Is the complexity on the frontend or on the backend?
Going through the products on Indie Hackers, it's hard to find successful products without a rich and beautiful UI that is only possible to build with a complex front end tool.
My assumption is that if it was easy to build, everybody would do it, and if everybody do it, then there is no money and no incentive to pursue as an indie hacker.
Is it that the successful startups here on Indie hackers are the one with complex UI built with tools like React and such? or can you find a successful product here that doesn't require that complex UI?
I think it depends on the product. Instead of thinking of React (and other frameworks) as a "complex front end tool", you should think about it as a tool to manage complexity.
So, if your app has a simple UI (e.g. a manageable number of components/forms, user interactions, etc.), then no you don't need something like React.
But if your app is complex (hundreds of components, lots of user interactions and side effects etc.) then you're going to want some framework to organize and manage that complexity.
But do you need a complex app to be successful? No, I don't think so.
I have a friend who's earning nearly 100k/month on a site with old school PHP + minimal jQuery. Not only do you not need a SPA for 99% of projects when getting started, it's probably a mistake.
Teespring went through its early days and rapid growth phase as a traditional Rails app. Ditto for many, many other hugely successful startups. Many if not most of those startups later spend their money to hire people and make a fancier front-ends, though.
I suspect the reason we see so many people here with complex back-ends, complex front-ends, complex dev-ops and even complex business models is that they're cargo-culting. Seeing that Apple or some 100M company does X, it's easy to also want to do X... but it's very often the exact wrong choice.
https://transistor.fm/ by @mijustin is built with just jquey I believe and is doing 40k+ MRR
:D more examples like this
Our stack is:
As far as I know, we don't have any jQuery
Nice.
I think Semantic UI uses jQuery
I think, depending on what I do of course, I can write the back end 3X faster than the front end. Even if it's a simple bootstrap static website, I will probably find some css bugs that take me hours to fix.
Pretty sure the complexity of your UI is going to be largely driven by the complexity of your app. If you provide sufficient value with static HTML, people will pay. If you don't provide sufficient value, but have an amazingly gorgeous React cathedral-esque thing, they won't.
Until you've validated your business concept, it's probably best to keep it as simple as is reasonable, then scale up.
The UI technology used is just a choice, most of the time just driven by "what is most fancy". Is the backend where the complexity should be.
The success of any solution is about which problem they are trying to solve and how did they solve it.
React, angular, jquery, vuejs are just a way to materialize that solution, nothing else...
It depends on what you’re doing on the backend. If you’re running a bunch of algorithms it’ll be much more complex than a simple CRUD back-end.
For a CRUD app, the front-end is usually much more complex in my experience
While I'm sure a lot of examples exist, imo I would definitely invest some time to learn a decent frontend framework since it saves you a lot of time in the long run.
For vailable.io I wasn't really making much headway until I decided to switch from Django templating to React. While it definitely might feel alien at first, tools like React and Angular are not that difficult to learn with tutorials on YouTube. There is nothing more powerful than being able to implement literally anything you design/wireframe. Definitely give it a shot before removing it from your list of options entirely!