Guys, where do you go to for start-up advice? There's so much out there on the internet holy hell.
Everyone, please comment where you guys get advice/expertise for your startup/product/service. Any blogs, websites, podcasts, books, etc.
I get overwhelmed a lot of the time with the internet sometimes.
Short of finding a mentor, as a founder, I am looking for any way I can get guidance on building, growing and scaling.
The only issue is that everyone has their two cents on how things should be. Even worse, I don't trust the advice that is on the first page of Google...
Another issue is that information is scattered all across the internet. It's not convenient to consume information.
I know indie hackers is useful to an extent, but what about expertise from those who have done it time and time again.
Thanks!
Trending on Indie Hackers
There’s definitely no shortage of startup advice online.
I’ve found the most useful insights come from founders who openly share real experiences, mistakes, and lessons learned not just success stories.
The key is filtering advice based on your stage rather than trying to follow everything at once.
Its all BS, why? Cuz even if the truth is out there there is no way for you to distinguish it from the BS.
Been doing this for 4 years now. Bootstrapped from 0 to 17k MRR to 6k MRR.
Some things I have figured out over these 4 years as a failure in business.
You or your co-founder have to be the customers. You are already immersed and you know the problem you are solving and that you would pay for it. Every other way is insanely harder with more luck, money and network required.
If you are doing this part time EVERYTHING will take 4x longer. But if you have a family and kids like me you have no choice.
You have to try and fail to figure out what the truth is. You need context as a baseline to filter out noise. Because even this stuff I just wrote is nonsense, how can you actually tell? I am just some guy writing some stuff on the internet, how can you take and make huge decisions that can impact your life on this?
No-one is going to help you unless you already have traction. You have to be able to offer something to get a mentor. Could even be a son/father relationship you are offering.
Indie hacker is like anything else, there is nonsense in here and great stuff. But the only way to know what is legit is because you have experience and have already failed before.
Human beings have a tendency to forgot how much luck or other randomness contributed to their success. The store is always "clever" because that's what sells. I have stopped listening to what people say and only look things that I can factually confirm. For example if someone says they do a certain MRR I don't care unless I can see the stripe + expenses. At least I know that this is "possible".
Try and expect to fail. But the goal is to learn what works and what doesn't. Think strategically vs tactically.
Thats my rant for this morning.
This is one of the better things I've read all week/month.
Listening to Clubhouse startup chats and everything is deal flow and people regurgitating what they've heard on other forums.
Everything here rings true. The 4X. The "no one takes you seriously until you have traction".
I'd say - listen to everything that is out there in the background while you build and take it all with a grain of salt. Some of it won't resonate until you are in that actual moment ("ah... now I know what he/she was saying....") and some of this is much more art than science.
And in some respects - ignorance is bliss. If I had known how tough some of this was going to be and how much time/money/energy it would take, I might not have gone down this road in the first place. And that would have been a shame.
Totally agree with your ignorance is bliss statement - the more you think you know the more reasons you’ll have to believe it won’t work. Stop looking for advice and just start, sounds much easier than it is, but that’s the only way you’ll learn.
What happened here?
Current thesis:
No customer interaction and no strategy in taking the little feedback we got and doing something with it.
So we were blind and didn't know it. We were dying and we just started building and pivoting and mentally checking out for months since we didn't know what to do.
lots of wisdom here...
... but, it's not all bs!
i think that's why places like indie hackers are growing... because there's a bit more transparency here, especially if you automate it via integration with stripe (for verification).
but, you're right. anyone can make anything up. that's why you should always try to find real evidence. due diligence matters.
good comments.
I recommend YouTube as a great source of advice. The Y Combinator videos are excellent. There are many university lectures and keynotes from successful founders and investors.
+1 on the YC videos. They also have an excellent podcast.
You could also decide to go through their Startup School program. It's free and we are getting great value out of it at Adflow (but they even have a track for aspiring founders).
Don't treat this like one big puzzle that fits together to reveal a map.
If you try to fit all the pieces of advice together like some giant jigsaw to reveal a map then you'll go mad and not start anything.
It is more like a few random pieces thrown at you from thousands of puzzles. Your challenge is to find 4 corners and fill the rest in yourself.
## My Advice to Start
Once you have a goal then you can better filter what is relevant and what is not.
People will clamber over each other to sell you something.
💯 solid advice here @rab love this!
Thanks!
I'm kind of amazed nobody has mentioned Paul Graham the founder of Y Combinator: http://paulgraham.com/articles.html
A couple classic articles are:
http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
As @technopreneur and @lorenzosignoretti mentioned, Y Combinator also has some good YouTube content.
I've been involved with Techstars and mentored programs there. There are lots of capable mentors that are a part of those programs. Brad Feld has some good content with his book Venture Deals, but that's more about a VC scale business than an indie business.
I strongly agree with @Gobynarth about building something where you are the customer. In my opinion, Lean Startup is seriously over rated and you'd be much better building for yourself.
i do like pg!
I've created several companies and hardly pay attention to others. My 5th company is now over 12 years old and my 6th is now six years in.
As you've said, there is too much "shit" out there. Nowadays everyone tries to be a "guru" and gives "advice" (I guess that's what you get with a self-centric society driven by Facebook and Instagram).
You can get a lot of value out of books. Even books that are older have very solid advice. After all, business building and having common sense is still the same now as it was 20 years ago.
