Ask IH: Do/Would you market as an Indie Hacker/SoloPreneur? Pros and cons

I think talking about what you're up to in a transparent way is great for building real rapport with people and for creating lucky/serendipitous situations where others are able to help you. (It's easier for people to help when they know exactly what you're working on and need help with.)

That said, the people who you most want to read that stuff aren't necessarily your customers. It depends on your business. Unless you're building a community or taking part in a movement or something, I think your marketing toward customers should generally focus on communicating the value you deliver specifically for them.

If potential customers are complaining that your product should be free and you're having trouble making sales, it may not be obvious enough to them how much value you're providing, i.e. how much money you're making or saving them. That's something you can communicate via better messaging/marketing.

I think it all depends on your audience. If you're building a SaaS application in the financial space, I wouldn't recommend it. But, if it compliments your marketing strategy, then go for it!

It really does depend on where you intend to go with your indie hacking journey.

Google started off with an altruistic, transparent slogan "Do no evil" then China and corporatism happened.

Not only has Google been roundly ridiculed and worse for that slogan but no-one really trusts them any more. People use them because there is, as yet, no effective competition but no-one believes any longer that they play nicely with their little friends.

I'm not suggesting you have an image problem on anything like that scale but it is always worth asking the question, "Will this approach be sustainable five years from now? What if I want to develop a 'serious' business aimed at other businesses?"

My approach would be to give the same advice I would to a teenager over-sharing on Facebook. "When you go for a job, is there anything on your Facebook account whichmight come back to bite you on the bum if an employer went trawling?"

I know it is fashionable to "put everything out there" but there is a reason words such as "discretion" and "reticence" exist. Sometimes, less is more and, with the necessary adaptation for the modern business world, the old adage "'tis better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt" is still as relevant today as it ever was.

If you want to make a business career out of your hacking - especially if you want to sell B2B - you have to change your mindset from that of an enthusiast to that of a businessman. You have to learn how to appear bigger than you are so that people trust you with their money and their data. You have to appear to be longer-established than you are and more solid than you are.

You keep secrets - your own and those of your customers. That means transparency is limited to those things which show you to best advantage and it becomes, how shall I put it, selective transparency - or good news stories as the rest of us cynically know it.

When I get on an aeroplane, I don't interrogate the Captain on his training, hours in the simulator or why he was the only one to escape from that crash alive. He presents himself to me as a professional and I take him at his word*.

As a businessman, you have to do the same. It isn't about you any more or your adventures in Hacker Land: it is about presenting yourself at all times as a professional.

Different mindset. And that's why the marketing people are berating you. They already know all this.

( * Having said that, some airlines are rather better at checking their new hires and digging this stuff up or caring than other airlines ... as a number of episodes of Air Crash Investigation have shown. The flip side of all those programmes, of course, is that I'm quietly confident - quietly confident in a British, understated sort of manner - that I could take over the flightdeck at a moment's notice in an emergency and execute a perfect landing in the event of total engine failue, depressurisation of the hull, total failure of critical parts, loss of hydraulics and two of the three wings falling off all at the same time. I humbly await the call.)

Go fully transparent, levels was ahead of the game with nomad list, transparency and authenticity mean so much more today than they did even 3 years ago.

As a user my main concern is not the nature of the business but whether or not it has a future.

In your case I know everydayCheck already makes money and (I assume) does not have massive hosting bills or anything, so that's what I would emphasize.

This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately.

First, let me just say that you don't need to explain why your product isn't free to anyone. This is my opinion, but you've spend time and energy building something and you have every right to price it as you see fit, and everyone else has the right to decide whether to spend money on that.

I'm going back and forth a lot on this honestly, more often than I probably should. There are pros and cons to both approaches.

Right now, I present my project as the job of a one-man-team. That might change in the future, but it is like this right now.

Obviously, there pros and cons to anything you choose here (and

for everything in life in general, but that's another discussion).

The way I see it, your biggest pro is that you're being honest and transparent, which is something you've mentioned yourself. Going with the truth sounds easier to me than creating a bunch of info and support and sales email addresses, and sending people emails like "let me connect you to our support team" etc (I've seen people do this). Your customers know what to expect. There will probably come a time when something stops working with your product, and people would expect a big team to solve that fast, same goes for customer support.

I believe the biggest con is that you just don't "look" important enough. This is a very superficial and usually an unexisting problem, but many people suffer from this illusion, and you still want them as customers. I guess trying to educate them that big teams don't always mean effective teams is useless.

Of course, it depends a lot on what is your target market. I would expect a habit tracking app to target everyday users more and big enterprises less, and everyday users should be more understanding of the fact that you're a solopreneur.

Out of curiosity, how has the traction been for your service, revenue/traffic/users-wise? I was thinking about building something similar, but not sure it's worth investing in (no offense) unless you have a specific twist to it.

I'm saying this from a place of love and relating, but it feels like habit trackers are the programmer equivalent of starting a t-shirt company.

You can't market it very well as a indie hacker project unless you keep up with your blog. Your last post in Oct 2017 implies you stopped working on the app 9 months ago. You're charging an annual subscription, yet most indie projects fade out within a couple of years. 9 months is a long time for something you're actively working on.

Have a boilerplate email for responding to the "free" issue. Keep in mind, many people are trained to haggle for everything so you don't really need to engage beyond the boilerplate. They'll respect you (and convert) more if it's just that.

If you really want to make it more about you as an indie hacker, do it like Marco Arment and keep a separate personal blog and share thoughts on trends, code, and social user support.