I just want to share my recent personal experience.
Recently I've finally decided to try creating something new that people would find useful hoping that some day I would be able to turn a profit from that. So I vibe coded a pretty bare-bones (but fully functional) version of my idea and started to talk about it in several platforms, including IndieHackers.
And the main "advice" I've got after talking with a few people was "You are putting too much effort in your product, your focus should be on finding the right market fit for your idea". And after reading the logs in my server I found out nobody bothered to actually try what I built(and no, you don't need to create an account to use), which is fine. But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing?
So, after a brief encounter with this community(people that are trying to build products) I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution.
I get that many people are in this space only to make money and that finding the "magic idea" is probably a good advice if you don't care about what you will build and you need to make money fast. But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas.
I didn't understand the indiehacker community/product mindset until I discovered the indiehacker "influencers" / lifestyle vloggers / etc. that might be the only ones actually turning a profit on all of this.
The influencers sell a lifestyle of throwing a million darts at the board with simple apps and building tiny businesses off the handful that get a lot of interest or seem to resonate with users. And the apps they build that do well are mostly small tools for other indiehackers to use to build/host/augment their apps. So they not only have the distribution and marketing aspects solved already, but they've actually created the demand for their own products by selling what they do as a viable (and easy/glamorous) path to success.
The other indiehackers are mostly in it to be like their favorite influencers, so they copy them by making small tools for other indiehackers and trying the million darts strategy. But it just gets lost in a sea of other indiehackers with no audience or distribution, all trying to sell the same kinds of products to each other. It just seems like a really bad community to sell to: very cost conscious, building competing products, familiar with all your marketing/fake-it-til-you-make it strategies. If at first you don't succeed, watch more youtube videos and throw more darts!
I don't think "market pull" is a terrible strategy and I'm sure for some it's just a fun way to write software but I worry that it's mostly a hybrid get-rich-quick scheme, parasocial thing for the small number of influencers at the top that wastes a huge amount of time. Personally I don't like the idea of baiting people with fake landing pages and think it's actively harmful for so many people to only build simple apps with immediate traction. It's just poisoning the well and making small-scale software low-trust, trying to get rich quick off other people trying to get rich quick
That's hilarious. The post reminded me of Marc Lou, who's launched like 30 SaaS, and from what I gathered by far his most profitable one is the one that helps you launch your own SaaS...
The same guy who sold a Saas starter kit riddled with security flaws that allowed anyone to just have access to your product, then when it was pointed out to him, he berated the person who told him and said it was 'no big deal' and to 'build something'.
The guy's extremely sketchy and is selling a non existent pipe dream to people who are easily swayed by "how to make money online" nonsense.
How do you make money online? By making “how to make money online” courses.
Lol I love it, been hoping something like this existed, thank you
If you want an overly long slightly different version of that video, you could check out the Folding Ideas video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
I find it pretty fascinating that these "asia backpacking entrepreneur" types are in general so stuck with the "fake it, perception is everything" mindset, that they build products such as:
"Create Stunning Travel Photos at Popular Destinations Without Leaving Home. Our AI model crafts your perfect travel photos."
which is the featured example client on https://codefa.st - the vibe coding course by aforementioned Marc Lou.
It's the "envelope stuffing" 'business' of the 80s informercials updated
Or the "how to make a course" 'courses' of the 2010s
Or the "how to make a blog" 'blogs' of the 2000s
As they say, what's new is old again
Now it’s how to earn money on TikTok by buying an AI course maker to make courses on how to earn money on TikTok.
That guy is sooo shady. Just something really insincere and sinister about his whole shtick. Unfortunately lots of young, eager devs dont know to avoid these characters yet
Its the old story of who makes money in the gold rush, the person selling equipment and eggs.
And vices! That's what's really driving this phenomenon. The users have a deeply meaningful goal they are pursuing (achieve financial independence, realize a great idea), and end up repeatedly taking low effort dopamine hits from "building their toolset" or whatever.
Same with the self-help world. Big, life-defining subjects hijacked for quick dopamine hits.
“During a gold rush, sell shovels”
Modern take: during a gold rush, review the shovels.
Build a shovel app?!
Shovel-as-a-Service*
[*] Also known as "tool hire" and has been around since the dawn of mankind
I package shovel-industry futures into financial instruments and sell them to speculators.
I strip out the sharp-bladed, fiberglass handled ones and sell them individually, then combine the leftovers with other shitty shovels and sell them as sets of top quality, grade-A dirt moving implements.
and I create a cryptocurrency whose name is shovel but has nothing to do with the shovel but its just for the hype.
I think we have a winner…
Well Pieter Levels has a negative customer acquisition cost because he gets most of his business off of X and he gets so many impressions that he gets paid to post there. That's a pretty incredible marketing hack if you ask me. I invest in startups and the ones who do really well hack marketing. They have tech in their stack that is specifically devoted to automating and scaling their marketing.
But if you listen to Levels' interviews, especially before his Twitter stardom, you will see that he always promotes the find your audience and build to them approach.
Amusingly enough the product that makes him the most is PhotoAI and that doesn't seem to target his audience at all.
But there's no guarantee your audience will buy what you can sell.
your audience is supposed to guide what you're selling. The fundamental belief is getting the audience is harder than building something they want. This part is probably true, while the rest of the ecosystem is garbage and scams
> They have tech in their stack that is specifically devoted to automating and scaling their marketing.
Interesting, what are some examples?
https://www.rezi.ai/enterprise
We've built a white-labeled version of our resume software to tackle specific keywords, communities, and now general organisations
This would be an exact example
Something very similar applies to VC investing. Sure, some founders get rich. But founder returns averaged across all founders are horrible. The VCs however... they are like those influencers. They'll tell you exactly how you should maximize for their return, just in case you strike it big. They're not going to tell you how to minimize your risks, unless that happens to align with their increased returns.
