Regular people are deep in the digital middle ages. Build for them.
The post below was inspired by a discussion here. I noticed a pattern that resonated with my experience of going indie hacker as a second “career”, which I will mention later.
Speaking very generally, many developers decide to build for the virtual web infrastructure, another piece of the Internet machine, another fragment of the web fabric. It is not surprising given many indie hackers are builders, coders, developers, and often digital natives, integrated with their computers. Product Hunt marketplace abounds in sophisticated products that optimize “virtual life”. When you have a hammer, all you see is nails. I can relate to it, when I was a bio-med scientist in academia I was like that immersed in science problems, without a larger smarter perspective. I paid a prize for being myopic and detached from the outer human reality.
Back to the main thread, I do not have a good term for it so let's call it the virtual-first orientation. Code (the virtual infrastructure) as a source of problems and code (apps, tools, ...) as solutions. Time and time again I can see developers are building smart tools and social media for other developers. Coders work for coders and for the Machine.
On the other hand, the regular people are deep in the digital middle ages. I am not advocating to embark on a mission of bringing them to modern times, but there is an opportunity in changing your perspective from the machine-first orientation to the human-first orientation. Open up and start building for regular people, and in the process educate them, modernize their outdated processes. By the way, educating others is a powerful marketing technique!
There are a couple of ways to get out of this limiting, myopic developer-first view-orientation. You can form a team or an alliance with a domain expert. You can befriend regular people like lawyers or bankers (first choose those with deep pockets and little time, for practical reasons :)). Keeping it simple, if you accept the fact that time is money and smart apps save time, it is just a matter of discovering and understanding good problems in their jobs or lives.
Many work-related problems center around poor, insufficient, messy, disorganized data and information-flow deficiencies, access, ease... Sort of coding problems. Your thoughts?
I can agree to some extent. It is also essential that we inspect the feasibility.
As bootstrappers/indie makers we look to generating revenue to pay our bills.
Hence we naturally target customers who would be able to pay for the product/service we provide. That's the reason why most indie makers target B2B markets. They'd always be willing to spend money on services which either increase their revenue or save time
I agree that it would definitely be awesome to help out consumers. But consumer businesses will require a different mindset. For instance, consumers would prefer saving money over saving time and might expect services to be free.
And the nature of consumer markets will have the power law in place with room for only 2-3 big players as opposed to the long tail businesses in B2B.
This would eventually force us to raise funds and follow the venture funding route which might not be really appealing to indie makers trying to just make a living
Cool. Yes, it seems that many indie builders decide on B2B model, arguing sensibly it is better to have fewer high-paying customers than many low-paying ones. But a major shift is going on, many professionals like MDs, dentists, lawyers, etc. start their own side gigs or run small businesses centered around their core skills. So you can use B2B model and there is less bureaucracy involved.
Actually this makes sense. Exciting times ahead :)
Yes, for you librarians, data analysts and others, let's get this internet organized :D
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I think it's a lot more likely that product hunt products are generally built for a tech audience is that their creators are building for the only audience they know. Building an app for Lawyers, Accountants, etc would require going outside of their immediate circle to do user interviews and find legitimate pain points, whereas they can build something for an issue they faced once and thought "I bet I can build an app around this"
Exactly. And I think the real gold is waiting on the intersections of different domains. If I recall well Paul Graham wrote an essay on that. I get that it is always painful the get out of your own comfort zone and test the unknown, but as they say no pain no gain.
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Thanks. Good comment.
It is like that, but it is changing. There are stats showing that more and more general population people accept paying for digital products or services. With respect to professionals, many of them are self-employed either part-time or full-time, or trying side gigs. Time is of essence to them, and they have money. I believe if you prove that your app can make their life easier, simpler, safer, or save time (and these should be part of idea validation anyway) they will buy.