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Simple application to reduce time to MVP drastically.

Hey guys, I am trying to validate an idea that I am working on currently.

I am an indie maker and I try and create many small apps and products. I spend about 1-2 weeks trying to iterate the product and get to an MVP or MLP (Minimum Lovable Product). So when I get to a stage where I can show it to public audience, that is when I kinda had to start building the logins, email responses, handling authorization if any etc. The problem was I had to do all these "non-business" operational features for every product. These are portions of any application that cannot be missed.

That is when I started to find one single product where I can use, very simple to setup and costing very less (when usage is less) so I can use that on my new products. This technically means, I can use that time to make my UI better, find and market products better or just add a new feature.

I wasnt able to find a single product that I can use, so I wanted to confirm if all other makers do have this problem at all. Is it a genuine problem that everyone face or is it just me that paranoid in doing same things over and over again.

Few of the features that I talked about and the average time that is "quoted" by a small tech company to build that in a product

  1. Authentication and Signup flow - 5days without OAuth, 7 days with OAuth.
  2. Authorization - 10 days minimum complexity
  3. Emails templating and sending - 3 days
  4. PDF creation of invoices - 3 days for low complex template

So technically, even if we consider indie-makers to get things done much faster than a company does, it could effectively save about 1-2 weeks of time, which is huge when you want to get from 0 to 1 or from nothing to your MVP.

Please let me know if any of you also face this or have any other solution that already does this or if you do face this and have few other modules that you keep repeating for every product you make.

#idea-validation #indie-makers

on December 17, 2021
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    I think this is a genuine problem, especially for solo-founders/indie hackers. The issue imo is that there isn't one 'right' way to approach any of this functionality which leads to different frameworks, boiler plate templates and SaaS solutions. Also, most of these features are not directly related (ex. auth and PDF creation) so we don't see a 'one size fits all' type solution. I think most founders (including myself) develop a tech stack that they like and are comfortable with and use that to build.

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      Sorry for the late reply. Thanks for that. I do that too and when I talk to other solo founders, they have their own recreation of same stuff again for a new product. Just picking your brain, do you think as a solo founder would you be able to spend few dollars to get this rather than building it or copying it or more importantly updating versions of existing solutions.