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16 Comments

My plan to launch and test 3 ideas before building

So far on my indie hacker journey, I've been building my products first, launching them, then seeing if my product has product-market fit (PMF).

This approach "feels good" because I spend most of my time on the thing I'm good at as an engineer -- building products.

The problem is that this is wildly inefficient at building businesses and generating revenue, which is my entire goal of indie hacking. I'm putting the most time consuming step first, then the important step afterwards.

Let's be real. I'm an engineer, so I have no idea what I'm doing in terms of marketing. But that's exactly why I need to focus on that first and prove that my marketing is good enough to sustain a product before I make that product exist. A product has no reason to exist if there is no funnel bringing users to that product.

I got lucky with my 1st product 1000 Pound Club and got around 150 users. I got less lucky with my 2nd product TypeChinese. I no longer want my success to be based on luck. That's why I'm trying this data-driven approach.

My Plan

I have 3 product ideas:

  1. OKR Tracking
  2. Custom Product Analytics
  3. Product-Focused Performance Monitoring

These ideas are not important. They only exist to guide my marketing efforts.

Here are the steps I plan to make:

  1. Research markets - find pain points and solutions
  2. Build marketing materials - use research to create messaging that resonates with users
  3. Test marketing materials - run ads and collect data (CTR and pseudo-conversion rate)

Practically what this plan will look like is that I'll create ads and a landing page for each of these 3 products. The metrics I want to track are click-through rate (CTR) and a "pseudo" conversion rate. CTR will judge how good my ads are and the conversion rate will track how many users will actually buy my product.

The conversion rate won't be real because the product doesn't exist yet, but I plan to add a buy button to each landing page. If the user clicks the buy button, then that will count toward the conversion rate.

Hopefully by the end of this test, I will know which (if any) of these products to pursue. And once the product is built, I will already have a marketing funnel that I can just put more money into. This is my plan to create a money-printing machine.

If you're interested in my day-to-day progress, follow me on X:
https://x.com/alexanderqchen

on October 16, 2023
  1. 3

    My recommendation start backward. It work well for engineer. Find place, niche or market that easy to market, have good supporting community that want to try new product and not much noise.

    As engineer building is not and issue. The product can be a bit complicated and we can still figure out how to do it.

    But marketing is different beast. Its not our expertise so making it easier from the start is a good way to do it.

    To test if the community, or niche is a good place to start, you can start by blogging or writing something about the niche. See how well people respond to it. That way you can estimate how easy the marketing will go in the future for the product.

  2. 3

    The CTA of you landing page could be a waitlist form to gather emails that will allow you to communicate with your potential customers.

    I have the same plan of validating the idea before building the MVP for my next product. Too much time wasted on coding first, skipping marketing, and failing to get traction.

  3. 2

    I have the same problem. Thanks for the advice

  4. 2

    Hi Alexander, I'm totally new to Indiehacking, so my questions below might seem a little bit odd. However, as I am an engineer myself, I can totally relate to "I'm an engineer, so I have no idea what I'm doing in terms of marketing.". ;-)

    • What are the target rates you want to achieve for the CTR and "pseudo" conversion rate in order to call it a validated idea?
    • How long are you going to run these tests?
    • And how much/long are you going to tweak the marketing strategy in an attempt to optimize it? From what I understand, I could also have a poor marketing strategy and that's the reason, why I get a poor CTR and "pseudo" conversion rate, while the idea could work.
    1. 1

      Hey Martin! No worries, we're figuring this out together :)

      • I'm aiming for 1% CTR and 3.5% conversion rate. These are just goals I made after doing some reading. When I have real personal data, I'll adjust my future goals accordingly.
      • Planning to run for 3 days this week (I'm building the landing pages right now, hoping to get the ads up by tomorrow)
      • Not planning to do any manual optimization for this test, but there are some automatic ones from Facebook. I have 3 ads per product, and Facebook will push the better performing ads.

      Hope this helps and good luck with your journey!

  5. 2

    That sounds good but it's not cost effective. You gonna spend money running ads e.t.c

    1. 1

      Yup! Not necessarily cost effective. This is the first time I'm spending money on my IndieHacking projects. I've had some success with free promotion through Reddit and Discord for past projects, but I wanted to try ads as a new funnel.

      How I'm thinking about this is that free promotion is a good way to start, but when I'm further down the line, I need to think about customer acquisition that can scale. As long as my LTV is higher than CAC, I can theoretically just throw more money at the funnel and it'll make more profit.

      Obviously this is all just theory until I get real data, which is part of why I'm throwing down money for this test. I just want to get started and learn.

  6. 2

    How much would you be willing to spend on running ads, buying a domain, setting up a landing page etc. ?

    1. 1

      I'm putting down $100 for the ads. I'm running 9 ads total (3 ads for each of the 3 products). I'm not going to buy domains because I don't think it's important at this stage. Landing page setup and deployment is free. I'm trying Nextjs and Vercel for the first time for these and going to stay on the Vercel free tier.

  7. 2

    Great approach! Excited to give it a try.

    1. 1

      Let me know how it goes for you!

  8. 2

    Great approach! I invested my time in developing a product first, only to discover it was destined to fail. I believe that starting with marketing is a better path to success. By the way, Rob Walling discusses similar approaches in his book, "Start Small, Stay Small."

    1. 1

      I've done the same! I've built a couple of products, 1 pretty successful (by my standards), 1 not so much. I want my success to be less luck-based, so I'm trying out this method.

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