My no’s and yes’s

I’m still within the first year of launching MealPlanner.App, and I just hit a significant milestone — $150 MRR.

It’s not significant because it’s a life changing amount of money, but significant because people are sticking around at least for now. I thought for sure I’d see people cancel their subscriptions one or two months in, but my early adopters are still actively using the tool I built.

I’m very encouraged by where my product is right now, and I want to shed light on some key decisions I made while building the product and learning from my early adopters.

I call it my No’s and Yes’s

Here are a few things I said “no” to, and what I said “yes” to instead. I’m not trying to prescribe what you should do, but for what it’s worth, here’s what I did:

• I said “no” to the flavor-of-the-day technology and micro service architecture.

• I said “yes” to Ruby on Rails.

• I said “no” to AWS and build-your-own cloud compute.

• I said “yes” to Heroku.

• I said “no” to fake-door landing page validation.

• I said “yes” to scratching my own itch and building something useful for myself.

• I said “no” to raising my prices and making a B2B product.

• I said “yes” to an approachable B2C model.

• I said “no” to TailwindCSS.

• I said “yes” to Bootstrap.

• I said “no” to unit testing.

• I said “yes” to alerting and monitoring.

• I said “no” to customer insight products.

• I said “yes” to building my own insights dashboards.

• I said “no” to building new features.

• I said “yes” to writing blog articles.

• I said “no” to putting my product first.

• I said “yes” to prioritizing my wife, my kids, my sleep, my friends, and my day job.

I’m still finding the right things to say “no” to, so that I can make the best use of my “yes”. I probably could have grown my product much more quickly had I said “yes” to certain things instead of saying “no”. But I’m perfectly content with slow, steady growth.

Happy Indie Hacking!