The sad part is, there are people building genuinely useful tools or creative projects, but their stuff gets buried under the avalanche of low-effort trend-chasing
Kind of like all the investment and finance influencers. If they’re so good at it why do they need to spend all that time trying to be an influencer? They should be rich already. They even beg for likes and subscribes so they’re obviously not doing it as a hobby. It’s simply because they’re trying to get rich selling advice to gullible people.
There is a similar "community" of real estate investors. I've met one of them through a friend and asked a lot of questions about his business. He was "pivoting" to seminars and courses as well. I asked him why and he said he can "easily scale" with seminars/courses while investing, even pure flips takes time and you can only do so many with a limited budget, maybe one/two transactions a year.
I am very skeptical as well and I think there is a lot of truth to "those who can do, those who can't teach" adage. It's one thing if you are in "who can't" group because you are older/retired/done with it after many years. It's another if it's a guy in his 20's or 30's selling courses. Those in my experience are almost always just snake oil salesmen.
Personally I find indiehackers unique amongst get rich quick schemes because it's very transparently a community of people trying to get rich quick by building small apps for other people trying to get rich quick building small apps. It's not necessarily that the influencers are deceiving anybody (I think some do), they really do build apps like that too, some of which are genuinely successful. They're not selling advice.
So it's like, on one hand it's not like "I'm a genius trader, buy my course for $3k and you will be too" because the people at the top actually, (mostly) demonstrably do the thing they claim is possible. And it's not like an MLM because there is not really any pyramid scheme dynamics involved. But on the other hand it's a market that only exists on the buyside because enough people believe it exists on the sellside to build for it, thus generating demand on the buyside.
Most influencers also don’t sell courses, although some definitely do. They try to ramp up eyeball time any way they can. It’s more about starting a mini-community in their favor which is where I see the parallel. You’re right though, it’s more fragmented it seems in the indiehackers community and a bit more ponzi.
The current templates business most of them have feels like the buy my course for 3k
> might be the only ones actually turning a profit on all of this
I don't think this is true at all. How many such influencers are there, really, a dozen? I'd guess there are a million people making everything from absolute bank, down to pocket money. Most of them are probably not even aware that these influencers exists.
The thing about MLM schemes (or I guess MLH schemes in this case) is that the pyramid at the bottom is flat and small, and this example illustrates that intuitively more immediately than Avon. Are you interested in being a follower of a follower of an indiehacker? No? Then as a follower of an indiehacker you have no market.
Yeah, I spent some time researching this crowd and most of the ones I found have the playbook of selling to indie hackers and talking about how successful they are with fake MRR screenshots.
It is also noticeable that IndieHackers talks a lot about revenue and very little about profit. Easy hack for revenue: sell $1 notes for $0.50.
> influencers sell a lifestyle
Oh, you mean that thing called the internet?
you should not ask indie hackers for advice and you should not hang out with them.
If you build a product for marketers, you should hang out with them and ask them for advices, not indie hackers who know nothing about marketing.
If you build a product for bakers, you should hang out with them to understand what they need, not with indie hackers who have never baked anything in their lives.
That sounds logical, but for certain types of products, it is not.
There is no point in talking with indie hackers. It's only useful if you need knowledge about coding skills, which is rarely the case (especially now with AI).
> But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing?
1. Comments are the internet aren't written for you, they are written for the author of the comment.
2. The assertion is sound, even if not particularly useful. Your logs exclaim that you don't have market fit, just as said. What more can be said? If finding market fit was a well defined formula, everyone would do it. This is the magic that, for better or worse, you have to figure out on your own.
> But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing?
Honestly most communities on the internet feel like that. That's one of the reasons why people migrated to discord servers.
(This very comment of mine is generic af too and has as little insight as an LLM predicting how a random HN users would comment here.)
Anyway, unless you made a tool for other devs (an IDE etc.), there is very little reason to ask what other devs think about your product. They're not your target audience. In the best case they're random people, in the worse case they're your competitors.
>> But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas.
I agree. As long as you make it explicit in your encouragement that they should do this as a hobby with no expectation of income.
If their goal is to work on an interesting problem then discussing marketing is irrelevant.
If however their goal is to get paid, then the nature of the code is irrelevant. If you want to get paid then marketing (finding a customer base, discussing their pain, solving that need at a price they can afford etc) is more important.
Unfortunately in a lot of postings this context is not made clear. So the replier has to assume one or other context. Equally Unfortunately they often don't post which context they assumed.
Incidentally marketing might be the most important part of commercial success, but it is not the only important part. It is the most difficult part though so it makes sense to start there. Execution still matters, good execution makes sales easier. But the best execution ever does not mean anything if marketing is missing.
> You are putting too much effort in your product, your focus should be on finding the right market fit for your idea
How is this not excellent advice? There are lots of stories of founders building first (sometimes for years, even), then finding out that there is no market for it (as it seems you have done). The people evaluating your product might have even just read your post and concluded that there's no market, a tarpit idea [0], from their own experiences.
I am assuming this [1] is your product, from looking at your profile and searching the name on IH. The comments are exactly as I've stated, and they apparently have visited your website too, so maybe your logs are not accurate, or they have an adblocker on.
> Hey, I checked out your website—looks great! Just wanted to share some honest feedback. I think you should hold off on going too deep into development right now. Instead, treat this as your MVP and focus first on getting real customers.
> This is a common trap many founders (myself included) fall into—building out the full product before validating if there's a real market fit. Get users, collect feedback, and then iterate. That’s the fastest and most efficient path forward.
If all you are doing is making apps, you have a hobby, but it is not guaranteed that you will have a business from it, so understand what it is you are optimizing for as the two require different actions to succeed.
[0] https://mikekarnj.com/posts/tarpit-ideas
[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-build-this-iCFJ3kI9WLa...
> How is this not excellent advice?
I do understand that in order to create something popular you need to create something good but you also need to properly communicate what you do. And proper communication is as hard as creating something good. So, I do know you need to "find an audience", and that is why I've posted it in a few places.
