Obsession with automation from the start is killing your project
Automation is for scaling. If you're still finding product-market fit, you should do the opposite of automation. You also end up forcing yourself into the confines of a box of what can be automated and forget that you yourself are turing complete.
Trending on Indie Hackers
As a developer we want everything setup perfectly, no code debt, one-click deploy, etc. That way when our product takes off we will be set. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good or good-enough. For example, I'm manually doing my new sign-up welcome emails until I get enough sign-ups per day to justify automating it. I learned the hard-way after spending way too much time on putting in place systems that can easily be added later once revenue is coming in.
Absolutely. As the old saying goes, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." In this case, optimizing for code, when code is probably not the thing holding back your product's success.
I've been working on side projects (not necessarily to make money) for a long time and I used to waste so many hours trying to perfect the project architecture and planning how I would build it out. It was good education on "best practices" but it really prevented me from actually shipping.
Once I got into the mind-set of "shipping is a feature", it made me re-evaluate a lot of little tasks I was taking on that didn't really help me get stuff out the door.
I don't know. I automate much of my "finding product-market fit" and it makes a full-time job into a part-time job for me. It opens up the door for me to indie hack in the first place. As others may say "use robots to your advantage".
I'm curious how you automate the "finding product-market fit"? In app surveys?
Yep. Write one survey and automate it to be sent to various places regularly to constantly get feedback. It allows me to just look at results instead of having to do all that work in the first place.
Web automation tools have come really far!
Sometimes, other startup venturers face the same problem (the process you're trying to automate).
So why not validate the demand?
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.