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Existential crisis (+ my first 2 products)
by
Shadowy
https://shadowysupercoder.com/the-indiehackers-dilemma-aka-existential-crisis/
You definitely need to stick with ideas a lot longer. No sign ups in the first 13 days I would say has absolutely no significance on the viability of a product. How many targeted eyeballs have seen it? Can't be that many unless you have a huge audience or have done a big paid advertising campaign.
Where would that first idea be if you committed to refining the offer and pivoting the idea for the next 3 months? Still 0 sign ups?
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Give yourself a break. It sounds like you are allowing your insecurities to determine the success of your hard work. I read a great book many years ago called Psychocybernetics. There is a great point made in the book about fighting the momentum of our negative behaviour. One suggestion which always stuck with me was to radically push back in the opposite direction and tone down later into your new normal. The example in the book was how to approach social anxiety -- don't become more reticent, become louder, speak before you think.
I would highly recommend you take a different approach to this whole thing. Don't worry about what people think. Be arrogant, talk about what you're doing every chance you get, assume people are fascinated about it. Worry about re-adjusting later. You need to completely break this pattern of holding back. Remember you are dead in the water without consistent marketing and exposure.
I reckon 12 projects in 12 months would be far more productive, maybe spend a little longer on the marketing before you build something. You could literally pick 12 projects from the IndieHacker directory (with reported revenue) and see what you could do in a month with each one.
I agree with BitGonzo here. And also I recommend a different approach: instead of building each one of your ideas, write up the lean canvas for them.
Seth Godin put that challenge out to his listeners a while back, as a demonstration for why most business plans suck. Most people writing them have done very very few. Often just one. To be good at anything you need practice.
I took that to heart and in the course of one week I wrote 40 Lean Canvases for every half baked idea that came to mind. Remind yourself that not all ideas are good and you need to figure out a way to kill off the bad ones.
Lean Canvas can be a 20 minute sunk cost instead of 20 days.
For your good ideas, dive deeper. You'll know which ones by how often you keep coming back to them.
Thanks agarithm! I'll look up the lean canvas and apply it to my next ideas! So doing this for 40 ideases you were able to pick some winners and discard the rest?
I actually discarded them all. A couple I explored deeply but I eventually found the flaws in all of them.
I was in a manic "Vision Quest" mode of thinking, desperately trying to find my next startup idea. I eventually came to the conclusion that the answer was not going to come from my own imagination. I needed to get outside and start talking to people. Random people. Anyone and everyone. A search to find problems someone else had that I could solve.
To walk that path I joined LunchClub (https://lunchclub.com/?invite_code=mikea15) and started taking meetings to hear about what other people were working on, and what they hated most about their tasks.
It's amazing what people will share when given the space to vent their frustrations...
Hmm that's a good point, I think I'm also looking inward too much instead of talking to people. Have you found a new idea to work on via lunchclub then?
Indeed I did, and we're close to opening the Beta to everyone...
https://www.indiehackers.com/product/signal-flare
You and any IH can try it too:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-flare/dflichognjbaodjcjjpfkmmhmamjaeid
Very cool!
Oof this hits home. Thanks for the candid feedback BitGonzo.
You're right, I'm way too impatient. Have to stick with ideas way longer. "Impatient with action, patient with results" as our friend Naval would say 😄
The first idea, I didn't even show it to a lot of people, didn't try ads or anything. So a very small audience saw it.
I think this 52 ideas in 52 weeks might be causing me to give up on ideas too quickly. So probably everyone who told me to do 12 in 12 was right (a LOT of people told me this)...
I chose 52 in 52 because it was different and probably a better "marketing" angle. Because so many people have tried 12 in 12 before. But I might have to switch it up. Even though probably a lot of people would see this as a failure or giving up?
I could also stick with the 52 and just try to discern bad and good ideas more quickly and kill some off more quickly? Not sure..
