How we made over $1k in 1 month and why you can too

Hey indie hackers!

I'm Filip, me and my friend Elizabeth recently made Notionery - a tool that helps people use various mental models. We launched a month ago on ProductHunt, without having much previous exposure to the indie-hacker world. Now we have crossed $1k in sales, which made me incredibly happy and feels unreal. I wanted to share a single piece of advice I believe made all of this possible, and why I believe anyone reading this is smart enough to do the same thing.

The simple idea is to ship early, ideally something you are embarrassed about. I literally used any excuse and took all the shortcuts I could to make Notionery public as soon as possible. Examples from Notionery include using Gumroad for payments or a pre-made website template. I believe trying to get these things "right" would make us postpone the launch a couple days/weeks, which can many times be dangerous, especially with a fragile, young product. It's easy to get winded up in something else and completely forget.

We launched just with 10 mental model templates, which I thought is no way enough. Shortly after that, the first customers and feedback started to roll in. Guess what? No one cared about the number of templates, everyone thought they are awesome and there's enough of them. Instead, we got feedback about the internal structure of the templates themselves, something what we started working on right away.

Shipping does a couple of magical things:

1. Shipping validates your idea. Do you see the product having traction? Or are the reactions very mild? You can only find out if you ship. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to kill the product and move on to the next idea.
2. It is a source of continuous feedback. Your product will likely be changing and you need a stream of feedback to help you direct the changes in the right way.
3. It allows you to build in public. Any update, bug fix or a new feature can be right away seen by your users or customers. That means building a small community around your product and getting more feedback on the updates.
4. It increases the change of getting "lucky". Shipping a project creates a lot of new opportunities. Examples involve e.g. that an influencer retweets you because they like the product and you get 10 new customers, or that a company reaches out and they want to create some kind of a partnership.

If you made it to the end, thanks for reading!

disclaimer: this whole post is based on my own experience. It might be that "ship early, be embarrased" is not a good idea for e.g. a tax audit system, but I still believe it is relevant for 99% people out there.