Having said all that, reading these comments made me feel somewhat demoralized because the advice wasn't really actionable. As a noob in this space I went in expecting to get some advice along the lines of: "your idea is bad", "the website design needs to improve", "your app keeps crashing", "there is no way to make money from this", etc... But all I've got was this generic "find users" advice.
"Find users" isn't intrinsically bad advice, but the way it was delivered felt really bad. How do I find users? Should I post about it in some platform? Maybe I should write a blog post about it? Running ads is a viable approach? Given what I have, what communities should I try to engage?
> so understand what it is you are optimizing for as the two require different actions to succeed
But I don't want to create a business right now. I just want to create something that people find interesting. I already know how to build things for myself, now I want a different challenge. But right now I feel stuck because I've built something, nobody seems to care and I don't really know how to improve my situation.
The thing I'm working on right now with a partner is an idea we got with yet someone else who was working with us. He was working in the sort of role that nobody would think of. I would have never known the area even existed. We're working on finishing the MVP this week and we have multiple people per target industries that are asking to check it out.
The trouble with influencers, is that they have ready-made consumer audiences.
Everyone else should be looking at things that create inarguable value. If I'm charging $XX per hour and this thing saves me multiple hours per X time period, then it sells itself. Even if the thing isn't saving me money (costs as much as the time saved) - it still may be worth it because maybe faster delivery and less drudgery is worth the outlay. And it would probably cost more to hire someone to do that anyway.
So, I agree with the dude who told you to find users first. But maybe the advice should have been "find pain points that you can solve." Say you figure out a service that could save lawyers loads of time. Then rather than say "try out my app" you could say something like "let me join on as a free contributor for a while so that I can work with you to improve X process." Once you have proven it works and you get the buy-in, then sales should come easier. But I don't see how you can discover / develop these things without being embedded in X field.
When you built your app, whom did you build it for? Presumably you built it for a specific customer segment in mind, so did you try searching for them on Google or elsewhere?
Or did you build it for no one? That is why you're struggling to get users, because if you actually had built it for a specific persona, then you'd know exactly where to find them. You're not actually doing anything different to the author of the OP, just building something and hoping people will come [0], which is one of the worst lies founders tell themselves.
> But I don't want to create a business right now
That's fine, you don't have to make money from your products, but my point fundamentally doesn't change, either you're building for yourself, in which case it's a hobby, or you're building for someone else, in which case you need to know who these people are before you build. Sounds like you fell into the exact same trap the person on IH warned you about, so if you don't want to feel demoralized in the future, you need to change your mindset, from building to understanding users' issues.
[0] https://samuelmullen.com/articles/startup-fallacies-if-you-b...
I think you have a big disconnect with the Indie Hacker community. It sounds like you posted there hoping to get them as an audience and potential users of your project. But they assumed you are posting as a fellow founder trying to get feedback on your business. So they gave you advice about your business (which you didn't want) and didn't much care to check out the actual project (which they assumed is secondary).
You should probably try to clarify this, address them more directly and make it clear that you're trying to gain them as users of your project - if you want to pursue this path at all, of course.
Also, remember that no one owes you to try out your project. It's perfectly fine for many people to just not care about the problem you're trying to solve, even if to you it seems like a very important idea. Personally, I'm not vibe coding or using Ai much at all, so I would have no interest in trying out your product, even though it is free. This is not me being rude in any way: I'm just not your target audience. Perhaps the people on Indie Hackers are also not, though likely for other reasons. Or perhaps your pitch just wasn't attractive or clear enough.
> But all I've got was this generic "find users" advice.
That is a polite way to say that your idea or your execution (so far) is bad.
> But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing?
Is there a website, documentation, any kind of presentation of your product? In that case, depending on your idea, this might be already enough for people to evaluate it. Certain categories are so overpopulated, people don't need to see the actual product any more; some description, maybe a screenshot, that's enough. The other side is, people are also so feed up with seeing the same stuff for the gazillions time again and again, they simply can't even bother with it any more.
> I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution.
The idea drives your marketing, which brings you customers. The execution is what holds them and animates them to give you money. But if your marketing sucks, you won't get customers easily, so it's important to have a good balance, unless you plan to polish your product for a decade, until serious money shows up.
> Is there a website, documentation, any kind of presentation of your product?
I do have a fully functional MVP available on the internet (https://leetprompt.io)
> The other side is, people are also so feed up with seeing the same stuff for the gazillions time again and again, they simply can't even bother with it any more.
That is a fair point, but if you can't even bother why would you give any advice then?
> it's important to have a good balance
That's why I went out of my way to try my hand at marketing something for the first time, but the only kind of advice I've got is a little bit depressing.
"But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas."
I don't think many programmers need that advice ;) Looking at the open source community, there's already plenty of people that freely share their ideas and implementations ... (only to be ripped off by cloud service providers later).
And, sadly, the market for cool gadgets or 3D-printable trinkets is even more brutal. There will be 10 clones in stock on Amazon before you get your first batch through customs. My advice would be that nowadays, you should start your product journey with planning what your moat is going to be and how you're going to defend it. Or if you skip that, accept that your moat is only going to last a few months, which seems to be what the article's author was going with.
IMHO you should not be marketing a product to software developers. That market is completely saturated and most of the tools are free.
Today's super-simple big market idea: We got my elderly mother a flip phone and it's too hard to use. I'm going to describe what would be ideal for her now, and by all means DON'T think up additional features to "make it better". She needs a phone that when opened/activated it give a list of people (contacts) which she can scroll through and pick one to call. It should call directly, not change screen or show some other shit. Just call the highlighted name and call. Maybe it could switch to a "calling" screen with just the one name until the call is over. That's it. No other functionality so she can "get lost" or confused.