About this idea of pushing back against my insecurities in the opposite direction. I LOVE it. I'm normally very shy and think what I have to say is not worth listening to. So just being arrogant and loudly telling everyone about my ideas is very much against my nature but might just be exactly what I need to do.
Thanks, great great advice, I really hope I can put it into practice.
Exactly. I wouldn't make my mind up until I had at least 1000 targeted visitors and had gained feedback from multiple targeted communities.
I would say again this shows too much concern with what other people think. This is your journey, nobody else's. The only failure is giving up on the ultimate goal. Your success is subjective as you are the one who defines what level of success to go after. We pivot on products, why not on strategies?
The problem I see with this 52 in 52 is that a week is barely enough time to even research a given idea, let alone adequately build out an MVP and then market it. With content marketing being one of the most effective ways get your stuff out there, how long would it take to produce and distribute a decent bit of content? Much longer than a week. Look at your growing list of tickets on an idea after a week. The better stuff usually comes down the road after you've spent months tackling a difficult problem space.
I would personally do what many businesses have done for eternity and copy an existing idea (that you can handle) which already has customers. That solves the number 1 problem of viability. I would then spend time evaluating the idea from the perspective of what domain I know about in which I can produce lots of valuable content. Bonus if I already have pre-existing connections/audience for it and/or it scratches my own itch. Look at Indie Hackers who built services to help evaluate ideas -- all they did was scratch their own itch after realising how anxious and laborious the process can be.
That's the way! Remember to give yourself permission knowing that you will re-adjust later. All you are doing is reversing the momentum. And I wouldn't even say it is your nature. I thought it was my nature to be depressed, insecure and socially anxious until I overcame it after many years. My nature is to be introverted, all the negative crap I piled on was just a series of internal behaviours and habits I had built over time.
Good luck with whatever you decide! I feel that impatience. I lost the first 2 years building a product without releasing it and it made the subsequent ideas much harder to keep up as my initial patience faded. But that's the game. The only thing that matters is perseverance to continue to learn, improve and try again.
Hmm this thing about attaching the negative stuff to my persona is def something I do. It's not who I am, but some habits I built along the way, which are possible to change. Thanks for your feedback, it's really valuable to me :) Good luck to you as well, I feel the pain of working on a product for so long without releasing it.
I watched one of sam ovens video where he mentioned the graph of work and its results, one thing most indie hackers miss is that....
You are not doing job where you do the work and get paid, the work and the efforts you put today will yield the result later but with compounding interest
so i think the most one should go for is 12 in 12 months more than that does not give you enough time to actually build and promote them enough
I personally have launched 6 last 10 months sendsimple.app, blurweb.app, certifysimple.app, epictexting.app and more
but i spend more than 5 months with just one
Nice, which one did you spend 5 months on? I think you're right that you're working now for future gains. Important to be patient with results :) Thanks for the advice!
i spend most time on blurweb.app
@shadowy Love your story so far. Although I think (from personal experience) you are biting off more than you can chew with 52 projects in 52 weeks, i do think that if the goal is just launching projects to train and flex that finishing/launching muscle, this is an excellent plan and I wish you success. I think, worst case, you'll emerge with a great understanding of what actually makes a launchable MVP, and how to quickly get those out the door.
Plus, even without focusing too much time on projects, i think you will quickly learn HOW to launch and WHERE, and what traction actually looks like - even if you don't get much from many of your ideas - when you do you'll know 'it's happening' because you'll have had multiple launches that just went no where.
2 other things:
I really admire what your doing. I recently posted here on IH asking 'How to train your finishing muscle' and admitting I lose motivation during a current longer-than-planned project that I have wanted to build and launch for the past many years. I'm almost 4 months into what I thought would be a 1-month MVP project... I may have to follow your lead, and spend a week on some of my smaller startup ideas and just build / launch those just to build up the habit of launching and then circle back to my 'large' project when I have mastered this.