The mechanics have changed, but you still need to do it and have grit!
Twitter. It’s not a source of coherent advise on specific subjects but following other people in your niche gives you really useful content.
They’re often happy to share revenue numbers, strategies that worked/didn’t work and sometimes even “I would pay for ___, someone please build it”.
Some of my favourites are (twitter handles):
I've been aspiring to be a entrepreneur for 5 years and in 2019 I took the first step and left my job because I could.
I have started on YC videos, and I wished I saw them before I left my job.
YC video really emphasise on working with a co-founder
I started finding for a co-founder on YC Startup School, didn't workout much
Building my app as a solo founder just soft launched it - https://aurelionotes.com
There only one way to learn about startups, do and fail. There's no other way. Nothing else works you can watch YC videos and read a 1000 books nothing is going to work. Because you're who you are and you'll make mistakes and you have buckle up and correct your mistakes and move one step forward.
+1 on these.
You can sign up for the Amy Hoy's 30x500 email list here - https://stackingthebricks.com/ s
I have been receiving emails which are golden!
Talk to your customers.
If you don't know how to talk to your customers then there's a few books out there... the one I hear about time and time again is The Mom Test.
Other than that if you're just looking for "bootstrapper pornography" I recommend listening to quality podcasts like Startups for the Rest of Us. You'll find more people than you ever need to listen to from that one podcast alone.
Came here to recommend Startups for the rest of us podcast, and also the microconf connect slack group community, which is full of founders that are a little further along in the journey.
All advice, out of context, may or may not be helpful, but I think the value of hearing other founders experiences is actually underrated, as long as you take these experiences for what they are: one person's experience. I say it is underrated because listening to these stories can really turn a bunch of "unknown unknowns" into "known unknowns" - and so when you encounter these obstacles in your own journey, you will not be surprised/stuck. You may actually have some good ideas of what to try to resolve them.
Agree. Just remember to take action 80% of the time and listen 20%.
There are very few or no shortcuts, and it's hard to recognize one unless you've got skin in the game.
As you've seen in the great responses from others on your question: don't ponder too long.
Read the basics, view and join a couple of the communities and get going.
The best learning school is going out there with your first version of the MVP and get user feedback.
If you have a tech background and want to learn how to learn, read Rob Fitzpatrick's - The Mom Test (affiliated link: https://amzn.to/35CGlMB).
It helps to ask the right things and get the convo going to find out if your product is right.
Positioning help for your product when its out there (and you want to position it better for that "click" with the (right) audience: April Dunford's - Obviously awesome (aff link: https://amzn.to/2QIsJ0n)
In general, you need to find out "what's working" for your product either by learning from comparable other products/services or find out for yourself by getting feedback from the users that you're aiming for with your MVP.
Don't perfect your thing and don't put in months of effort before releasing something. That's soo 1995 ;)
Three places:
But don't live and die by advice. The advice of most people is a mirror of their experiences and this is not a hard science, so people have different, opposed, conflicting experiences and they will swear by different things. Read, learn, talk, make up your mind and then execute.
startupschool.org has great resources, a free program, and a growing community. honestly, their library is really good. even as an experienced founder, i review their material for healthy reminders.
I think advice is contextual, it doesn't work for everyone. I use books, talk to people, podcasts, conferences, youtube videos, etc to get as wide of a perspective as I can on the problem I solve, and ultimately I (with my co-founder) make the decision of what happens next.
For me, advice is just a perspective, so getting as many as possible helps us make better decisions.
Think this is a good intro, then go from there and just tinker around.
Maybe read "the Lean Startup".
The best way from there to learn is to do.
Startup advice in the form of What to do is rarely useful as there's so much variables around each individual, What's really useful is What not to do as that is usually applicable to many and might help us with one less failure to deal with.
Surround yourself with others solving similar problems as you. Take a look at the Hive Index for online communities, here are the pages for Entrepreneurship, Bootstrappers, SaaS founders.
I totally feel you. Everyone has something to say on the internet (which is also a great thing) but at some point it all just becomes this overwhelming noise.
Anyway, I think they key is to consume in moderation and rather than waiting to find the perfect advice from the person that has it all figured out (of course there isn't one) you should spend more time just trying things out. After all, you need to find what works for you and execution of an idea is something that needs practice and can only be learned to a certain degreed through theory.
But still, there is definitely some good and helpful stuff out there. So having a couple of people to derive inspiration and moderation, and skills, from is important. But in the end it depends all on what you actually do.
A large amount of that modern "advice" is either not useful or is based on more "traditional" business resources and research rather than than the endlessly overwhelming stories and punditry. While the tools we use to conduct business have changed a lot, people have not changed as much.
I recommend starting with an understanding of people - skip the startup advice and focus on psychology, human behavior, communication, and persuasion. These four cornerstones are needed to understand your customers, "read their minds" to understand what they want, create marketing material that attracts them and sales copy that converts them into users and buyers.
Some high-value starting points that I recommend often that you won't usually find among "startup" guides:
"Short of finding a mentor" - and what's wrong with that? ;-) I mentor a number of very early-stage founders and creators, and it can really help them to share their ideas and offload the million things racing through their heads.
You are absolutely right, there is way too much info out there, a lot is very good but much of it is awful! You should read and try to learn from the experience of others. But if you spend all your ongoing time reading it all you will end up very confused and never have time to build your actual product. That is why I wrote my popular post on JFDI
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