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