3) Google Sheets as DB is so great

I used databases for 15 years.

But this year, I switched from traditional databases to Google Sheets for my public projects and directories.

And sh*t, did it pay off!

Here’s the full story

One night I launched osssoftware.
Posted about it on hacker news, devto and X then went to bed.
Woke up next morning - boom! It had gone viral!

Over 20K visitors overnight!

But there were hundreds of comments about data quality, corrections, and suggestions.
Tried fixing them but quickly realized: too many comments, too little time.
Got this shower thought: Why not make the sheet public? So everyone can add their comments?
Did that with Google Sheets. And It worked.

Suddenly, osssoftware.org became a crowd-sourced directory of open-source projects.

Imagine if I’d spent time building complex software for comment moderation...what a waste that would’ve been!

Now all my public directories run on Google Sheets.

It’s totally free! No matter how much traffic or users I have. It’s so easy to edit the data and maintain it based on user comments. I’d say 100x easier than if I used conventional databases.

All my directories now run on unicornplatform.com + google sheets:

My next step: I’m adding advanced directory features on top of the same stack such as

auth
ratings
reviews
bookmaking
comments
upvotes

All this will still run on top of publically open google docs. Totally transparent, everyone can see everything, validate that the data is real, no fake, no bots, no data mamipulation, since the db got public revision history too. This is in fact true: decentralized immutable storage. While the world was hoping to get this from blockchain, google sheets were sitting in the shelf waiting to be used for this usecase.

4) Maker Experiment #5: Launch 15 micro SaaS tools

No more directories. It all works now, I’ll make 90 more by the end of 2024.

Time for something NEW. I’m ready to build 15 basic SaaS tools. Each tool will do one thing in a very clear way. The domains used will be based purely on SEO research.

I’ve been saying that this is the next big trend. Now, it’s time to see if I’m right or not.

The products are these: Blog / Website / CV / Help Desk / Docs / Directory from Google Sheet / Notion/ Airtable

These will be 15 separate products. Super focused, each with just one button user experience. All of them can also be found inside @unicornplatform as apps. No subscription, but there’ll be a lifetime deal option. In fact, my plan is to add this option to all my products.

5) Directories drive traffic, but I made $0 yet

Time to reveal a new project.

My directories drove

10 million clicks to 3rd-party projects.

Revenue: $0

But here is the real plan behind all this. I’m building a directory promo network. I planned this a long while ago, the first step was listingbott.com.

But later I realized it would be difficult to convince the directory owners to jump on board with a new project from a noname. So I made another plan to reach the goal.

The plan was simple, I need to launch 100 successful directories with a Domain Rating above 30 and traffic above 10k visitors a month each.

Then I launch this directory-promo-network system on top of my directories.

Once I gain traction it will be easier to convince the other directory owners to join my network, because it’s already fully functioning with clients and revenue.

Project Description (no name yet)

You’re an indie maker or a small startup. You’ve got low Domain Rating or Low Traffic or you’re just starting out. You enter your URL, you load $100 to spend there, and activate it. The tool finds the most relevant directories and features your tool there until it gets X number of clicks. Let’s say $100 is for 100 clicks. Once you get 100 clicks, your tool is gone from all the featured sections of those directories.

Why do we need this project?

Because I want people to monetize directories in a scalable way. Most directories monetize in a very ugly way (google ads, carbon ads, irrelevant banners). These options make almost no money. I know guys with millions of visitors and making just a few k a month.

The best way to monetize the directory is to sell “sponsored” spots. But it’s not easy to find a buyer. And the buyer isn’t sure if the directory is good.

In this project I’m building, software and AI will do all the job of matching the promoted products with relevant directories and the buyer can try it out for as little as $5. Just to get 5 clicks.

So, I’ve opened my cards. Expect more on this in January. I’m open to partnering with other directory founders.

That’s it.

Share it with a friend if you think it’s good.

My newsletter» 100xfounder.beehiiv.com

My twitter » x.com/johnrushx

John Rush

Discussion about this post