From Idea to validating & launching beta In 7 Days

Hey hi, so right now I'm working on my next indie project and I would like to share how I was able to come up with a project idea that got validated in 7 days and how I gained early beta testers and spiked up interests for my product.

💡 The light bulb moment

So professionally I'm a freelance app dev but have been lingering in the indie space for over a year now. I'd worked on a few indie projects at that time but none of them grew or made any profit.

I was working on my last indie project till last month which I had started in early December but soon after launch, I realized that I wasn't able to generate any proper value from this product. Just after a month after the launch, I decided to work on something else till I get a proper idea of what to do with this project.

So like we all do, I was scrolling Twitter instead of working on my next project😅 and I came across this tweet that said that Craft is enough of a differentiator in software by sighting the example of bento.

Believe it or not, that tweet made me realize that I don't have to come up with a brilliant idea for a product, what if I can just build on an existing validated idea but execute it in a much better way to provide more value to the end user?
So, I was sitting down on this idea of building an App Store Screenshot Creator Tool that can be used to create app store screenshots for your apps, but I never really started on it considering the complexity of the project.

But this time, I decided to start on it mainly coze of the following reasons,

1. Existing tools like this provide a terrible experience in creating such screenshots and consume a lot of time. I knew if I built this I could execute it in a much better way.
2. Being confident that I can build it. So I'd worked on something similar in the past which was also an image editor for desktop. Also, I've been doing creative coding for over 2 years now which made me confident that I could build this, may take time but I'll figure it out at the end.
3. Being a developer myself I knew the pain of using such outdated tools, it hit me close and I was abt to solve my own problem.

🧱 Building the product

For almost all of my last indie projects, I'd worked on them for at least a month before abandoning them. So this time I decided to build something within a week, share it, and see if anyone's interested. If enough people show interest then I can accelerate the development for it.

Day 1

This time, I wanted to execute my development a little differently. So I followed the following steps to start working on MVP,

Step 1- Write down the initial set of features for MVP
Step 2- Create some quick designs to guide MVP development
Step 3- Build it!

On day 1, I wrote down abt the initial set of features that would qualify as an MVP. I got down to some great features that would fit the MVP and that got me excited.

Day 2

So after planning down features, I wanted to get a good idea of how the ui of the MVP will look so that I can quickly build it and not spend time thinking abt ui while building the tool.
Opened up figma, and started designing a very basic ui for the application, at the end of the day I was happy with the ui designs I was able to create.

Day 3-4

It was build time!👷🏽

Started working on the product, having known what my initial feature sets are and some good ideas for ui, I was able to quickly get this together to start sharing the ongoing development on Twitter.

Just at the end of that day, I shared some more on Twitter,

and got this reply to that tweet,

Reading this fired me up and I knew I was up to something that people may find value in.

Day 5-7

So the positive response from sharing ongoing development on Twitter really excited me and I went full throttle with getting the MVP done in 7 days, and I was able to get a decent build out and announced the launch of beta and started looking for beta testers.

This spiked up some huge interest in the people. A lot of people were interested in trying out and beta. I was able to get past 10-15 beta testers after the announcement and some good early exposure to the product.

Learnings from my 7-day beta launch :

1. You don't have to come up with a brilliant idea for your side project. Remember, "Craft is enough of a differentiator in software".

2. Share ur work online, anywhere you can, on twitter, reddit, indiehackers, etc. You never know who will find value in your product and that may just be the one thing that you need to keep pursuing it.

3. Build something that showcases the primary goal of your product while limiting the number of features. This way, you can get something out very quickly that showcases what your product is supposed to provide.

I think that's pretty much it for now. This project is still in ongoing development but the first version is coming to the app store once apple approves it.

If you liked the product and think this can help you speed up ur app publishing pipeline, then you can join the waitlist below and get notified once the project is live.
AppShots - Join the waiting list

🙏 Thanx for taking the time to read the post. This is my very first post on indie hackers and I hope to share more of my learnings while hacking through my indie projects here. Have a great day!