Maybe this is an android app? I'm not sure if you can override the main UI to the extent this wants to be. I'll gladly get her a cheap Android phone and pay $5 for an app that turns it into this usable device for elderly people. Yes, five dollars. No adds, no user monetization, no enshitification.
Can anyone deliver this? I think there's a large market for it and it should be a one weekend job.
BTW, however you load/add contacts should be a sort of hard to find function maybe for someone else to do. Not something you can accidently "get into".
There are a million things like this just waiting for someone to create. But talking to developers for ideas is a dead end.
>> I think there's a large market for it and it should be a one weekend job.
You're essentially asking for a heavily customized phone OS, this is not like adding a bootstrap theme - and you're willing to pay FIVE DOLLARS?
>> But talking to developers for ideas is a dead end.
Maybe for product ideas but perhaps you should find one to critique your "weekend project" idea
>> You're essentially asking for a heavily customized phone OS
No. I'm asking for a "dialer only" phone OS. It can take the form of an always-on-top dialer app over a standard OS. That's it.
I don't know why people gave you that advice but it's pretty easy to tell when a designer hasn't spent enough (or any!) time defining their target market and then spending time with those people to listen instead of force fitting a technology. Without that up front work we're all just rolling the dice. That said, building stuff is fun by itself so it doesn't always need to be about money and growth. Just know it's a hobby.
There's definitely room in this space for building stuff just because it's interesting or fun or weird. Some of the coolest tools and communities started that way
Well that meant your users do not hang in IndieHackers
Yes, and it is very tiresome advice to see continually, especially when given to newcomers whose first instinct is to build a solid, useful app or service, and they're being steered away from that. The number of times I've read that one should put up landing pages, spend time socializing them, and only if there are enough signups to actually build something is rather depressing.
These folks are obviously playing a different game than I'm used to. But in my ~30 years at it, I can confidently say that taking the time to build what I feel are good apps, well-crafted, has provided immense satisfaction (I can at least look at a collection of apps, not landing pages), and has always developed or honed my skills, which has opened many doors. The marketing-first approach just sounds painful for someone who, like me, wants to be building things.
You have a hobby (of making apps), not an actual business. The sibling comment is right, those are two different skills that optimize for different things. Which is fine, everyone has hobbies, but understand that the "game" they're playing is making money, which requires acquiring customers, which requires marketing.
>and only if there are enough signups to actually build something is rather depressing
Yes, but it is also rather depressing to spend a lot of effort building something that nobody wants. Especially if you are trying to make a living at it.
"I can confidently say that taking the time to build what I feel are good apps, well-crafted, has provided immense satisfaction"
... but has it provided more revenue that what it would have cost for someone to hire you to build this at an acceptable hourly rate? Because if not, you're comparing your hobby against their business in the sense that you can accept less profitable results which wouldn't work for them.
Have you stopped to think about the other possibility - that your project idea is so bad that nobody wanted to try after reading the landing page? I'm not sure it is in your best interest to think first that the problem lies with the audience.
I have lost track of the number of apps I could use and maybe even pay for but that were badly executed (that’s actually being soft as most didn’t even work past the authy login).
You do need to validate product market fit but you also need a minimal viable product. I think most people lost the meaning of what viable means.
Then the problem here isn’t there advice but what is it you need to do to get them to try it? Or where do you need to look to get them to try it?
I see one of the products and I already hate the OP. Thanks
It makes me sad that I cannot trust comments that talk about products or services anymore. Now I understand why people are using TikTok for search. Seeing the person can helps with the trust, even if the problem is the same (they can be paid as well).
There are lots of ads on TikTok too, even more insidious than on forums.
Hm not sure if you are a legit commenter or if this is just rage marketing ;)
He doesn't even own it anymore and, according to the recent reviews of the service (by marketers), it basically stopped working since he sold it (and when I google there are many more like it that works better, this seems to be using 2024 LLMs). So I am not selling it at all.
I just really hate the idea.
I hate it too, but I hate it even more knowing it broke after he sold it. Not even bringing any integrity to the evil. lol
Weird to expect integrity from someone who developed a forum spam-bot.
To top it off, the responses demoed on the web page include testimonials. The product is designed to lie.
“If it’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well”
It's crazy how AI folks are re-inventing literal Internet spam
This is commonly how people choose to use the “greatest breakthrough in the history of computer science” as it was stated in another thread. Great work humanity.
it’s either spam or porn, or both.
heavy sigh
Remember when memes were wholesome cat pictures? That was awesome.
And not only that, people are cheering them on for making slop. The amount of high fiving and patting on the back and the moronic 'bro culture' around these sorts of products especially on Xitter is insane.
I mean that was the most obvious use case from the start.
same, that behavior's an insta-block.
I also dislike the product. But I find it refreshing to see that selling LLM slop for marketing is, apparently, not a viable business.
this is one of the ones he successfully sold, for apparently the biggest amount in fact
I've looked at several and they're mostly aimed at helping to market software. It feels kind of meta. Perhaps this is a particularly tough niche?
This is one of the interesting things I’ve noticed about the indiehacker community and software ecosystem, it’s mostly software built for and marketed to other indiehackers.
At one level it makes complete sense to build software that solves problems you understand, and then market it to the people with the same set of problems. That’s what the “well known” indie hackers did. But if the ecosystem is all just people trying to hack something together quickly and sell it to other people hacking things together quickly it seems questionable that there is any real value there unless you are one of the few influencers with guaranteed distribution.
now you're getting it
>It feels kind of meta.
'circle jerk' would be a less polite way to put it.
Wow, they're actually proud of a marketing spam post that convinced a depressed person struggling with debt that they're being listened to and understood, while possibly convincing them to try some predatory lending service (I assume, since that "debt freedom now" site is telling me how much debt "Americans in București" are erasing right now!).
Having this as a success story you brag about is sociopathic.
The website doesn't work anymore. But yeah it sucks
Are YOU reply guy?
Gross. I would be ashamed to make such software.