I REALLY love the idea of Hustle Adventures. I think you could actually have something here, especially with everyone chomping at the bit to get out and travel again. I fear the Delta variant and current COVID restrictions might limit traffic right now, but I can see this having huge potential in the near future (assuming we finally get COVID controlled). As a suggestion, I would find other communities like IH to target this to, specifically where Nomads and Indie Hackers cross. Maybe partner with these communities to offer your trip(s). Alternately, you could circle back and build your own community around IHs / Nomads that what to visit somewhere to travel but what to do so in small groups. Again I love this idea.
Good luck in everything. and I'll be following your journey and rooting for you as I stumble along my own.
Thanks to you and some other people I decided to change it to 18 startups instead of 52 😅 The main problem was that 1 week is just not enough to decide whether to give up or continue with a project because there's just not enough eyeballs to see it.. With 3 weeks per project it becomes more manageable, I can spend 2 weeks building and 1 week marketing :)
Thanks for the nice words, you have no idea how much it inspires me to keep going. From personal experience I'd say, get that 4-month project live asap 😄 You don't have to necessarily immediately launch it on PH and HN and everywhere, you can just start asking some friends to use it. But once it's live the game changes completely.
Because you said this about Hustle Adventures I'm getting excited again to really do it. I think it'd be great fun actually. even if it's not a business 😂 So what's stopping you from joining me? 😇
Anyway, thanks so much for the feedback. Good luck with your journey as well!!
You wrote: "There's always room at the bottom. I like that. I think I'll settle in here for a while. I can live as a bottom feeder eating the scraps."
Let me give you something to consider, if you are really hungry and you go to a salad bar and all you do is eat one crouton after another, small as they are, you will eventually get fed. If you are looking for a break-away product to emerge from your 52 builds then you aren't looking at what they are capable of in the aggregate. What if you build 52, scrap 26, and then slowly fan the flames on the remaining ones so they each bubble away just every now and then? Scaleable? NOPE, but able to get you past 1k/MRR? It's highly likely. You could then narrow it to 13 and double the effort applied to each... You might end up with a mediocre group but the risk of failure is distributed across all of them.
Great analogy, but I'm a bit scared I won't even get to the point where I can get to some MRR with any of them if I keep going like this because there's just not enough time to develop them and also market them. Feels like 1 good idea is infinitely better than 50 mediocre ones in a way.. But this process of quickly narrowing down might be good. Seriously consdiderin changing it to 12 in 12 months now though.
52 in a year is like training your brain to find the most micro of use cases. I think 12 in 12 is far better. 12 is still a big number of ideas to really explore in a year and with zero marketing time allotted now with 52 they are literally going to have to be both micro and self-starting which, honestly, is a total moon shot, and if any one of them did catch fire they only have a 7-day build time moat around them. As a performance and a way to build an audience, claim a title, etc. 52 in 52 is still something to brag about for the sake of personal brand but that would need to be the true goal here because the 52 you build won't likely get anywhere without marketing and the process precludes any marketing time - UNLESS - you find 52 marketers to take marketing ownership one-to-each and let them fight it out and really turn this into a spectacle! It could work.... make it a marketing challenge as phase 2 - 52 marketers get a randomly assigned app - keep score somewhere...the whole thing becomes a game show!
Haha I somehow like this idea of a gameshow of marketeers 😂 But thanks to you and some other people I decided to change it to 18 startups instead of 52. You are completely right, 1 week is just too short to build and market a product.
Thanks for the feedback, it's really nice that you took the time to write this :)
You probably hear this a lot, but 12 startups in 12 month is a lot more practical, manageable, and ultimately healthier
A startup is more than a tangible product or service, e.g., go-to market strategy, vision, revenue, understanding the space, etc
What you're doing here looks more like 52 products in 52 weeks and that's ok too, except you'll have to readjust your expectations
Yup definitely starting to realize this too. Might have to change the challenge to 12 in 12...
Any ideas in the pipeline yet for the next few weeks?
Currently thinking about doing some more marketing for the first 2 ideas, because everyone's right, I can't kill em off too quickly.
