If you do B2C, start with a very narrow audience. Here's how

It was really interesting to read on how Pinterest changed their audience without changing their product. And so many people reaching the same conclusion. Fascinating.

He mentions that the people who were his early adopters were surprising and not who he would have thought. I think that's one of the coolest parts of indie hacking. Each project becomes like a living organism often growing (or not) in unexpected ways, having unexpected use cases, and attracting people that are surprising even to the creator of the product.

I think that's why staying really curious in the beginning is so important. I ended up finding a very niche group of people who I didn't even realize existed that are now paid subscribers to my newsletter. I'm so happy I stayed curious and kept my ear to the ground.

This really drives home how important it is to know the space you plan to build your product in. How else can you you effectively find and hone your niche? You have to know the landscape like the back of your hand.

Then again, you might also have to find a completely different space like Pinterest did! 🤷‍♂️

Interesting to read how these companies started with a product and then found their target audience. I usually hear advise recommending the opposite: pick an audience, get to know them really well, discover their strongest pain points and only then create a solution to that problem

Instagram went after designers interested in photography with a large Twitter following, because those are the people they wanted to set the tone for the platform:

So first you've gotta find the niche of people who actually want your product. But in some cases you've also gotta find the people who you want to represent your product and focus on them — sort of a niche within a niche.

Finding your super-users, enthusiasts, early adopters (or whatever you want to call it) is absolutely essential to get to product-market fit!

So many try to shotgun the masses, ending up not knowing what it is that makes their product truly stick.

Great read. Really shows how critical it is to start with a super specific target customer. I wonder though how this impacts estimating TAM, SAM, and SOM?

“When it comes to the question of the target customer, the most common mistake is the definition is too broad. It must be almost comically narrow, to the point where you may be misunderstood for such a narrow focus.

Really interesting.

Great post. This is very important advice and quite often is discarded by the creators... We always think: Why settle for a few if we have the whole world?
But the more I learn about bootstrapping the more I understand how important this is...

The only thing that I would change is to start with finding the who and only after the idea. I describe that method in more detail in my bootstrappers guide