10 Things Every Beginner Indie Hacker Should Know

https://hackernoon.com/10-things-every-beginner-indie-hacker-should-know-7ps33y1

3 Days after launching my first product, Notion Startup OS as an Indie Hacker, I made $1.2K+ in revenue. However, I feel like the lessons I learned are worth more than that.

Here’re 10 lessons I learned after making my first $1K as an Indie Hacker.

1. Learning builds knowledge. Doing builds experience!
   During the past 3 years, like many of you, I read many books on building startups; The Lean Startup, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Zero To One, and the list goes on.

They were all great books; I learned a lot, and they paid off double time. The one misconception I had was that reading translates into learning, and learning translates into better decisions; this was wrong!

What I learned is that it launching a successful project needs experience, not knowledge. Practice launching smaller projects. You’ll build experience; experience means better decisions, and that’s what you need to launch successful projects.

Less learning, more doing can get you to better results, faster.

2. Attract customers first, then build the product.
   As I shred in my case study, my tiny email list (1.6K subscribers) was responsible for $438, that’s 36.5% of the revenue, and it costs nothing to send the emails. It’s almost 348% ROI.

If I didn’t share the free templates back in august last year, I wouldn’t have collected these 1.6K emails, and my pre-order launch would have been much harder.

My advice is to start early, build a piece of the product, offer it for free (in exchange for email), create a landing page describing your product and why someone should care.

Remember, I’m talking about 1.6K emails; imagine what the numbers would look like If I had 20K emails! Build an email list first, then build the product.

https://hackernoon.com/10-things-every-beginner-indie-hacker-should-know-7ps33y1