And then I'm thinking about maybe doing an app where you can add experiences and people can "collect" those experiences into a bucket list all over the world and check them off. And anyone can add "experiences". Not sure if it exists yet.
Or maybe something with DeFi. I know some people doing stuff in the field and it seems like there are a lot of possibilities there.
I'm in the crypto space and have been working on a research application for finding early crypto projects. There is a lot of unpredictability in crypto at the moment due to looming regulations and such, but crypto is a great opportunity right now as we are at the beginning of fleshing out web interfaces into blockchain technology. It's perfect for a web developer.
The big challenge (for me) is the data. Blockchain data is generally difficult to to parse, store and analyse due to the format and size. The archive data for Ethereum mainnet is 8+ terabytes and only growing. Hetzner won't even allow you to run a node and synchronise on their platform. After months of going back and forth with different solutions I started to pull data from APIs such as BitQuery and combine with managed node providers such as QuickNode.
You could also create a smart contract or token (Truffle is a great framework) and integrate it with your application(s). Look into Web3 which is a growing list of tools to interact with Ethereum directly from the browser.
hmm interesting, gonna check out Truffle. Yeah could be nice to make a web interface to make some things smoother ux wise. It's crazy how fast it's going right now, all the innovations in this space. Not even sure where to start 😳 Very interesting to hear more about this research application you're working on tbh :D
The thing with crypto is you are naturally rubbing shoulders with investors by acting as a middleman into blockchain. After 8 months I had a user approach me (small VC) and give me $20k in Ethereum (without contract or equity) so I could work full-time on the app for 6 months.
The platform I'm building is https://moonfactor.com. It is essentially a bunch of tools to help zero in on immature projects with huge room for growth. There are a lot of people looking for "moonshots", or projects which can increase in value 10x/100x/1000x (which happens quite frequently). It is also a financial minefield due to the amount of scams and incompetent teams that fizzle out.
I have a small but growing userbase and I use the tools myself so am very much my own customer. I mean there is something to be said for investing into crypto alongside whatever else you are doing. I may even make enough over the next 12 months that I don't need to build a business -- I can just invest into other people's.
Another idea in crypto is to write a trading bot. Here is an example of a Python one: https://github.com/whittlem/pycryptobot. I was thinking of eventually creating one myself once I have a strong foundation on the analysis side of things as that can power the intelligence of the bot.
This is so "crypto", someone just giving you 20k :D Moonshots looks great. How do you decide which projects get featured? I'm also a bit invested, small fries though. I'll still have to build a business unfortunately 😅 Burned myself in 2017 alt season and subsequent crash then mainly held btc and eth. I've helped a friend a bit with a trading bot but it's very, very hard. Very much a zero sum game. Your tool might help you though like you said.
Damn! Sorry to hear you got burned in 2017. I missed the first couple of boats and only became intrigued last year. If I bought up Ethereum when I was first introduced to crypto I would be sitting on over $50k right now :/
The projects on MoonFactor are listed automatically based on market activity, listings in CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap or one of the decentralised exchanges such as Uniswap or Pancakeswap.
No worries, that was a long time ago and I got over it :) I really think that's a great idea actually. Could even take into account how active the dev community around the project is. I remember something about someone making a list of crypto projects and sorting them by the number of git commits a few years ago :D
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Hey codeswaps, yup that was my premise in my head when I started. I do still believe that, but I'm also starting to think that ideas need a bit longer than a week to see if they are "lucky" or not. Feels like 1 week is just too short to AND build AND market it a bit. Need to be able to get feedback to see if an idea could be the lucky one in a way..
You're right it's basically gambling a year, but otherwise I would be freelancing and I'd earn more money but then what...
To you what would be the number one thing I should do to maximize the chance of success?
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Will keep documenting everything. Will keep going for a year. However decided to change it to 18 startups in one year instead of 52. End goal of $5k MRR stays the same :) Thanks for the tips!
This comment was deleted 3 years ago