Wait, are these considered products? I think the whole indie hacker scene has totally lost it. A product takes time. ”Painkillerideas.com” doesn’t sounds like a product - and this was his biggest win
If you look directly under that you will see that replyguy was his biggest win at a 6 figure sale.
The author states "Virality is rare and nearly impossible to predict" and yet one of his products aims to automate the creation of "viral LinkedIn posts"! Much irony.
>Did you find success by focusing on one project and giving it time, or by making lots of new bets?
Mostly focusing on one project at a time on most days, but running several projects in parallel, and cross-pollinating the knowledge I gain from one to the others.
>Has "slow growth" ever paid off for you?
My arguably most successful project (in terms of impact and popularity) went “almost nowhere” for the first 2-3 years. But I wasn’t really trying to make it go anywhere, it was just for the enjoyment of me and my friends.
>If you had to start over, would you pick patience or a high volume of launches?
Both. Be patient, let projects grow slowly, and grow multiple projects at a time while you wait.
Slow and consistent. I truly believe this is the key to growth. Unfortunately, I also suck at it. If I don't see interesting growth after a few weeks ,I'm inclined to give up too quickly.
Can you tell more, please? I'm interested to know what did you build that had an interesting growth to you. Could you please expand on one project of yours? Thank you!
> 37 different products
I guess we have different understandings of what a product is.
Yeah I feel kinda petty saying it, but given how easy it is to crap out a web app, I hardly consider most to be "products". That word in my mind is at least reserved for something that at least has some tangible aspect to it.
Let's call this shotgun capitalism. It's all the rage over at indie X.
It used to be that one had a unique interest, profession or capability. This uniqueness causes them to see a gap in the market that could be filled by a new business. They work on filling out that gap, going as far as the customers and their capabilities will take them.
But that's too limiting. Because their interests and their customers might not lead to infinite growth! So instead you need to burn your life looking for that ONE business that will take off.
So shoot at everything. Burn your business, burn your time, burn your customers (this I detest the most), burn your intellect. Maybe get a shot at joining some club that no one cares about, except the other shooters.
The correct path is neither a shotgun blast on all available ideas, or a march to the death on your pet idea. It's a coherent expansion of effort based on feedback, capabilities, risk and likely return. Otherwise known as being in business.
The problem is that feedback is difficult to get without customers. Plus in many cases, the feedback of what people intend to do is not really helpful at predicting what they will do.
I'll go with an example from my past: We built a SaaS for freelance photographers to organize and distribute their images. People loved it. We listened for feedback and people loved the new features. But churn was always a bit too high to make this a truly great business. We asked for feedback and got various reasons, none of which turned out to be correct. Most of our churn was photographers getting frustrated with the freelancer life and either signing up for an agency or changing jobs. That's how I learned the hard way that you cannot succeed in a bad market. But from the outside, it wasn't obvious that this market segment would be bad. You need to "test drive" the market with a product to learn if it can sustain a business or not. And that's what many of those indie builders are trying to do: feel out an acceptable market.
Yeah I agree there. The challenge is the order of the test drive. The ideal validation goes like this in my mind: 1) Will anyone buy it at all? 2) Will they buy it greater than its costs to produce at reasonable margin? 3) Are there enough assessible marketing channels at that margin? 4) Is the overall size of the business viable for my goals?
What the indie builders are often doing is starting backwards. Starting with something that should ostensibly be a large market (4) or seemingly timely. Then they find that the marketing channels are hard (3) so they work on that. Then they lower their margin or increase marketing spend (2) hoping that fixes conversions. Then maybe they learn that no one actually wants their product at all (1).
It definitely is not easy, especially novel ideas. Existing markets you can largely skip #1 and #2 as proven.
This is my experience as well - it is very difficult to know what a market is really like without actually trying to sell a product into it.
What people say and what they do are very loosely coupled. The only really good validation of a product idea is people giving you $.
Why, in all that this holy, won't anyone focus on one thing and stick with it until it stops making sense. Building a business takes time.
- Stop diluting your attention.
- Iterate, iterate, iterate.
- Stick around for long enough so people have a chance to know you exist.
37 is one of those numbers that keeps popping up in certain places. Whenever I see it in a headline, I go in feeling like I'm about to be bullshitted by the author.
You might be interested in this video by Veritasium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6iQrh2TK98
I think that Jason Fried knew about that.
I build random things in the “indie hacker” way but it’s always more about doing stuff for me than others. I find it enjoyable and fun, and that’s what drives it. If I get some traction, then great, but if not, I also get the tool I wanted and the fun experience and learning of building it. While I wish this didn’t come at the expense of reading less, I am happy it means my TV backlog is growing.
I don’t get how anyone thinks that spending 100s of hours over and over again on projects that make $0 is a good idea. “Definition of insanity” and all that. You are in denial that you are unemployed, you might as well do something more interesting or enjoyable.
There is an argument to be made that it's good training, like coding kata's just with the end to end.
If you're looking to make a living off of it, the training argument only works if you then go on to used the trained skills though.
In this instance, if the numbers provided are to be believed they made bank.
i'm seeing a six figure sale on a five figure investment, among others.
Though i suspect, like is usually it, that the provided cost numbers are much higher in reality when factoring in time and opportunity cost etc.
A product with $6000 in revenue selling for only $12,500 seems crazy to me. Why were you so eager to get rid of it?
Most likely, they booked some advertisements to push revenue but didn't honestly account for the ad expenses. I've seen that way too many times with Indie products that they brag about large revenue numbers and "forget" to mention that profit margins are negative. I remember once hearing about a start-up that resold baby diapers at a loss. Obviously, they were easily able to scale up customers and revenue ...
found it:
"Critically, he did not understand margin. At the end of December when things were getting truly desperate, he said to me “Phil, just bring me a forecast that shows how much we need to sell to break even.” He did not understand, after three years of negative margin, that increased sales resulted in increased losses."
from Ecomom Post Mortem by Philip Prentiss
It's the whole "we're selling $1 bills for 50c, but we're not worried, we'll make up for it by scaling up."
