To the bloggers, the writers, the twitter influencers... I know it's hard to recall the exact pain and the initial struggle of actually figuring out what you really have to offer (because, I believe, there's usually so much, it's easy to get confused what to pick and run with).
How did you figure out what you wanted to serve the world with? And how find out what sucked?
I'm planning to test new waters and would love to know how you went about this, initially. Thanks for your help in advance!
Ideally your product idea comes out of a personal frustration. Something you need that you can't find. That doesn't have to the be the case.. but it's so much easier when you deeply understand your target customer and just need to find more people like yourself.
My startup came out of a frustration with how much up-front development work is required to get a new product off the ground. Things like layout, common components, functionality like auth, integrating with 3rd party services, Stripe payments, deployment scripts, etc. So much work is required before even getting to the actual core functionality.
I always wished there was a tool that would let me select the functionality I want and then then gave me a codebase with everything setup and working out of the box. So I built Divjoy to solve this problem and have been focused on marketing it to other indie hackers looking to get a product off the ground quickly.
It was a lot of work getting the first version out (over 6 months full-time!), but because it was a personally need I had the conviction that it would be successful and worth the effort. It's been live for about a year now and I've done over $50k in sales so going pretty well :)
Hey! Late to check this out. Yeah, too late.
Just wanted to drop by and thank you for your elaborate note. Your point about creating something YOU want yourself is super practical and I see that being unanimously recommended by everyone in the startup scene. Which makes sense, and that's probably why it's going super well for you. You understand the EXACT problems.
It looks super tempting. I'm already sold on it, will probably use it when I need something like this next. Incredible work! I wonder how I never came across this before.
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Getting back a little too late! Life's been something else.
I think I liked your overall answer and approach.. What threw me off was actually understanding what each of them could be. For example, different groups I'm a part of... Is it like 'marketing enthusiasts'? An unfair advantage, like 'being good at copywriting.'? I mean, just trying to understand the questions a bit deeply. Like, how did it help you, for example?
I'm still figuring this out so, apparently, it's not an easy thing for me lol. Really appreciate your list, though!
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.