Ignoring 10 million users at scale
In this article Philip Guo talks about running pythontutor.com for 10 years with nearly 10 million users. I love his contrarian point of view and I think there's some good food for thought in here and even some points that would work very well for certain types of Indie Hacker businesses.
http://www.pgbovine.net/python-tutor-ten-years.htm
Summary of his points:
- hyperfocus on one feature.
- don't listen to user requests.
- refuse to communicate with users. 😂
- don't do any marketing or outreach.
- build stateless applications.
- don't worry about performance or reliability.
- use old stable technologies.
- don't make contributing easy.
- don't accept contributions lightly.
Quite an interesting and honest opinions.
I just laughed the part he mentioned, "He doesn't use the product and he doesn't listen to user's requests" . 😅 😅
I love his point of view and it has clearly done wonders for him!
However, I believe that if I didn't listen to users, DarwinMail would not even be half as good as it is now!
They told me what they wanted + and I delivered = paying customers!
Ha ha yes it's a refreshing counterfactual to much of the common wisdom you hear from founders.
What that says to me is there are many pathways. Some have low probability but that doesn't mean they're impossible.
You are right.
The thing is, founders these days are fed with a bunch of "its only this way" that works and doing the opposite you are doomed to failure.
Businesses are different; all the way from industries, goals, customer niche, founders vision and proving what works and what doesn't is only through trying it out (but being cautious, careful and ready to iterate really fast).
His strategy aligns with his vision and seems to have worked quite well and thats all what matters.
Does anyone know of other successful stateless indie hacker projects?
Saw that article and loved it :)
Though to be fair, it seems he explicitly created this as a learning tool and not as a business. I think learning tools can easily benefit from being extremely focused and opinionated. Businesses... It's harder to say, though there's plenty of anecdotes about people following what their customers (or potential customers) said they wanted and it going completely wrong, but there's also plenty of anecdotes from the other side too.