The hour-eating monster
So, there I was, deep into the triple digits of grind hours (500+) on what was supposed to be a simple side-project... I'm afraid many of you have also been there at some point in your Indie Hacker lifestyle career, and can hardly imagine it was a pleasurable experience.
The 500+ hours project had a semi-successful beta... and 0 signups after going live. To put it frankly, that sucked (and hurt). I could almost literally hear the crickets chirping outside. Something had to be done differently for my next project to prevent another episode of this.
Enter: Constraints
I set myself the goal of having a fully functional MVP live, with minimal-to-no code to tinker on, Stripe linked, and a decent landing page/site in less than 20 hours.
So, did it work? Heck yes, it did! Miraculously, instead of spending 10+ hours figuring out a name and domain, I literally did it in under a minute for this project. Instead of grinding away endless edge cases in my supposedly MVP app, for this one, there is literally no code to grind on! Instead of... well, I guess you get it by now.
The mere thought of entering my hours into Toggl at the end of the day (and, with that, eating away at my 20 available hours) limited me from doing so much useless stuff. For instance:
- It prevented me from looking in every nook and cranny of the web for potential reasons why I shouldn't build this.
- It stopped me from creating a custom Stripe setup (but instead I just used WP Simple Pay this time around).
- And mainly, it forced me to think up a way to deliver results for customers in the MVP phase without any code, because building a shiny, fast, and useful MVP in < 20 hours (minus all the other work) is simply a near-impossible task.
Hello, UserFeedback
I flipped the switch on UserFeedback literally minutes before I started typing on this article (which was supposed to be a simple 'Show IH' forum post, but kind of got out of hand).
I'd love to get your feedback (yeah, I see the irony there :D) on this project. Or, of course, for you to spread the word if you know any online marketers, webshop owners, or Indie Hackers in need of fast and affordable user feedback from real people that they can then use to improve their website/project.
PS: So, did I make it in under 20 hours? No. In the end, it took me just shy of 35 hours to get to this point. Do I care? No sir, I do not, because 35 is still a lot less than 500.