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9 Comments

Roast My Idea 😬

Fellow Indiehackers,
Roast my idea. Please be brutally honest. It's a self-discovery tool called manas.app

Problem

The process of self-understanding is excruciatingly hard. It takes a lot of time and energy. Oftentimes, one doesn't even know where to start and how to go about self-introspection.

I know this is a little vague. So, here's a little context,

I started up 2.5 years ago with a colleague of mine with no clue about how. Obviously, we built few products thinking people will come, once the product is ready or once this shiny feature is added. Took sometime to realize that's not the case. But, my relationship with my co-founder had turned sour and we decided to part ways.

This failure kinda left me in me an emotional turmoil. I had no clue what to do next. I had lost all the confidence. I had to go on a journey of self-discovery to come back to normalcy. It took many therapy sessions and many hours of painful self-introspection.

Solution

I want to make this process easy. Just like how apps like calm, headspace make meditation a bit easier, I want to make the process of self-understanding easy.

By self-understanding what I mean is understanding strengths, weaknesses, fears, guilt traps, regrets, etc.

There are many tools/methods/frameworks that can be used to dig these out. I want to curate all of them under a single roof. The end solution is going to be a combination of audio/video material these tools in a digital form. If you have not checked out the landing page, I recommend you do that.

It's available here: https://manas.app

The main question I'm struggling with is,

How do I validate the problem without building a full-fledged app?
I'm trying to slide into self-help, personal development communities to see if people would use such a tool. I always end up thinking one of the two,

  1. This a hidden problem (meaning people won't even know they have), and they might not understand the value.
  2. I have to actually build the app to show how it all would work together what tools I'm talking about to see if they would use them.

Please let me know your thoughts on the idea or on how to validate it.
Thanks for your time!

  1. 3

    I personally like the idea and think that people are more interested about self-awareness, therapy is "normalised" these days and also many people tend to do Yoga and meditation.

    I guess the best and most common way to validate your idea is to state your value proposition more clear on the website. Because after reading over it I don't know how you would actually tackle the problems that you are mentioning. For example this: "Identify your guilt traps, regrets, fears, insecurities, and work towards resolving them." My question is "How do we identify them"? And I would say once this is clearly communicated you can present it to other people and ask if they would use the service

    1. 1

      I'll definitely need to work on the value proposition on the landing page. I think I'll have to explain more about the process and how it will benefit them. Thank you!

  2. 2

    I love the idea and I see the value right away, signed-up for the waitlist.
    Background: I do a lot of self development work, use to study integral philosophy, interpersonal meditation, gestalt, enneagram, etc.
    I guess the main concern I have with your project is: I hope you can make it super professional and deep. I don't want a shallow "lifestyle app" that just scratches the surface. I want something that really goes deep :)

    Also, I assume people like me are rare, but willing to pay. So maybe target to people who are really into self development, and make it more expensive. Probably easier than trying to convince tons of people of the value of deep introspection.

    Just my quick impression, I can give more feedback if you need.

    1. 2

      Hey @dagorenouf,
      Thanks for your comments and interest. I would love to get more feedback from you. Emailing you in a bit. Thank you so much!

  3. 2

    I'd start with the problem:

    "The process of self-understanding is excruciatingly hard. It takes a lot of time and energy. Oftentimes, one doesn't even know where to start and how to go about self-introspection."

    How did you validate this:

    a) That the process of self-understanding is really hard. Did you talk to people? If you did, what parts of the process are really hard?

    b) Often, one doesn't know where to start. >> Have you talked to people about this? Like Maik said, maybe most go to a "default" place like Yoga/meditation.

    1. 1

      a) I don't know if this is a valid problem or not. It's just a hypothesis that I have mostly from my experience.
      b) I have started talking to people. I think this is sort of like a hidden problem. It is not easy to see the value unless you try it out. For example therapy, most people won't know their problems can be solved with therapy.

      But, I'll talk to more people to get to the bottom of this.

  4. 2

    The idea is great, yet formalizing it into an app would probably be difficult. Provide an example of how one of these would look - take STRENGTHS & WEAKNESSES for example.

    1. 1

      I'm looking at something like this,

      1. Personality tests like the big five or MBTI. Each personality will give broad traits that someone will have.
      2. Then use that to filter the answers from questions like these,
        • What worked for me is a series of questions like,
        • What am I naturally good at?
        • What will do for free?
        • What are some things that I like to do for long hours without
        • What skills do people compliment me for?
        • What are the things I dislike doing? What's the cause of dislike?
        • What are the areas where I fear I'll fail?
  5. 1

    I honestly don't believe this is the right CTA for your product.

    "Your Digital Life Coach"

    I clicked on your link first without reading your story just to get an understanding of the product before the "breakdown" of what the product should be.

    Is your product more focused on "mental health" and "anxiety" for solofounders and the startup industry in general?

    I ask that question cause your "breakdown" of it makes more sense than the Landing Page.

    Creating a minimalized educational platform of actionable habits or tips for obstacles of "mental health", etc. may be more useful as an idea.

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