From Our Desks: Leaderboards and Newsroom Ambitions

Welcome to From Our Desks, where the people behind Indie Hackers share the stories behind the headlines. This week, we talk leaderboard products, newsroom expansions, and social media drama.

@ChanningAllen (Channing Allen, co-founder and editor-in-chief): For a couple months I've been hard at work putting together our news program, which has involved finding the right journalists for the job, supporting them with newsgathering and editing and internal technical support, and making sure all of their content goes out on schedule — namely, three times per week on our newsletter.

And this past week, we decided to up the number of newsletters from three to five. Which ultimately led to one of those dramatic weeks I hated living through but massively appreciate in hindsight. Because right at the beginning of the week as I instructed the team to hit this new target — which I knew would require an unprecedented amount of coordination between our writers, our editor, and myself — I got really sick with a stomach flu. Which meant that I would have to play a significantly reduced role as the team's central coordinator. And to be honest, I wasn't sure we'd be able to hit our goal at first.

But as the week got going, something magical happened:

Every morning as I opened our newsroom channel in Telegram, expecting to have to micromanage the processes of newsgathering, story assignment, newsletter coordination, and editing, I discovered that everyone on the team had already taken the initiative to do all of this work autonomously, only ever popping their heads up to ask for support in moments of really high ambiguity ("Would yet another piece on the ongoing drama between WordPress and WP Engine be overkill, or…?").

Needless to say, we hit our 5-issue-per-week milestone. And now we get to be laser focused on upping the quality of our journalism, which probably means doing a lot more original reporting.

@csallen (Courtland Allen, founder and product lead): A month ago it seemed like every indie hacker on X was building a Product Hunt clone. Including us! But after running a product leaderboard for a week or two… I just don't think it's a great business.

The goal of a leaderboard is to build a marketplace. The supply side (founders) posts their products to get traffic, and the demand side (visitors) comes to discover new products, support their founder friends, get inspired, relieve boredom, or whatever.

The problem is that launching isn't something you can do over and over without being annoying. So a launch-based leaderboard is a poor source of traffic compared to blogging, social, and SEO, which can scale. It's also lame for conversation. What's there to say about a launch except "congrats"?

So I spent the week overhauling our leaderboard to be based on content, not launches. Anyone on IH can create a product page. And when you post on your product page's timeline, it'll go to the day's leaderboard. So instead of a launch leaderboard, we now have kind of a build in public leaderboard.

I'm going to get back to doing some writing this week, but I'm excited to keep hacking on the leaderboard into the future.

@krhignett (Katie Hignett, journalist): I've been thinking a lot about Twitter (X) this week, after writing a story on how expensive its already-pricey API is about to become.

I've only been coding for three years, and writing a simple Twitter bot was one of my first projects. It helped me get to grips with the basics of Python.

I understand the Twitter API is ultimately a highly valuable data source, and that giving it away for free (or basically free) was pretty generous. But I am a little disheartened that this simple project would cost $100/mo (and soon, $200/mo) to run. It was really satisfying to make something that interacted with this massive social media platform.

Then again, the whole process of learning to code has been upended by LLMs since I started in 2021. Maybe if I was starting today, I wouldn't even bother making something so simple.

Like many of us, my relationship with Twitter/X has changed a lot over the last few years. I removed the app from my phone last week after reading a discussion (on Twitter of all places) about scrolling.

I've always justified my time on the app as work, because I find news stories there. But Danny Postma makes the excellent point that if it's work, it should stay on a laptop.

So far, I don't miss it at all.

@StephenFlanders (Stephen Flanders, journalist): I was reminded of the WordPress drama this week because of my story on Ghost. Like everyone else in tech, I paid attention to the whole saga, but it was especially important to me because I've spent the last year building the WordPress plugin Raffle Leader.

Admittedly, I didn't know that much about WordPress before I started building it. All I knew was that my parents used it for their business and that it powered an absolutely massive ~40% of the internet, so I thought it'd be easy money. Wrong. Building on WordPress has been absolute hell.

The platform itself is slow and bloated. Building the plugin itself was even slower, feeling a lot like hiking through sand uphill. The approval process for getting on the official plugin directory comes without timeframes or updates. We've been waiting for over a month now, and without it, marketing has been a challenge. And, of course, there is now almost constant drama surrounding the most important man in the ecosystem.

So, if you're thinking about building on WordPress, my sincere advice would be to save yourself the headache and stay as far away as possible.

@zerotousers (Darko Gjorgjievski, journalist): I've been doing digital marketing for over 15 years now. If there's one "constant" in this world, it's this:

Best practices become worst practices (and vice versa). Email marketing is not the exception. The "best practices" of email marketing 10 years ago are the worst practices of today. This recent analysis piece just proved my point.

This week was also dominated by lists:

• A list of 49 startups that have become unicorns in 2024

• A list of the top 100 creators of 2024

Last but not least, AI. OpenAI is trying to become more like Google, and Google is trying to become more like OpenAI.

@IndieJames (James Fleischmann, journalist): This week, I had the opportunity to interview two founders who started their careers with decent jobs at big, successful companies — and neither could bear it. They were frustrated. Their contributions felt meaningless.

One of them built internal software that "senior leaders" would push, then forget about. The ideas never saw the light of day. The other became an accountant because that's what people do. But he soon found that his impact as an accountant at a 70,000-person company meant his impact was imperceptible.

Both eventually quit and started successful companies. And both of them feel some sense of purpose now.

It makes me think about the importance of seeing the impact of your work — of feeling that your participation in a project actually matters. Most indie hackers get into the game for freedom or the desire to scale their incomes. But I think the unsung hero in getting people out of the 9-to-5 grind is impact.

At the end of the day, it's important to feel that your time was well spent — to see the impact of your work. And I think indie hacking might be one of the best ways to do exactly that.