Giving up too soon: the leading cause of failure?
I was reading a post in another forum where an individual was trying to make a point about how hard the app market is by sharing his story. Essentially he threw together an Android game and put it up on the Play store. He waited 6 months and only got a hand full of users and one purchase.
Was the issue a bad app? Or, rather was the issue the set-it-and-forget-it attitude that quickly turned into just a forget-it attitude. If he made iterative updates to the game and put a little marketing effort in, I wonder if the outcome would have changed.
Made me think of a web app I put together. Created v.1 then didn't even use it myself because the UI was difficult to use. Instead of seeing the idea as having potential and revamping the UI, I gave up and assumed the idea was garbage.
What do you think? Giving up too soon common with us "hackers"? How do you find the balance of not giving up too soon, but also not keeping with an idea that's a flop?
I have found that managing (and lowering) my expectations depending on the actual size of the project (resources available, projected revenue etc) and not what it could be was the thing that helped me ship more often.
It’s hard to iterate and stick to the day-to-day tasks when the finish line always seems too far.
It’s marathon, and you define the aid stations.
There would be a lot of other things, but it’s the one that had the bigger impact on my productivity, self esteem (« hey now i AM the kind of person who ships often! ») and overall happiness.
Another really helpful approach to this (that helps me at least) is to plan ahead and break down tasks into tiny little pieces. I have a checklist with items like, "Include alert with ___ copy" or "Add hover state to button" and it makes it easy to crank out a few even if I only have 15-30 min free to work.
Solid advice! I keep a list but it tends to be much more high level like, building an entire page or section. This can make motivation difficult if I don't have a few hours to work. Breaking things into bite-sized chunks will definitely help when I only have minutes to work and not hours.
So, if I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying: Having over inflated expectations can make it hard to stay motivated to continuously ship and iterate your product. And it's that habit of continuously shipping that keeps you from giving up too soon. Never really thought of shipping being a habit before; makes sense.
My experience has been:
The antidote to giving up too soon is shipping earlier.
The antidote to shipping late is paring down scope.
The antidote to scope creep is to program the happy path user experience and then work backwards from there fleshing out the app and smoothing the rougher edges.
I learned this from years of incrementally building apps to the point where the scope creep led to disillusionment and fatigue and ultimate shelving projects instead of launching.
I assume that I am willing to spend a year or two on a project. If I ship in month 11, then I may only have 1 month of "entrepreneur juice" left to spend on iterating and marketing and whatnot before fatigue sets in.
Keep scope limited, break things down into bite sized bits and keep shipping to stay motivated. Seems like a common thread here. Interesting insights!
Thanks for sharing!
My revenue for Place Card Me's first six months after launch:
$0
$0
$0
$0
$3
$17
If I had given up after several months of little-to-no revenue then that's probably where it would have stopped, but I kept working on it (especially the marketing side) and just about a year later, crossed $10k in all-time revenue last month.
I kept working on it despite the lack of success indicators because I knew it was better than what was out there, and I was confident I just needed to get it in front of people for them to figure that out.
So, I do think it's very important to not give up, though it's also important to have conviction (and ideally be right) that your product is solving some real problem in the world. Some ideas - or executions - are just bad, but success for indie makers comes slowly and you shouldn't let that squash your dreams.
Very cool! Thank you for sharing. It's definitely inspiring to see how you grew from $0 to $10k!
I think your experience echos the underlying point in my question: that too many of us put in the effort up from and - hopefully - ship version one, only to give up because we don't see the initial numbers. If more of us followed your example there'd be a lot more success. What did you find to be useful forms of marketing during your growth?
Far and away the best for me was organic SEO work. I experimented a lot with ads in the early days but that was mostly useful to validate the concept and wasn't a sustainable way to drive traffic to the site.
If you're curious I wrote more about my SEO strategy here:
https://www.indiehackers.com/@czue/seo-for-developers-reaching-the-front-page-of-google-without-being-spammy-7bc350d171
I'll definitely check that out. Thanks!
Probably?
Most of the time I don't even get version 0.1 out there in front of people.
My process has historically been:
That's why I was so excited to finally launch my first big project last week.
It wasn't because I didn't do step 3 either. I definitely talked myself into quitting it multiple times.
I had to make a conscious decision that if the project is going to fail, I'm going to let the market decide that. I'm not going to get in my own way and even if I think it's gonna fail I'm going to build it anyway and put it out there.
And whaddaya know, it turned out to be a pretty good launch :)
Awesome! Congratulations on the launch!
I think you make an excellent point about letting the market decide. Whether we don't ship at all, or ship a basic version and don't get users, it's easy to assume no one wants it and give up. Shipping, driving users and letting the market point you in the right direction seems key.
Each project is unique and expectations are also as unique. Most are created to solve a problem or set of problems. For the creator it may be a big problem or simply a bother. It is the value of the solution that many do not address. Is this something people will pay for? In my opinion both people and businesses are looking for only 3 things in a product or service. 1. Generate Revenue 2. Save Time 3. Control a Variable. If your product addresses these issues in any way you have a chance. Also I think that builders or creators really struggle with marketing. This is not only limited to the "hacking community" as most companies struggle as well. While in launch or dev phase you generally have a target. The ability to pivot is often overlooked and viewed as lack of focus.
It is the marketing where most fail. People make marketing difficult and actually it is quite simple.
I like your "3 things", and definitely agree. I'd take it a step further though and say that a successful product not only accomplishes one or more of those, but make's it very easy and intuitive. Trello is a great example. There are plenty of "better" project management solutions out there, but Trello has simplicity down to almost an art.
The more I personally dive into entrepreneurship, and see others in the "hacking community", the more I'm prone to agree with you; "It is the marketing where most fail". A lot of us have a "build it and they will come" mentality. I recall Elon Musk saying they don't focus on marketing and just build great products. If you really look at it though, that's not entirely true. Maybe it's more accurate that they don't do Traditional marketing. Criticizing governments and public officials, promising a country you can solve their rolling blackout issues, sharing your "crazy" product ideas, creating and selling flamethrowers, etc. etc... are all pr/marketing in their own right.
What do you see as the most successful avenues of marketing for bootstrapping indie hackers?
Most people do not identify the target market enough. They fail to research it enough and are actually to broad in the definition. For example a health or wellness coach. Even if they segment into women, there are so many different needs there basically defined at unique "life points." Get healthy avoiding "freshman 15", stay healthy in your new corporate job, lose weight after your first child, stay fit at 50 or 60 etc. All of these are blanketed under "get fit" yet each has different goals and thus require different marketing collateral. The same can be said for a business idea. If you want to target accountants what kind? New, struggling, plateaued etc. Marketing is not a sexy or glamorous career. It is the combination of 2 very basic entry level jobs: copywriting and research. Neither have very many resources available. It is much easier to make an impact on a small audience and people think when they approach it this way they pigeon hole themselves. Would you buy from a social media manager or someone who presents themselves as a Facebook expert that works with startups and new products or concepts and subscribes to the bootstrapping method?
Excellent points! Niching down is something I definitely struggle with. Even my current project I think "Tons of people could use this!", while intellectually I understand I need to truly find a target market/niche.