I very few words I am a 24 yo romantic wannabe indie hacker from Greece, the country of deep economic crisis chasing down this dream of living of side projects that may turn into companies.
So I had always been building products for too long, polishing them, only to find out they were flops. Then, about a two months ago, I decided to approach this 'building a product' thing another way.
I listened to all the cliches and to my amazement they were actually all true. Don't dwell on the idea, launch fast, be scrappy, ditch or focus, repeat.
After taking this approach I built two products in two weeks and launched them on Product Hunt. GitHub Gardener (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/github-gardener), which ended up being the 3rd product of the day and Maker Feed (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/maker-feed), which came first.
I even built them in the complete open on single Twitter threads (https://twitter.com/alexsideris_/status/993523095708332032)(https://twitter.com/alexsideris_/status/997158898665738243)
GitHub Gardener is making 50$/mo and growing.
Everything sounds great right?
Well I am probably stupid cause I went back to my old habit. Today I am launching a new product that took 6 weeks to build, and again I am feeling the pressure of higher expectations. It's not as long as my first ever product I built, that took a whole year, but still it is 6 times more than my most successful products so far.
When you invest so much time into a product you are attached to it's success or failure. When I launched those two simple product, I honestly didn't give a f about how they would go, and it worked perfectly for me.
Long story short, after this launch today, I am going back to launching faster.
"My new found recipe: Launch fast with low expectations! If you fail you haven't lost much time to dwell upon and also you didn't have high expectations anyway. You are literally unbeatable!"
Here is the link to the product in case you want to check it out.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/telemonetize
Some products take 9 hours to build. Some day 9 days. Some take 9 weeks. Some take 9 months.
I think a key thing that needs to be understood is any level of PROFITABILITY (including zero!) can come from any of those launch times. But the product that takes 9 months to build can't necessarily be built in 9 hours, days or weeks. So I think we tend to like the idea of "do the thing that takes short time!" and that's fine, but in doing we are cutting ourselves from some of the POSSIBILITY of the products we could build and deliver.
Here in lies the rub... it may be that the 9 week product is the one where you have the magical combination of an audience you want to serve, are capable of serving and you know how to reach. And maybe the 9 hour, day or month products just don't hit that sweet spot for you. So what's the right or wrong things to do? I would say only building without any research, but in extremely small percentage ;f cases that works out for some guy and if he did the research he might have thought nah that's too much work not gonna start then he wouldnt have his success. So... who even actually knows.
I think people neglect the fact that there is an awful lot of randomness and hidden things below the surface they can't see involved.
Keep trying, keep experimenting and eventually maybe you find what works for you. Lately I realized we listen to stories how other makers made it tells us a lot about how they succeeded but nothing about how YOU will succeed. The only thing that will tell u about how you will succeed is the data from your own experiments. So just keep pushing and keep trying new things.
GitHub Gardener is a hilarious idea btw!
Thank your for advice. It is truth about false espectactions, but I think we have to learn in the hard way . First projects we will spend many months and we will fail .
It is very interesting, but I think it is does not matter, it does not have as much significance in real life. And even vice versa. It's very productive, I think