Imo the pithier version is “we lose money on every sale, but we’ll make it up on volume!”
It's profoundly depressing that this is basically the model for almost all startups in the last twenty plus years. :shrug:
Revenue isn't profit.
Might only take months for traffic/attention/fad to completely die off, or a rival to supplant it.
I think such small businesses are really hard to sell. It may be the purchaser just wanted the domain.
Slow growth can feel like failure in the early days, especially in the indie/startup Twitter bubble where people post their $10k MRR screenshots two weeks after launch. But what was said really resonates: many of those "failed" projects are actually just early
Ok, guesstimating that the 6 figure sale was around 3x earnings, the total of all the revenue is less than $450k for 5 years. Then you need to allow for expenses and taxes. Might be Ok as a side hustle, but probably insufficient to replace a typical income.
A reality check to counteract all the startup boosterism.
$33k per year, so $165k for 5 years is good enough salary e.g. in Poland where I live, not achieved by 80% of people in country. Why I chose $33k? It's enough to have decent life with some good holidays and local trips along the years. Having $450k income, even if half will be taken by expenses - you still can live a very decent life in many places around the world.
It seems that all these products are 100% online. Therefore it's a very viable income source for people who live in, well, the majority part of the world.
Is making ~8 products a year for 5 years perceived as a viable way to be successful?
I worked for a company where I designed hardware products at that rate, although not for as long. Someone in management discovered that each time you release a new product you get a huge sales bump from distributors filling inventory. We already had a crowded and confusing product line, so the distributors eventually started sending the old unsold products back and asking for a refund, and that stopped that release cadence.
It did limit the complexity of products, which could be good or bad, but the products were pipelined, so having one employee designing them in ~300 man-hours per design, spread out over six months or so, was totally doable. This included the whole gambit, from conceiving the design to component selection, schematic, layout, design for manufacturing, test fixtures and procedures to documentation and ad copy.
I do feel like it's quicker with hardware than software, because hardware follows something like the theoretical "waterfall" method that software has never used, so everything is clearly documented. For example, I pulled up the cheapest transistor from a common supplier, and it has five pages of documentation plus an index: https://www.formosams.com/upload/product/Mosfets/FMSBSS138-Q...
Everything is always easy to look up, with consistent formatting from every supplier, and you're never dealing with APIs that don't do what you'd expect them to do. You also don't need to continuously fix older releases, because they worked when you shipped them. On top of that, if a component is commonly used, it'll stick around for a lifetime, even as newer products come out, so you don't need to update your product unless it's worth the cost savings.
Yep, chasing short-term signals (like launch bumps) can backfire if it's not grounded in sustainable demand
A lot of people want to replicate Pieter Levels success
In that list, "startupretreats" jumped out at me because surfoffice.com has been doing well for at least 10 years by now... So maybe he also lost some opportunities by giving up too early.
I guess it's go wide or go deep
I've launched 37 turds in 30 days and will do it again.
The indie hacker community builds worthless, visionless widgets and then fails to market them. Could you imagine Steve jobs talking about building 37 products in 5 years?
Instead, talk to a customer. Build something that solves just one person's problem really well. Grow from there.
Or a dozen. Or, better, a few dozen. Read "The Mom Test" to learn how to get useful information from your face to face discussions.
So much this! The Mom Test is a rare gem in a sea of startup advice books, but it's the only one I've come across that cuts through all the BS and focusses on the only important thing - finding a market for people who want your product.
Spoiler alert - you can't always do it sitting at home in your office chair.
From what I perceive of his personality through the media, I totally believe that a 24 years old Steve Jobs in 2025 would do that.
Jobs was a perfectionist and would not have done that, given what I read from Isaacson's biography.
He would have started a group of people and got them to each do that, and then connected with the winners of the hundreds or thousands of attempts and then taken credit for it.
Jobs literally did get a group of people together and did not do that. He built a company where all the products contributed to the vision of personal computing; either personal computers or personal computer accessories.
The thing people seem to forget about Jobs is that he really was that good, that obsessive/dedicated and that visionary. It's that simple.
His process resulted in some of the most transformative products humanity has ever known.
True, but lots of people who were less talented failed with this approach. It's always a bad idea to look for advice from outliers.
Exactly this.
It's inherent in the process and way of thinking. It's a dangerous path to pursue for entrepreneurs. How can the results be anything but disposable and frivolous when the process treats them as such.
> Virality is rare and nearly impossible to predict
People see viral products and early hackers who spent years building their reputation, and think that's not too hard, and maybe you need to try as many as possible... Nope, you need to build a business too! Low-hanging fruit saas can be built so fast nowadays that knowing how to build software is not a huge advantage. We know that building businesses takes time and a huge effort. Most businesses will not be Lovable like.
Steve Jobs comparison is not great. You don’t have to be Jobs or have grand vision to make decent product that will make you money.
„indie hacker community builds worthless, visionless widgets „ - I totally agree with this sentence. Those 37 „products” feel like huge waste of time even ones he sold.
But how do you find that first customer who's willing to pay for a solution?
In a way, that's the same problem as getting a job, which seems to be harsh for recent college graduates.
It's complicated, but you have to talk to real human beings in your surroundings and learn about their lives.
Please elaborate. I think I can talk to people pretty well. But I've yet to hear anyone accidentally mentioning a valid business opportunity.
How do you pre-filter which event to go to and who to talk to?
How do you introduce the topic of potential business ideas?
How do you confirm that they would actually pay for it if you would build it?
Also, has this ever worked for you?
You learn where your customers hang out, and then you hang out there and authentically become part of the social group. You spend weeks/months/years learning what they like, their workflows, and their problems. Or, better, you've already spent years working with your customers so you have some experience in these matters. Then you spend more time setting up face-to-face discussions, at conferences, online, or wherever they hang out, *not* trying to shill, but honestly and authentically trying to learn what they need.
