I spent too much time building things nobody was asking for
I used to think that making progress meant building something new every day.
A new workflow.
A new integration.
Another improvement to the system.
And when you're building a product by yourself, it's easy to convince yourself that this is productive.
You can always find something to improve.
The problem is that building something and proving that someone needs it are two very different things.
I've had workflows that worked exactly as expected.
The webhook fired.
Make processed the data.
Telegram sent the notification.
Notion recorded the order.
Everything looked good.
But sometimes there wasn't enough real usage to justify all the work that went into building it.
That was a useful lesson for me.
Now I'm trying to get things in front of people earlier instead of waiting until everything feels finished.
Build a small version.
Put it somewhere people can actually use it.
See what happens.
Then decide what deserves more work.
It's not as satisfying as building a complicated system.
But it gives me something much more useful:
Evidence.
I'm still figuring out how much time I should spend building versus testing and distributing.
For other indie hackers here:
How do you decide when to stop building and start testing?
building things nobody asked for is the default failure mode - the fix that worked for us was watching what people actually do instead of asking. with swapfile.live we noticed file conversion complaints everywhere and built exactly that, nothing more. how do you validate now before building, conversations or landing page tests?
I'm leaning more toward conversations and small real-world tests now. A landing page can tell me if the idea is clear enough to get someone interested, but actually watching someone use it tells me a lot more. I'm still figuring out the right balance, but I've definitely become less willing to spend weeks building before putting something in front of people.