My first lesson building as an indie – keep it simple

One of the most difficult challenges I’ve faced in building Bruno has been crafting a simple enough solution that hits directly at the center of the problem space I’m exploring.

After launching my MVP, I quickly learned that before I can try to tackle too much complexity, I need to first obsess over refining the problem space and then design a product that solves that specific problem with incredibly high precision.

It’s sort of like writing. It’s painful to cut language you feel adds depth and nuance to a narrative, especially when you’ve spent so much time deep in the weeds.

But cutting is almost always necessary.

With Bruno, I’m trying to create the most reliable destination for learning about something new. My insight is that I think people are hungry to unpack their curiosities alongside their peers but are underserved by traditional educational institutions (credentialism trumps genuine curiosity) and overwhelmed by the abyss and noise of today’s internet (there’s seemingly too much to pay attention to, which is only getting worse with generative AI).

My goal is to develop a new methodology for curating high-quality thinking that better connects us to our curiosities.

Our initial approach to solving this problem was to design a set of incentives that would compel smart, curious people to share the most interesting ideas they were reading about and listening to every week. I built an MVP that used a “give-to-get” model where only the users who contributed URLs to the database could receive recommendations from this database. The goal was to optimize for quality, not quantity – instead of the never-ending list of Substack posts in your inbox, you’d receive links to five ideas (and only five ideas) each week.

However, after building this, it still didn’t feel quite right. I was having trouble converting users. And while I thought the quality of recommendations I received each week was quite high, it didn’t solve the core of the problem – prioritizing what to pay attention to. In reality, I (as the ICP, I’m basically building for myself) already had a dozen essays or podcasts I wanted to dive into throughout the week. Receiving more recommendations on top of that only exacerbated my problem.

So, I refined the approach. Before I can curate new ideas for users, I should first focus on curating an existing archive of ideas.

I just released the initial version of this new feature. The way it works is quite simple – save links to essays, podcasts, or videos you don’t have time to read, listen to, or watch, and Bruno will learn your interests, parse through the noise, and suggest the five ideas from your saved links you should dive into each week.

I’m looking forward to seeing the results of this new launch – you can check it out at https://www.trybruno.xyz/

Keep it simple, folks.