Our target audience found us. And it's different than initial target.

It's hard to find a product-market fit. And it's weird when you feel that you found it, and then another market suddenly knocks at your door. That's what happened to us after 3 years of QuickAdminPanel.

Phase 1. Yay, we have a product market fit!

Story of the product is pretty typical - as a team of developers, we realized we need a tool for ourselves to save time on writing repeated code, which is around adminpanels. As most of our work is with PHP Laravel framework, we built this code generator - first as a set of scripts internally, then as github package, and then moved into online generator as SaaS as QuickAdminPanel.com.

The idea always was that we're building a code generator for Laravel developers like ourselves, who want to save time.

And it is a successful product - we're live for 3 years, currently at $4,000 MRR and also saving a lot of time by using our product ourselves.

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Phase 2. Wait, do we REALLY have product market fit?

But at some point our growth kind of stopped, roughly same amount of monthly revenue. So I started to listen more closely to our potential customers and their questions and struggles. And noticed a pattern.

Quite a lot of people were raising questions on customer support about struggling to install the generated code. Not because our code was bad, or because instructions were unclear - we generated everything as close as possible to Laravel framework standard, as we were expected our customers to be Laravel developers who know what they're doing.

In reality, a lot of our potential, and even paying customers appeared to be entry level junior developers, or not even developers at all! They were expecting to generate the code for a full project, without deeper code knowledge. And when they realized they had to know some code deployment stuff like dealing with PHP versions, JSON DB fields, storage folder permissions etc - a lot of them stepped away.

And we thought it was ok, cause they weren't our target audience. We couldn't help them, as we're not teaching Laravel or PHP, that's not our mission.

Or is it?! (I thought one day)

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Phase 3. So what's our market?

Let's look at this situation from another side.
A person is trying to get value from our product, and is asking for our help, and instead of helping them, our reply is basically "Sorry we can't help you, you're not qualified enough to use our product".

Phrasing this way - sounds arrogant, doesn't it? And it's even stupid - someone wants to pay money for our service, and we're turning them down!

In other words, we were trying to achieve product market fit, but potentially in a wrong market.

Another strike for me was when I met a person who I can call my business mentor. Told him our story and that we're struggling with growth for our Laravel adminpanel project, and he asked only one question "Why are you building for Laravel?"

"Well, because we work with Laravel, that's what we do best, so we want to be the best in our industry.", I replied.

"Ok, fine, but do you have enquiries from people who don't know Laravel?"

I confessed that we do. He continued his thought:

"Have you heard of a no-code movement?"

"Of course I have. People who are trying to build the next Facebook with Zapier and Bubble? I think that's BS".

I was thinking as a developer. And as an arrogant indie hacker who was in love with his own idea and product.

My mentor finished with a question that hit me hard:

"Oh you would be surprised about possibilities of no-code tools these days. I'm not saying your admin generator is for no-code people. But have you heard of low-code movement?"

Later that day I was googling and researching low-code stuff all evening. And I realized that actually our QuickAdminPanel is a perfect example of that niche.

• People generate 80-90% of the project without code
• For the rest, they can code something, or hire someone to do it

Wow, that was a mental shift in my brain. So our tool for Laravel developers, is apparently not for Laravel developers? Or maybe not even for developers at all?!

I always thought we were selling the generated code. But it turns we are selling successfully launched web-projects, and code is just a part of it.

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Ok, so what now?

After that series of questions, I started thinking what to do in that "low code" direction. At first, I thought that we have potential here, possibly leaving a lot of money on the table by not making the product more towards "no-code".

But in reality, it's not that much about product, it's about positioning and messaging. When someone lands on our homepage - it says clearly "Laravel admin panel". Maybe that text should be different?

I realized that in order to "touch" that low-code audience, we don't need to change our product at all. I just need to write a few articles and design a few landing pages towards these specific people, and see how they react. So that's exactly my plan for upcoming months.

Also, I want to double-down on help articles for people who lack Laravel knowledge to properly install code locally or deploy to live server. Lack of their knowledge is not their problem, it's ours.

I hope to tell how it went with that side-pivot later on IndieHackers, but for now I want to leave you with these thoughts/questions:

1. Do you really know your target audience? Are you talking to them often enough?
2. Look around - are there any similar niches that you can "touch" without changing your core product?
3. Are you just selling a drill or are you helping your customers to make a hole in a wall?