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I'm finally building my own product!

After over 4 years designing and building products for other entrepreneurs as a freelancer, I've decided to build my own! This will be a side project since I love my day job and have two young kids to feed, but I need to scratch that entrepreneurship itch.

I'm going to build for entrepreneurs because of the friends and past clients I have. I saw a lot of failed and successful products created and feel like I can help more entrepreneurs succeed (hopefully I can be part of that second group 😉).

Since starting, I've made good progress on the following:

  • Deciding on an initial idea which scratches my own itch and is something I noticed a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with - organizing and learning from customer research!
  • Designing and building a landing page to share my idea (navana.app). Still a WIP, but open to feedback.
  • Setting up the stack for my MVP. The app will be built with Next.js on the frontend, Fastify and Prisma on the backend, and Postgres. It'll be hosted on Vercel and Heroku. Locally, I'm running everything with docker compose.

So what's next?

I have an initial solution but need to validate or invalidate the problem and solution I've thought of. I just read The Mom Test and feel a lot more prepared for this step of the process. Another book I'd recommend is Just Enough Research for anyone wanting to step up their user research skills.

I want to make sure I don't get stuck on my initial idea by building something people don't want or getting stuck on a local maximum. I'll gladly switch the problem or solution I'm working on if I find something better when doing user research.

After doing some more user research through interviews and scouring forums, I'll do some more solution ideation then follow up with the people I had interviewed. It's all just iterating on ideas and testing my assumptions from here on, right?

How can you help?

I'd love to chat with you about your experience doing (or not doing) user research! Schedule a time here🙂

Thanks for the encouragement

Thanks to all the awesome people in this community for sharing their stories and what they've learned. I hope I can share a few things I learn along the way too 🙂.

  1. 1

    Navana looks interesting. My only experience with qualitative research is in academia and government. (Yes, I know, I should be doing more user research as an indie hacker.) Would Navana be comparable to NVivo, maybe more specialized to the asynchronous interactions of helpdesk traffic?

    1. 1

      Hadn’t seen NVivo before, but it looks really powerful! Navana will be geared more towards indie hackers and small teams, so much more affordable and simpler. It will be used when doing interviews, doing research on Reddit/forums, on the go when an idea strikes, etc

      1. 1

        Sounds like a great niche--good luck!

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