Hello IndieHackers,
I hope that everyone will be in good health, in these unhealthy times.
So, this post is for those people who want to build & launch their small side-projects within no time.
I have recently built www.untapped.link , a hand-curated 500+ resource database for developers, designers, founders, marketers & crypto enthusiasts.
I am going to share behind the scenes process & learnings I encountered while creating this project.
How to get started?
Firstly you have to clear things in your mind that what purpose your project will fulfill, either is built to directly sell in the market or built to get a few customers & expand in near future. Comparing this with my own project (untapped.link), It is not a unique idea, but it has quality.
After that, you have to quickly search through the market, which projects are making $$ & can be recreated but with some good additions, those projects tell that they are pre-validated in the market & obviously you have to provide quality to your customer not just think about how much money it can bring in or it can be sold or not.
So, everyone has his/her own research technique, what I did was to search through maker's tweeter accounts and see what they were selling with some good reviews. & obviously used some more research tactics.
Note: Don't choose a fascinating idea that might go above your budget & you can't keep running your project at least 1-3 months thinking of having no customers.
After you quickly got an idea of what you will be creating, find at least 3 competitor websites. This will help you create the best possible landing page & will let you know what features they are lacking in, helping you in making sellable quality additions to your project.
Start gathering resources required for creating your project, it may be some data or tools, here untapped.link can help you out finding some. :-)
In my case, I have done it through all NoCode tools, So for that, I checked which platforms/tools/resources my competitors were using. Check the full flow of the website, from landing page to signing up & dashboards pretending to be a customer.
Tools used in my project;
Tools that can help you;
How I created the website in 30 Hours?
Found a $$ making competitor, checked the tech stack they were using & went straight finding some high-quality resources.
The key to researching is that one website can take you to the other similar to it & hence you got your solutions in hand in no time.
I gave myself 3 days to complete the whole thing but giving 7-8 straight hours finding some good resources, I ended up gathering some 400+ resource list. The next day I continued the process & after a few hours and 500+ curated resources, I quickly jumped to create a fully functional website. Again thanks to NoCode tools, everything was setuped in a few hours after detailed research on which tools to be used.
I have recorded the whole making journey through tweets, here you can have a look "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/created-new-project-in-30-hours-464b31ee1e"
After that, it all depends on you how you promote & get some unique visitors to your project. Some cool marketing tactics might work.
Support us on Product Hunt Launch;
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/untapped-link
If anything/suggestion you think can help anybody in the community, do write it down below. Would love to hear your findings too.
I have tried to help you guys with my little knowledge, If I have missed anything worthy to be mentioned, apologies for that.
Updates; Got out first sale, within 3 days of launch.