In November 2007 I was a high school student and hungry for cash. Back then I had two objectives:
1. Buy a motorbike (in Belgium you can get a license at 16 years old).
2. Go to Australia and study English there for at least 2 months.
The problem? It all costed a lot of money. The only way to make money back then: get a student job.
I landed various student jobs: I assembled computers parts, repaired printers, and also worked a few summers at a slaughterhouse in my hometown. However, I knew I was far from achieving my financial goals.
During the time, I also had one passion: Music, and specifically web radios.
You could stream music from your computer, integrate a web radio player to your website, send the link to your friends on MSN Messenger and get people from all over the world to listen to your web radio. I thought it was incredible! However: I did not make any money doing so.
However, I rapidly became familiar with the industry. To set up my web radio, I did not have a lot of money so I begged a friend of mine who was running a hosting company to give me free space on his dedicated server and launched my we radio.
After a few months I thought: "Wait. There might be more young people like me interesting in doing the same."
I asked my friend (again) if he could lend me some space on his dedicated server for free. He gave me an access and I started installing instances of Shoutcast/Icecast. I also set up a basic website with payments by SMS (back then I realised a lot of young people did not have credit cards), and I started cold-calling web radio companies in France, Belgium and Canada from my parents home phone (we later had a bill of 150 euros but that's another story!). Within a few months I was making between 500 to 1000 euros a month at 15 and bought my motorbike, my flight to Australia and paid my tuition at the university there.
Today, looking back at that story I did a lot of things right: I did not know what I was doing but I was focused on creating value, and was intensely focused on doing so. Later I went on creating an online real estate agency as well as a design-as-a-service business. I will write about my learnings in this post. My learnings are a bit different than regular business advice: There are learnings specifics to being a constrained Indie Hacker, with not a lot of money to start with and what my thinking is behind creating value.
1. Create value... And look at your own problems to see how you can uniquely fix it.
The most important lesson I have learned so far in multiple side projects is that: You have to create value no matter what. Shipping is cool. But shipping something of value to others is even better (if you want to build a business).
The 3 projects I made that were successful (from a financial standpoint at least) had at least one thing in common: They generated value for others.
My step-by-step approach on creating value is the following:
1. What is the problem? -- Often, this is the most important thing to get nailed down. To get a deep understanding on the problem. Often it can be something you experienced yourself as a user / customer.
2. How am I trying to solve it and how easy is it for me to solve it? -- In other words, what is the solution, and do I have the knowledge on how to solve it?
3. What value do other people get from me solving this problem? -- Am I making their life easier than better? Am I making their experience better? Do I help their business become more efficient? People need to get value, and then they pay you.
If we had to give a definition of what a Indie Hacker was I think it is just a noun to denominate a startup individual. A startup is a small, constrained venture looking to fix a specific problem that they know very well. A Indie Hacker is the same: A resource-constrained individual looking to fix a specific problem by throwing out ideas at a particular problem he is experiencing.
Think of yourself as a startup: Take advantage of you being small and focused to solve a unique problem.
2. Seek the shortest path to show and deliver value to your customers
Now that you have identified a problem to solve, my advice is : Seek the shortest path to show AND deliver value to customers.
When I have a new idea here is what happens in my brain : "Wow, this is SUCH a great idea. It will probably revolutionise the world if I ship that.".
This usually ends in two ways:
1. I am demotivated the next day and do not ship at all
or
2. I do ship it but no one wants to buy it or use what I make.
Instead of delivering (which takes days, weeks or months of shipping). How about showing and confirming the value first? Build an email list, build a small page telling about your services, and see if there is real interest in it. I build my last MVP (or Minimum Viable Offer) in less than 5 hours.
Forget about perfection in the early days. Your only role is to confirm you are working on the right things. Perfection can come later. Your early days should be about confirming your assumptions as soon as possible. To confirm your assumptions, let the market decide whether your product is interesting or not, and do that by putting a minimum viable offer in front of your customers.
This brings us to point 3...
3. Listen to your customers all the time
The beauty of building side projects on the Internet is that you can have a quick access to your customers and even build with them: Leverage that!
As an example, you can go on Twitter to ask questions or make polls to your users about a new feature you want to build or a new blog post you want to create. I am a big fan of of how @levelsio is doing it) or you can even build Facebook groups for some of your early users. Recently, I even "hired" fellow Indie Hackers to test my service in exchange for weekly feedback.
Each day, I also oblige myself to talk directly with 5 random customers and ask them the following question: "What is your single biggest frustration with our company right now?". Putting customers at the forefront really helped me make a ton of great decisions and avoid confirmation biais.
4. Focus
Once you know what you have to work on, just stay focused. It took me a while to understand that one but usually as entrepreneurs we are creative people and have ton of ideas and a huge to-do list that. I usually ask myself a few questions to get more focused:
Is it delivering value?
Is it a great idea or is it my ego talking? Should I talk to my customers or team first?
5. on getting more focused... practice communicating clearly and sharing.
I often find that my lack of focus is often due to me not understanding clearly what I am doing. If I have 100 ideas or 100 things to work on that seem as equally important I usually label it as a red flag and try to ask myself: "Do I know what I am doing?"
One great way to stay focused is to write to others what you are working on. When you put your ideas and vision on paper and even have someone real to review it, it helps you highlight the shadow areas in your reasoning.
6. When your project is making money: Get a great team
Once your side project is making money: You can decide to scale it and try to build it as a business (which is what I am trying to do with Manypixels) or just let it run as a fun side project. It really depends on what you want to do and there is no right or wrong answer.
I was able to "scale" two projects: My online real estate agency and my now design-as -a-service Manypixels. I realised the very best results I had were with hiring great people. Do not compromise on hiring really talented people to work with you and do your project with you. Having an awesome, fully dedicated team can really make the difference.
7. ... Then make processes and a great environment to empower them to do their job.
Once you get great people I always ask myself the following questions: "What is this person the most motivated to work on?". I usually ask them the following: "What motivates you? What do you want to work on?". Once you give people what they want you can usually obtain what you want. When people are motivated, they do an extremely awesome job because it is fun for them and fulfilling.
Secondly, I document processes for everything. I make guides, steps, and checklists for everything. I also ask my employees to second-guess how the checklists are to see if they are willing to use it or if they see a better way of doing it.
8. Always seek to be resourceful
One thing I practice on a daily basis as an Indie Hacker is that I try to be resourceful as much as I can.
When you are a big company with a lot of money you might not always have the incentive to be super creative because you can use money to fix issue. Sure, you might have more money for research and development but a lot of ideas can be had just by practicing creative entrepreneurship: Seek to assemble bits and pieces from everywhere to build a unique solution, if possible at lower costs. Always seek to be inspired and resourceful because you might find unique ideas that your competitors cannot have.
9. And leverage education and learning from other people mistakes.
One of the learning I wished I had earlier is to learn from other people mistakes before and try to understand why I could make that mistake and what I should do to avoid it. Always talk to people who have been there before or even read interviews on IH. Often, a lot of problems you might be facing might have been fixed by other people many times over and you can save an incredible amount of time just looking at other people mistakes.
10. Just ship it!
Last but not least. Ship it. Seriously. What can happen? Ship and learn, nothing bad can happen!
I talk a lot about shipping on my Twitter!