It may take dozens or hundreds of attempts, and then you find a small group, maybe a half dozen or so, that are early adopters, willing to live with your experiments and provide feedback. Work with them to hone the value proposition, and learn how to communicate it effectively. Tweak or pivot the product to fit their needs, often for many more months.
There is no simple solution that involves making a few social media posts, or paying for advertisements, or spamming people with email. Everything that actually works takes lots of personal time and energy.
Has this ever worked for you? If so, could you walk us through your journey?
In my experience if you spend a really long time trying to identify a problem to solve, you end up burning too much time on a problem that may not work. The Indiehackers approach is like the opposite of that where you shotgun low-effort attempts at ideas until you find one that sticks. I think most folks trying to build a business want something in the middle though. Use your experience and your knowledge to winnow the market of potential opportunities and to offer you an advantage (with your expertise) then iterate by creating different products until one of those products gets traction.
When I worked at a tech company that eventually became one of the Big Tech Unicorns of the last rush, we had plenty of products that completely bombed, much to the sadness of the folks that worked on them.
This approach has worked for me, and many others. Read the Lean Startup for the general approach, and The Mom Test to learn how to talk to prospective customers. The main point is that you need to talk to customers and work with them throughout the process.
I suspect the 2020's indie hacker community is now a byproduct of the "get rich" enshittification of social media and their role models are tiktok and instagram influencers who teach you how to "build" because with ai no tech skills needed anymore.
Do you think Steve Jobs give a shit about what customers thought?
I've wondered about low-sum acquisitions commonly celebrated on indiehackers/build in public... I thought they were often likely scammers in some way, like using domains with traffic for then nefarious purposes? But maybe not, maybe this is just a way to avoid the dozens of $0 projects on OP's list, and the buyers sincerely want to grow. Navigated to a few OP sold and they still seem to be what they were.
For many people, building out these projects feels impossible to avoid. Selling them on for almost anything at all gives them: some amount of cash, the positive signal of achieving a sale, and also clears headspace otherwise occupied with "I really should do some work on idea #3487."
I am actually a little intrigued in the inner workings of replyguy.com (the app OP sold for 6 figures)
It just sounds like it relies on scraping reddit/twitter/some basic google/brave search api shenanigans...
Seriously, all the posts on replyguy.com seems to particularly target reddit and I am pretty sure that they might be scraping since eating reddit's api cost might be hard.
The autogenerate reply feature might be really easy to build (I think)
I mean, I don't condone scraping since it might be a little grey area but apify has reddit scraping too with the ability to search for keyword.
I mean, they are also raking as in as much if not more dollars per month than replyguy.com while being an api..
Now, we don't know if they are scraping or using api but I have assumed that they are scraping and so I may be wrong, I usually am but I am kinda impressed by how reddit scraping can lead to 6 figures.
6 figures is not that much to a company that wants that specific product and it's well-built. It also has a user base with somewhat decent monthly visits.
Earning $150000 + 1 viral product sold for 6 figures over the last 5 years isn't that bad in terms of experience which can help grow Refgrow faster using organic SEO and marketing.
I guess all those ideas that never made $1 were because of the "If you build it, they will come" marketing approach.
It is SO bad actually. That's $30,000 a year, a salary of a junior developer with 10 times less responsibility compared to running multiple products.
I am not discouraging building tools, I do that myself but most of these could be done while having a full time job and learning on the side.
You missed the other part of that equation.
One viral product ReplyGuy would have sold for in the $300,000-$500,000 range (my guess) is equivalent to 4 years of salary of a senior developer.
But the level of experience he has now cannot be achieved while having a full-time job and learning on the side.
I feel like this is the same story for products that don't really solve a problem. Its probably a lot easier to focus on one broad market segment like e.g. marketing and learn as much about it as you possibly could. That way you'd know what to do next and maybe even have the power to shape the market.
The growing product is something that bolts in the worst of current internet (affiliation links). Hopefully it will fail too
Affiliate links have been here for three decades; (AutoWeb.com doing it since 1995)
That doesn't mean anything. It's still a huge reason for all the junk and bullshit that's ruined the internet.
> Did you find success by focusing on one project and giving it time, or by making lots of new bets?
lots of new bets are technically impossible. unless you doing something super trivial, you will hit roadblocks that require effort and time (e.g. Apple App Store reviews are notoriously slow and can take a month for a single new app).
"After launching 37 different products over the last few years, I've had one go viral and almost all the others struggle to get any traction at all."
Imagine if these "products" were subject to the laws of product liability in the United States like real products sold there.
Why do software developers call websites or apps "products". Why not just call them "websites", "apps" or just "software".
For example,
"After creating 37 different websites and apps over the last few years, I've had one go viral and almost all the others struggle to get any traction at all."
Is "products" more descriptive. Is it some sort of signalling. Do developers want there software to be treated like tangible products.
"product" just means "something you sell for money to customers". Saying "37 products" rather than "37 websites" makes it clear that each of these were business ventures, and that "going viral" means "finding many paying customers" not "finding many users curious about my fan site". Wikipedia is a site, for example, but not a product.
agree. if those websites were like "Google" that literally indexes whole internet, or "New York Times" which is 175 years old, or "Bloomberg" which is biggest financial data provider — then those can be called products. website is just a surface to provide some real value, backed by really good design and execution, marketing and operations.
what we see instead is a myriad of half-backed, useless, un-maintained, poorly-executed, poorly-operated, poorly-designed solutions to non-existent problems, like shooting a gun into the sky and hoping it will land on a target.
> Imagine if these "products" were subject to the laws of product liability in the United States like real products sold there.
Software products are products and they come with liability. Maybe many bullshit apps can't cause any harm and don't really matter, but most evident is software in the medical space. Also, if you step outside of the US, software products in the EU must comply with the GDPR. If you fail to comply, you are held liable.
