Indie hacking is hard. Real numbers after 3 years

I agree with @that_guy_iain about going deep into one product. I was lost into the "built and sold my startup in 3 hours" kind of stories for a long time. But now I know that this is really really hard. I do not see any way through which I can focus on more than one product. Building a usable and useful product takes a ton of time. Then as a indie dev there is marketing. Overall it is hard af as you put it.

Ah! Just when I was feeling down seeing a competitor who bootstrapped it $200k ARR in a year.

this is cope. if you're dissatisfied with these numbers and you've been working at it for 3 years you either have a product/market fit problem or a strategic problem.

i've had multiple profitable online businesses. one of them had a TAM issue which limited how much money I could make. I sold it for that reason. Look at the realities of what you're working on and be honest with yourself.

obviously you have some talent getting $6k out of an idea. you should leverage that and hedge your bets more imo. aka always be testing new business ideas and once you identify one that gets serious momentum, off just a landing page and stripe checkout or a signup form, go hard pursuing it. i use trends.co ($300/year), explodingideas.co (free), ahrefs and some other tools to basically always be doing market research and testing ideas.

about 1 in every 15 gets a lot of natural momentum and i pursue it. it's a much more effective strategy when building an online business.

I feel like it's important to really focus on one product for a long time to get ahead. Everyone I've saw do that over the past year has seen decent gains. People, like myself, who spread themselves thin and go all over the place don't get much traction on anything and end up just burning out while not generating much money.

So personally, I'm going all in on one product and just focusing on that for the next year.

I can't say much, but there are people right here who would wish they had your kind of profit right now. Look at how far have you came and just do what you think is right. Cheers.

I really appreciate you showing us how indie hacking can be difficult. I was surrounded by the "SUCCESS" stories for a while, where people make thousands of dollars monthly

Stick with it! You got this

I love that this post is honest.

Without commitment, it very hard. Investments has been far outperforms my IH efforts. This is especially true the first 2 years (obviously last year was a bust).

tldr; timing is important. I think during pandemic, the best thing to do was to stay alive, connect with family and let investments grow. We are going to enter recession and I have no idea how it will turn out. That said, I think we should all spend efforts in AI, the application of it.

Many people only notice the success stories that seem to happen quickly, but they don't see the hard work behind them. This way of thinking ignores the importance of never giving up, making sacrifices, and always trying. The truth is, before someone becomes successful, they usually spend ten years or more working hard, facing failures, and staying strong. When we recognize and appreciate the hard work that leads to success, we can better understand what it takes to be successful and help ourselves and others to keep trying, learn more, and reach our goals.

When I first started, I definitely had the hubris to think that my project would blow up in 6 months and I'd be exiting in 2 years... But along the way I've learned that it's so much more difficult. On the other hand, I've also fallen more in love with my project that I no longer anxious about the speed of growth. I've just chosen to focus on doing things the right way to build it up sustainably.

I don't really think it's hard. People keep on promoting and shining the fact that it's hard. But nobody gives you an explanation why? Why is it hard?

Have you considered diversifying to other website builders like unicornplatform, Umso?

Also in your case reaching out to a user base is easy as they are all using a certain product and their information is kind of public. So are you pursuing direct outreach as a strategy?

Yeah. This is mostly true.

Working on building my newsletter and can tell you getting eyes on the biz isn't where the work's at -- kinda like finding users for your SaaS product.

Would cut this out here, but the comment wouldn't be complete with a 'shameless' plug

Here's a link to the latest issue: mrwiggles(.)beehiiv(.co\m)/p/buzzfeed-news-shuts

I think the big picture should always be "play the long game" but I really like the idea of trying lots of things and seeing what works.

Having the discipline to drop something when it's kinda working is difficult though.

Congrats on what you've achieved!

Scaling monetization for your product may not have been achieved yet, but earning $500,000 per month can provide a comfortable life in many countries. Exploring different approaches to increase revenue could be beneficial. Wishing you the best of luck!

Good old taxes, the thing that makes the hard working men a poor hard working man XD.

Actually no it could be because of your offers, if I have 300 users and each one of them pay 1 usd it different from having 100 but each one of them is paying 2k usd.

This comment has been voted down. Click to show.