🪄 Reverse-Engineering Distribution (via Open Analytics)

Hey,

The Spells Master is back!

Welcome to the 17th issue.

Today's topics:

1. Reverse-Engineering Distribution (via Open Analytics)

2. A tool to discover Rapidly Growing Trends before they take off.

3. One recommended video on Ultra Realistic Fashion Photography using Midjourney v6

Reverse-Engineering Distribution (via Open Analytics)

If you had access to a successful startups’ web analytics, you would easily be able to figure out where they get their distribution from.

And if you are in a similar niche (like AI) or adjacent niche (if they are AI Image generator and you are AI Video generator), then you can easily replicate the same strategy to get more eyes on your product.

Thankfully, we have 100s of startups sharing their analytics openly so you can use it to get an easy advantage.

Pieter Levels famously shares all his analytics openly for all his startups.

Let's suppose you want to find where his startup photoai.com gets all the traffic from.

Since he uses Simple Analytics (I know it because he tweets about it all the time) and a Public Dashboard so we can easily find it.

Simply go to simpleanalytics.com/photoai.com to find the traffic sources.

Pro-tip: Sort by 1 year to find the traffic distribution from the last year. Or simply just append ?period=year&count=1&interval=month to the url like simpleanalytics.com/photoai.com?period=year&count=1&interval=month

As you can see, he gets a lot of traffic from Google, Twitter, and There's An AI for That so you can at least get on TAAFT if you are creating an AI product.

You can also figure out exactly which pages of his rank like /ai-avatars, /tinder, /wedding and make your own pages like that to rank yourself.

You can take a look at another startup of his called Interior AI.

As you can see Interior AI gets tons of traffic from its andriod-app source which might be the Android App for Interior AI.

Idk what xataka.com is but it sure ranks well.

Now remember that you can't find every startups exact distribution like this though but you can approximate it using tools like SimilarWeb and a few reverse-engineering techniques.

In any case, you can find all kinds of startups that use Simple Analytics and publish their analytics openly by doing a quick Twitter Search with simpleanalytics.com but you have to scroll a lot to find them.

Thankfully, I have compiled a list of some of them:

1. Photo AI

2. Interior AI

3. Remote OK

4. Read Make

5. Simple Analytics Meta Dashboard

6. Leave Me Alone

7. QR Menu Creator

8. Try Ellie

9. StartKit AI

10. TailScan

11. Pizza GPT

12. Knip Dev

13. Android Dev Careers

14. Like Remote

15. UniHosted

You can do the same for Plausible.

Pro-tip: Sort by All to find the traffic distribution from All Time. Or simply just append ?period=all to the url like plausible.io/plausible.io?period=all

1. Plausible Meta Dashboard

2. Screen Studio

3. Line Breaker

4. I Code This

5. The Final Hop

6. Build Market

7. Filiphric

8. Beraliv

You can find more of these by searching for plausible.io on Twitter, Reddit, Indiehackers, ProductHunt where Indiehackers post these.

A tool to discover Rapidly Growing Trends before they take off.

Exploding Topics discovers trends before they take off.

You can see how AI Image Enhancer, Loop Earplugs, and Typebot are ranking.

These are great if you want to sell something, make a video on it, or just write content on it.

You can filter by time or even categorize it.

It even includes future forecasting upto 1 year.

You just have to be right once in this kind of thing because if it blows up, it will really blow up and you'll be very early to take advantage of it.

You can even sort by category like AI.

Turns out, ChatPDF and AI Presentation Maker have a good search volume.

This tool surfaces data from Google Trends and many other sources but presents it in a really useful manner.

You can still use Google Trends but unless you know exactly what to search, it is useless.

That's where Exploding Topics shines.

One recommended video on Ultra Realistic Fashion Photography using Midjourney v6

Attractive thumbnails are the main reason people click on videos, choose a book, watch a movie, or rent a house on Airbnb.

People do judge a book by its cover.

One way to make attractive thumbnails is to use AI Art generators like Midjourney and Krea AI.

Thankfully, there are people who make videos like this.

It is a complete guide to Ultimate Fashion Photography covered in the least amount of time.

Imagine being able to generate impressive people on your landing pages in just a matter of minutes.

The good thing is you can generate realistic images too.

This guide covers it all.

You can also download the prompts on their Gumroad.

Tweet of the day

Make Luxury Places useful rather than shutting them down when there are no games.

It makes for a better business.

Rabbit Holes

1. The “Brand Swapping” Method - Content creation is hard unless you can boil it all down to a formula. This is one decent formula.

2. How I Use Syften To Grow Syften - The best kinds of startups to build that grow by dogfooding them. Most Cold Email and Cold DM SaaS fall into that bucket.

3. The Psychology of Money - The blog that gave birth to the book. It is that good.

Until next time,

Your Spells Master!

Enjoyed the newsletter? Share it with your marketers and content creator friends.

Someone forwarded this to you? Join the newsletter so you directly get it in your inbox.

More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Hidden Signals in Job Boards (LINK)

2. The Next Billion-Dollar Business (LINK)

3. How Causing Confusion can get you more attention (LINK)

Disclosure: Everything said in this post is for educational purposes only. Please follow the law. By reading this post, you accept full responsibility for your actions.