2 Months Into Indie Hacking And My First Product Failed

I started indie hacking 2 months ago. Joined Indie Hackers and started going through their ‘Start Here’ section. At that point all I knew was coding and I would consider myself an average developer at best. After a few days, decided to build something with the typical mindset of a technical founder- build a product and people will come. However, after starting and dropping two projects due to their lack of solving any problems, I recognized a pattern forming - abandoning projects before launching them. So to break this habit, I decided to build something simple and small, achievable within two weeks and launch it quickly. Even at this point all I was thinking was about building.

The project that could’ve been completed in one week took me 20 days. I kept falling into the trap of obsessing over the MVP, believing that a great UI/UX would compensate for a bad product. But the thing is my product was crap, so even if I built it with the best UI/UX, it still would’ve failed.

I barely built it in public. All I did was post about the features. Didn’t post what I was struggling with, what I learned, what I solved, how I did it and didn’t even bother to ask whether if anyone has this problem. Just saw someone posting on PH discussion that they don’t know where to launch their product and jumped straight into building the product without even talking to that person. As I said all I knew was coding and thought this was the way of building a product/startup - a solution looking for a problem.

After 20 days I decided to do a soft launch on twitter and reddit. I knew it wasn’t gonna do well on twitter as I don’t have an audience but I thought it’s going to do well on reddit seeing some posts on Indie hackers people getting 100K+ views. But I was wrong. Yes I wasn’t bashed on reddit as I followed the rules of the subreddits and started engaging 9-10 days before launching. But it didn’t go well at all.

Here’s why I believe it failed:

• My product was shit
• I didn’t bother to check if someone actually has the problem
• I built a solution looking for a problem
• I didn’t market at all
• I thought building the product is the most important thing
• I don’t know shit about marketing and sales

Here are the lessons I learned from this:

• Look for a problem first
• Find at least one person with that problem and talk to them
• Narrow you target audience as much as possible
• Build MVP with only one feature(two max)
• MVP is good to go as long as it’s functional. Good UI/UX doesn’t matter.
• No one cares about your MVP and your initial launch. So launch MVP asap. And yes no one’s even gonna remember them.
• If you’re a solopreneur/indie hacker, try to find a balance between technical and non-technical skills.
• Market more than build and start marketing asap.
• ‘12 startups in 12 months’ works only if you want to get viral and earn quick money. Yes initially it might you help you gather some experience about building and launching products. But this is not the way to build a business.

I'm not trying to portray myself as an expert or guru. I'm simply sharing my learnings and insights. Feel free to add if I've overlooked something or made a mistake. I've just started my journey and here to learn. Cheers and best wishes to everyone persevering through struggles and failures.🥂