As an Indie Hacker, you're your own VC
You’re your own VC.
Invest time and money in many projects.
I have one winner (Makerpad).
It brought me more than all of my others combined, and then some.
Gotta try a lot of stuff to get just one winner.
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The beautiful thing about this is that, unlike literal VCs, you get returns on your investments even if they don't recoup their monetary costs.
There's just something about the psychology of autonomously starting and building your own personal projects that delivers an immediate reward. And that's to say nothing of the massive amount of intellectual capital (lessons learned, new technical and soft skills, reusable templates, emotional resilience, and so on) you accumulate as a byproduct, which you can then convert into better shots on goal in the next venture.
Hence "startup failure" posts often contain more wins than losses (e.g. scroll down to the "Salvage" section of @chr15m's micro-SaaS failure article 🔥.)
As painful as it is to feel you've wasted time and built something you cannot turn into a sustainable product or business, I do wholeheartedly agree with the "intellectual capital" gained from it.
If there is one thing I've learned from the last 4 years with minimal success, it is to ask for money sooner. Validating a product through usage, sign ups or vocal interest is utterly useless. If people aren't willing to pay for what you are building... it's a hobby, not a business.
This is super-important.
As indie hacker founders, even if most of us fail right now, we would have been taking money off the table every month already as founders in the form of profits and/or salaries.
As long as you have some form of decent early traction/ramen profitability.
Either way it would have been a good run, and you would have ended up with more money, knowledge, skills, and experiences than before.
I love this. I decided to become an indie hacker three years ago, but I was sidetracked by consulting work. It is so easy to choose consulting over my projects whenever I have time to invest. Because consulting means I get a paycheck right away, but working on my projects means I may not get a paycheck in the end.
I switch my mindset last year to look at the time and money I put into my project as "investment" It helps a lot. An investment means no immediate returns, but it has bigger returns in the long runs. I love what @channingallen said, all the lessons learned is super valuable. If I did not start being more serious about indie hacking, I would not learn so much about business. Thanks for sharing!
That is absolutely true but not having capital also means that you have to build most things by yourself. I am building a virtual coworking space for boostrappers and it really helps to have like-minded people to share my wins and frustrations with.
How much are you making with Makerpad?
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That's a good one. Ever read "Little Bets" by Peter Sims? If not, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Interesting, will check it out!
I like MJ DeMarco’s Millionaire Fastlane. It was clearer and more practical than other books people recommend me for bootstrapping.
Have added this to my queue, thanks for the recommend!
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.