What are your biggest time sinks when taking a side project from idea to MVP?
I often catch myself overengineering a solution when building out an MVP, that might never see the light of day. I'm curious what other time sinks indie hackers find themselves doing and how you try to overcome them.
The further I go in my own journey, the more I realize how important it is to test out ideas before writing ONE line of code.
Let's say you have an idea to help people find their dream job.
You could hack out a basic MVP that allows them to upload their resume, and to somehow connect them with a recruiter, and then to walk them through the interview process.
OR...you could just put up a landing page (using something like Wix or SquareSpace) and describe the problem you are trying to solve. Once you do this, then try to get people to sign up for it.
If / when they do, ask them questions like:
what resonated for them?
what problem do they hope you can help solve?
...etc
Each time I do this, I find out just how off base my initial ideas are. But developing a process to get real world feedback from the start helps me stay on the right path to solve a real problem that people care about.
For what it's worth, I still do this with everyone who signs up on Tribe of Five (www.tribefive.me). And through these back and forth conversations, I learn new insights that I HOPE will prevent me from going down time sinks with design / development on features people don't care about.
Good luck!
Jonathan
This is absolutely true.
I often find myself spending time on, as you say, underutilized features nobody cares about.
The fastest way to get burned out / quit is to be excited about a feature, spend lots of hours working on it to make it great...only to find no one cares about it.
That's great that you still focus on feedback from everyone who signs up. Are you at the point where most feedback is the same? Do you see shifts in what people are looking for over time due to other products or offerings in the market?
I do find that the feedback starts to converge over time. That's a good thing though because once it does, that's when we build a new feature / version.
So far, in the ~3 years I've been hacking away at this project, we haven't seen dramatic shifts in what people are looking for.
Our worldview is that there will ALWAYS be times when you need external accountability to get started on something new (like building a reading habit). But we also know there won't be people in your immediate network who will be a good accountability buddy for you.
That's because they either don't care to build a reading habit, or they don't read the same types of books you read, or they only want to read once a week and you want to read everyday, etc.
We want Tribe of Five to ultimately be that place you go to find the RIGHT kind of external accountability!
Getting feedback early on and really hammering out the value props of your product. I am a builder/maker, so I'm always tempted to just build more stuff. Building things and writing code is the most satisfying thing for me, and while we've built some really cool things, if no one is using it it's kind of pointless. So I've definitely sunk lots of time into building features before anyone is using or even asking for something.
Yeah! Completely the same!
The problem is, building is satisfying until you realize that you put it out to crickets. The crash from lack of interest and feedback is rough.
I'm not sure if I just need to trust in "you have to spend money to make money" - so pay for advertising or user testing, or if there's an organic way to build communities and feedback. So far, I've only been willing to spend < $100 on advertising. I'd really like to find a way to get feedback quickly.
I'm not a seasoned maker, but I found out that asking for early feedback on specific subreddits with a simple MVP or landing page can give good results. I didn't have people opening wide open their wallet to me, but they gave such a precious feedback that I don't care if I don't have even one email address from them.
Hey Mehdi, thanks. That is exactly my hope! I'm building some open source software that I'm not trying to immediately monetize, so I hope I can get organic feedback more easily. A lot of subreddits seem pretty skeptical, but I'll probably try that method before exploring paid routes.
So true! I love building new and cool things, but that's what I want. It really takes some discipline to go get feedback on something that is not finished to validate you are building the right thing.
Figuring out who else could benefit from the idea that I'm pondering about
Getting the message out to those people that I'm working on something
Getting those people to subscribe
Those are my biggest concerns. About and around working on it the same way as @jianinglai describes.
Design. I want things to look nice when they should simply function clearly in an MVP. Lately I've been pulling back on design and cutting corners on UX to test concepts.
I probably spend the most time overcoming my own insecurities about whether someone will care, and spending too much time on email/website/blog post copy. I should rather spend the time getting to know the target audience a lot better, so the copy just flows.