If you want to get rich during a gold rush... sell digging equipment.

Selling to startups, and particularly bootstrapped startups, is tough. They don't have a ton of money, and the majority of them die. That means your customers will be price sensitive and churny, which is the worst kind!

That said, I think startups / indie hackers are a great audience to have on a free version of your product. They'll appreciate the free resource, and it'll create some buzz around your product. Eventually, a bunch of them will "graduate" on to a paid plan as they grow.

The interesting part of this quote is the details around selling shovels to gold diggers.

The details are:

• Selling in the right location (near where people want to dig)

• Getting supply to location

• Storing shovel supply

• Dealing with competitors

• Selling something close to a potential revenue stream

• Selling something that fits into the buyers discretionary income

• Shovels are simple but unique

• Building a tool that someone uses for 10+ hours per day

• Looking at the jobs to be done and realising that someone travelling to a gold site might not want to buy a shovel from a large town but might want to buy it near the gold site so they don't need to carry it on trains etc

Just some random details that do relate to build for IH'ers or any market.

hello BareMetrics

hello Intercom

I would ironically say join a company, because they will pay tooth and nail at this point because competition for talent is fierce. Once a crash happens, then start your company

It boils down to solve a problem.

I feel that indiehackers are generally frugal. I think it's more the traditional startups that would be willing to pay decent money for services.

I'd say that the "digging equipment" in our case are the VPS providers (Linode, DigitalOcean, etc) and Cloud Service providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Heroku, and you'd have difficulty competing with them.

My view is that you'd get rich easier if you find a good niche you are passioned about and focus on it.

Cheers!

Discuss...

It sounds like an order from a king hahahahahahha

But my opinion is that this is not "starting", tools for startups is a huge niche that people building business are focusing for a very long time

Startups is quite a broad target market.

Indie Hackers are more of a niche and I can see it work if you have a great tool built for them.

Keep in mind that there are already tons of "equipment" companies out there (web hosting, email marketing, design etc.)

Your idea could be applied for a specific startup niche, perhaps.

For example, take a look at the crypto frenzy that went last year, tons of companies have made tons of money just by playing in the same game but not dealing with crypto currency directly.

Anyhow, not always easy to be in the right place at the right time, and like any other gold-rush markets, there will be tons of competition.

This is a great point! I truly believe that this is a great think to consider. And not only the startup / indie hacker movement is a gold rush but "every business will be an online business". Just listened to the IH podcast with Des Traynor of Intercom. His point is that more and more business are online business now and they need the tools to make it work.

Online marketing is a great area right now and it confirms this theory, look at HubSpot for example.

If you have a great idea for a tool to other business succeed online, I would say go for it, this is the time!

The problem is, in every stages the equipments will be different.

MVP and Growing stage will cost you different amount of money, also different tools and services.

While in the mvp stage, wordpress installation on $5 digitalocean might be enough. But when you got 1000 paying customers and your cost on the digitalocean start rising and php start to slowdown you will need another cheap solution, serverless on AWS maybe?

The solution, pick a specific niche in the specific stage.

Example: sharetribe.com provide you a tool to create online marketplaces. Good for starting point, but when you growing you will need to move to another cheap solution. That's why sharetribe's prici is expensive, because they knew, at some point their customers will leaving them.

what i must to sell ?

How do i do?

Answering a question with a question:

Whichever group of prospective customers meets (or can meet) this criteria:

(1) you understand them;

(2) you can reach them; and

(3) has a desire or need you can (most, or at least very) profitably serve, within your values, risk tolerance, desired lifestyle, and cash flow requirements?

I agree that there is likely a big opportunity to build tools that cater to the startup community. I just think your marketing or value prop has to be around saving time and allowing the person to focus on growth. I find many startups, ones that are serious about moving the needle are willing to pay for a product that is useful.

We are just starting to build a hardware product (IoT designed around a Raspberry Pi). The devices are installed at our customers locations and therefore access and control is tough. We didn't want to tinker with the customers wifi settings and port forwarding so we found a product called Dataplicity that allows us easy remote access to our hardware. We pay $3USD/month for each device and happy to do so since there isn't a free alternative that met our needs. It's a small cost but allows us to monitor our beta hardware and make changes on the fly.

Great point of view. The key question would be:

What do all gold diggers need to do the job?

Keep in mind that they would need more than just digging equipment (shovels and hardware). Maybe the gold diggers with greater ROI purchased proto-saas tools such as maps, geology advice...