How do you define an indie business as successful?

My personal definition of success would be when my product pays all of my living expenses (i.e. "ramen profitable".)

I think 3 months after launch is too soon to know if your product is going to be a failure. But if you're growing really fast and making 4-5 figures in MRR after 3 months, then it's pretty clearly a success.

Brent! Hope all is well man, you're one of the best teachers I've ever seen and the foundation of my successful bubble based business (just featured on indie hackers) was possible due to your courses. If I hadn't built yelp with code free I wouldn't have used bubble and likely wouldn't have a product.

Answer to your question - I'd say revenue. Enough to pay the bills and increase a few percentage points per month would be my minimum.

I'd say that three months is kind of an arbitrary amount of time.

What are people's reaction to your product? If you're selling and have good feedback, awesome! If you're not selling and not getting any feedback, it's probably dead. If you're getting some paying customers and getting a decent number of people telling you they'll never pay what you're asking, wait and smoke 'em out. Not many people engage with a product they're not interested in. If there was a better option for them, they'd choose that rather than try to bargain with you... but it's probably going to take more than three months.

For my product (freemium), about 25% of customers buy in on the first day they create an account. For the rest it takes an average of 468 days to buy in. In the interim, I get a lot of advice from not-yet-customers who tell me I'd make more money by making the features they want free for all... which is the kind of analytics you can't even pay for as long as you're reading them right.

I don't know what your product is, but 90 days isn't long enough to declare victory or defeat or even an accurate trend in either direction. However, if you know in your heart it's a bust after 90 days, pull the plug because you'll never make it through the trough of sorrow that'll happen 15 to 21 months later.

Objective criteria: would you do it again?

Less terse: many factors are packed into any answer given. Find "fair" income for your lifestyle and expectations. Make money that's (after taxes) 15-30% above that. Or decide that the very act of providing the service/journey to its production gives you happiness and way this against the above equation.

I would say it completely depends on the type of business, your target customers, and how much resources (time, $, etc.) you're putting into it.

If it's a side-project with little ambition or risk, success is keeping your motivation up, having people use your project, learning new skills.

If this is something you're sacrificing income and career growth opportunities for, then of course the stakes are higher.

My current project VidHug (https://vidhug.com) started simply as a side project that friends & family used. I launched it publicly a few weeks ago and now spend significant amounts of time that I could be freelancing on it. That ups my expectations a ton. I'm sacrificing real income and I've got a wife, kids, mortgage (we're doing fine, but still). Of course revenue is the most important metric, before focusing on that, you need to find product-market-fit and that's the stage that I'm at. So currently the metrics that are most important to me are getting people to discover that VidHug exists (site traffic) and getting users to experience the product (to produce word-of-mouth, get feedback that improves the product, and also get some organic marketing materials). I'm still exploring various different markets for the product, so success is more about finding the niche that really loves it.

3 months after launch for me, I'd hope I have a steady stream of sign-ups (20 per month) and people generating content. If you look at the current business model, it's absolutely not going to work - and that's why I'm exploring other markets for the same product. I want real-life examples of people having used it to approach these other markets with.

Tracking customer success metrics is the key to customer loyalty and happiness.

Customer success metrics are used to determine what kind of customer experience you are delivering. You can place yourself as a customer-centred business, but you still need to know if the product is having a practical, positive impact on a customer.

We have compiled a list of the top 16 actionable customer success metrics that will help to see your SaaS business strengths and weaknesses. Choose wisely and focus on those metrics that matter most for your business model.

The link: https://bit.ly/2ZiKTdt

Hello,
More than the numbers I believe it's the goal which you have attained during this period and if you still believe that the project can be improved, matters most in terms of success.

Number game can change at any time but during this three months if you have learnt a lot from your shortcoming in different areas then that is the biggest success :)

So here are the goals/metrics I care about for my B2B SaaS business, asked as questions. I want to always be able to answer “YES” to these KPIs. Success to me means you have the systems to produce the data to answer these questions instantly... and you’re striving to be able to say yes to all of them, constantly improving the numbers.

Note some can’t be fully realized at month 3.... but they still matter to track:

Goal #1: Is our LTV:CAC ratio above 4?

Goal #2: Are we recovering our CAC within 6months?

Goal #3: Is our net MRR Churn Rate under 3%?

Goal #4: Is our net MRR Growth Rate over 20%?

Goal #5: Is our gross margin over 80%?

Goal #6: Do we still have at least 6 months of cash in the bank to cover our gross burn rate?

If you can answer all these with YES, and have systems that spit out those answers to you, I would expect you are doing pretty good, and have a pretty success opportunity in front of you.

I’d love to hear others thoughts on these metrics as they relate to your businesses. Do you believe they cover key indicators of success? Are they reasonable? Are there other KPIs you track? Why?

Something which generates enough take-home pay to sustain the livelihood of the creator.

That's tough, as it really depends on where you're at and what your strategic goals are with the project. Are you trying to quit your job? In that case, Ramen profitability is the minimum you need to achieve. Do you want to use the indie business to subsidize a bigger project? Then you need to figure out the capital needs of the other project and the timeline it should happen on, and see if your numbers can touch that.

Going into a project, I try to set out wins that I'm guaranteed even if the project craters - these involve learning new skills, a new industry, or working with great people. If these aren't met three months in, I'm going to be concerned regardless of the financial metrics, and this is primarily a gut check.

"Do I still want to be doing this?"

If the answer is a resounding no, I need to reassess if my heart is just not in it. If it's a maybe, then I look at other metrics to see why I'm maybe not feeling it - am I putting in tons of effort and the needles aren't moving? Is my approach bad? Is it exceptionally stressful for some reason? And then I try to target that specific issue.

If my heart is still all-in on the project, whether due to the subject or the people I'm working with or whatever, then I still consider it successful and I'll keep grinding regardless of the objective metrics.

Hope this helps!

This is super subjective but it depends on your goals.

Where do you want this project to be a year from now monetarily? I feel like measuring where you are to where you realistically could be in a years time. The other thing to consider is how much time are you spending on the project? What signs of success have you seen?

For me creating bootstraplogos.com was a way to express my creativity. I am a product designer at my day job, but I really missed designing logos. Creating this site allowed me to earn some beer money and do something I love "Making logos". It is nowhere even close to being able to support me or even pay my rent. But it is a low-stress project that I have a lot of fun working on.

Great question @brentsum. The more I think about it, the more I realize this is a very personal question that we should all ask ourselves often and work on.

Here on IH, it seems revenue (MRR) is the only success metric but it really comes down to what each of us wants out of life and how our projects/businesses can help achieve that.

I made the mistake of using MRR as my success metric for a long time because I cared more about how it would look to other people and not what it meant to me, my team, my customers, etc.,

I probably wasted a whole year of not "feeling successful" but in reality: I was working on a project I loved, expressing my creativity through building, helping customers I cared about, and doing it on my own terms. This was more important than any arbitrary dollar amount.

On the flip side, if someone's goal is to turn their side project into a full-time gig, making enough profit to live off of is success metric #1.

Kind of a ramble... But great question and I wanted to get some thoughts on paper.

Good question. I think it depends on each individual.

I'm about to launch my side project Acct.Watch that I've been working on the past few months, and I don't even expect any paying users! I'm just looking to really learn from it and to hopefully guide my next project into something people will use, like, and pay for.

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