I gave up after 20. Now I just work on other people’s ideas or consult.
I burned myself out trying to make something of my own.
Burnout's real, and stepping back means you're being smart about your energy.
The biggest problem I have, is that, even though I know from experience that I should talk to customers to understand their problems and build a solution that provides them value, and spend time talking to them to understand the value proposition, how to communicate it, and how it fits into their workflow, I don't enjoy those bits, and I prefer to just code things I want to build. I prefer to willfully delude myself into thinking that the thing I want to build is something other people will want to pay for. Oh, wait, and I prefer not to charge people and not to sell ads. So there's that too. Am I doing this right?
Probably if not you are trying to build a business.
But! That's just one reason to code anything, and you are probably "doing this" well enough for the other reasons (education, experience, job hunting, and the best one: fun).
Sounds like you could use some input from someone experienced with product marketing. They are all about this kind of communication, both expressing ideas to potential customers and hearing their feedback from initial exposure.
It felt good to hear what Gabe Newell had to say about startups.
I don't mean to criticize how capitalism can turn sour, but the startup system can easily turns into some sort of pyramid scheme or snake oil, where some actors benefit, like online advertisers.
Startuping feels like it comes from a libertarian, Reaganian beliefs of how capitalism works.
"You failed because you had the wrong dream." - Diego Delgado
3 products
1st one didn't sell
2nd one sold for 000s
3rd one sold for 000000s
4th one ?
so really went the other way, quality over quantity
what do you think was the cause for that kind of increase? quality? different target? complexity?
Everyone is trying to "copy" Pieter Levels "success" which as of now is "brand effect."
The guy started his thing over a decade ago and people look at it now and think they can replicate it.
The stuff the guy codes is garbage and what he does is far from solving any problems.
And, I do not believe his revenue numbers. At all. But people on the Internet see some shit posted, believe it, and then compare themselves to it.
Gleaning anything from his "1 in a million success" is falling prey to survivorship bias.
I agree with half your comment while disagreeing with the other half. Yes, it is very true that he now has a brand and can get users much more easily, and that trying to replicate his success is very survivorship bias heavy. However, if he hadn't been solving problems for people, he wouldn't have made the money he has in the first place, because no one would be buying his products (I, for example, bought NomadList a long time ago and met many people from it due to their Slack channels). And see my other comment about "garbage" code, it does not matter if they're making money, Levels is by his own proclamation not a software engineer, he uses code as a tool.
I think Pieter is actually legit, even though his bad takes on things started to increase in the last few years. But his products?
- Nomadlist solved a problem, especially back then: a social network for digital nomads. Nothing wrong with it.
- Remoteok is a job board, but niched down, which is completely ok
- photoai / interiorai: it pains me that an AI slop generator is obviously a viable business model, but apparently many people are willing to pay for this
The rest is indeed brand effect. That shitty flight simulator wouldn't have gotten any traction if it wasn't for being part of "a community".
But, and this is the most important thing I like about Pieter: he doesn't sell shovels in a gold rush. His products solve problems for quite different groups of people and X isn't necessarily the primary marketing platform for his stuff.
There are others in the indie hacker scene that are way more shady, because they make their money from products that sell that lifestyle first and foremost.
How are you defining garbage?
Probably because Levels says he codes each product in a single PHP file. But then again, there's a reason he's successful and the parent is not (at least to that same level, pun intended). Technologists think code is an end unto itself while true entrepreneurs that it's just a means to an end, and that the end itself is money (otherwise, why are you running a business? If you don't make money, it's simply a hobby).
>it's just a means to an end, and that the end itself is money
The end is also to create something useful for your customers. Hopefully.
single file 30,000 of PHP code.
That truly doesn't matter though. It's certainly not what I would do, but assuming the numbers he claims are genuine, it's hard evidence that your customers don't care how you wrote the software.
The feature of software being maintainable and reusable by people other than its original author is for the users. It can be easy to forget until it’s too late.
1 file can be very maintainable. Reuse is promoted by a well designed library and interfaces, which can also be in 1 file.
Only thing 1 file can't do is allow concurrent work if bad version control is used. If patches are tight with good patch theory, 1 file is fine again.
Modern programming languages have namespaces, catch type bugs, all of it works quite well with 1 file. Recent OAuth Cloudflare 1 file library (coded a bit with AI) is a breath of fresh air, 2600 lines of data types and behavior in one place.
The users don't care about this.
I write my software with Haskell, NixOS, comprehensive testing, static analysis, linting, a great deal of care, etc.
If I had written everything in one big PHP file however, the difference to a paying customer would be exactly nil.
like his flying simulator.
same. his websites are indeed garbage.
Indiehackers was the place that finally made me realise trying to bootstrap a tech product is almost always pointless. There's almost always a far better way to allocate your time.
Yup same, the whole toxic culture of lies surrounding it makes things worse as theres people trapped in this weird little bubble of believing half the stories on there. Most are completely fabricated.
For me personally I gave up on SaaS a couple of years ago and shifted my focus elsewhere. I ended up building a site in a niche I've always loved, and it ended up making me love that hobby even more, and now I have a place to share knowledge on it, with the bonus being it puts a small amount of cash in my pocket (not at all job quitting kind of money, but that wasn't the goal).
Lots of products on IH are Stripe verified though.
That's a strange conclusion to come to just based on some people on a website. What's a a "far better" way to allocate your time?
Looking over his list of products, it is clear the author is the quintessential late stage capitalist.
"I cranked out 37 unoriginal, shitty products that have countless existing competitors and zero moat... and none of them made me rich :( "
Best TLDR;
He hasn't bribed the government to make any of them mandatory, so they're all effectively worthless. It's just regular capitalism.
He'll either randomly hit on something that's actually useful, or leave the low-effort software sector, or get a regular job writing low-effort software at one of the big conglomerates that already bribes the government to make their products mandatory.