Last week Leo and Ewan from Ourselves set me the challenge of making a new product and getting 50 users in 5 days! I've made it to 65 users and there's still 6 hours to go! Here's how we did it!
Coming up with an Idea
I didn't have too much time to validate, so I followed the conventional IH wisdom 👉
Solve your own problems. Because you're an expert in your own problems.
My Problem 🤔 — I often have several ideas bubbling around in my head and don't know which one to work on.
My Solution 🛠 — Product Hunt for Ideas. A simple *Idea List* where the best ideas filter to the top. Makers can discuss each others ideas and give feedback.
The Benefits of a Time Constraint
I had 5 days to make something. This meant I couldn't mess around with superfluous features. It was all action. When I made 140canvas I spent 3 months making an amazing site. Media queries galore. And after all that no-one wanted the product.
Having a time constraint forced me to ship the bare minimum. All I could manage was:
1) Login with Twitter
2) Ability to Post, Comment & Upvote Ideas
3) Basic Leaderboard
But, that is all that is required. This is enough to test the idea. And if there's demand we can always add in additional features.
In fact, now the site's getting traction, Leo's just added in a simple "Subscribe Via Email" Button.
Getting our first 65 users!
There's no secret ingredient here.
The benefit of solving your own problems is that you know the audience for your own problems. Over the past year I've made enough maker friends who were happy to trial the site, upvote it on Product Hunt and share it with their friends.
"This is cheating" I hear you cry. And yeah, this is an underwhelming way to make it to 65 users. But this is the reality for most startups / side projects.
Product Hunt began just as a small email list with 40 subscribers. How did Ryan Hoover get his first 40 subscribers? From his own personal blog which had built up a small following.
Whilst Stripe was at Y Combinator the Collison brothers went round manually installing their beta onto the laptops of any other YC founders who'd let them.
Build your network. And use it. If what you're doing looks too pretty, you're probably doing it wrong.
Summing Up
If there's any Indie Hackers wanting feedback on their ideas. The site we made is here 👉 https://ideasareworthless.io/
At the minute, I'm heading up the team at Ourselv.es It is a venture builder looking to work with new founders so please get in touch at [email protected] if you've got any ideas. The two founders, Leo & Ewan are big fans of the Indie Hacker mindset! In fact they hired me straight off this forum 😂 😂
Obrigado,
Harry
How did you build the site itself?
Good Question. I should have touched on this more in the article. Fortunately I've learnt how to code over the last year so making this wasn't too hard.
The site is built in Node JS, Pug (for templating) & Passport JS which handles the twitter auth, and then uses Mongo DB as a database to store comments + upvotes.
If you know a bit of Javascript I would massively recommend @wesbos course: https://learnnode.com/. If you are starting out from a more basic level I'd recommend nailing HTML + CSS first (Net Ninja Videos on YouTube) and then doing @wesbos javascript30.com
Wes Bos is a seriously unbelievable teacher!
Thanks for the info!
Pleasure!
Did you use any UI library to quickly scaffold your app? I am currently looking for one.
I didn't. My UI library is other people's websites haha. The design of "posts" is taken from the design on Indie Hackers. And the leaderboard is taken from the design of WIP.chat 's leaderboard.
My advice would be to go onto land-book.com & goodweb.design find something you like. Everything is 2nd hand. Nothing is original.
Sweet! I have added my idea to your website. https://ideasareworthless.io/ideas/backup-your-youtube-playlist
Awesome. Cheers Tekeste!
[UPDATE] now at 130 users! And a shout out on Twitter from the founder of Product Hunt about one of the best ideas - "Virtual Reality for Pets"
The idea came from friends and founders constantly running ideas past me to get my opinion. It's hard to tell if an idea has potential without putting out there (even in a small way), and it's even harder to muster the resources to make it into a real product. Harry and I thought we'd open up this process to let the community decide and see where it goes from there.
By way of background – I run a product agency called Crowdform (https://www.crowdform.co.uk/) and a venture builder called Ourselves – so identifying good ideas is a core part of what we do. Read more here - https://www.crowdform.co.uk/blog/building-venture-studio/. But the most important step is actually building them, and doing so better and faster than the competition. Part of the purpose of Ideas Are Worthless is to reach out to founders who might want to work with us, and can demonstrate to us, investors and customers that their ideas aren't...worthless.
You might be able to tell - it's heavily influenced by Scott Adams’ quote “Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.”
@harrydry heads up the Ourselves team, so reach out to him for any help on your projects.
Leo
Get it Harry :)
thanks Hugo!