11 tips from a founder with 24 projects and $2M in ARR

No list of the greatest indie hackers would be complete without John Rush. The creator of an almost unfathomable 24 projects that span industries from SEO to website building to AI directories, he pulls in $2M annually while maintaining enough free time to keep building new projects, a testament to his skill as a maker and his wildly popular social media presence.

And, he's done it all without taking of dollar of venture funding.

Last week, I was lucky enough to get his advice on how to be an indie hacker:

1) What’s A Mistake You Often See New Indie Hackers Make?

The most important one is not validating their ideas. 

Indie hackers often fall into the trap where they start building something they think is good, and then they spend months building this thing but then when it’s time to bring it to the market, it doesn’t work. So then the only way to go from there is to change the product, but that takes forever. 

It’s so much easier to just validate the idea in the beginning, see whether it works, and then build when you find something with legs.

2) How Do You Come Up With Good Ideas?

I just see what I can create to reduce my workload. 

If you’re able to automate something for yourself, you’ll often find that other people will want to use it as well. 

3) How Would You Go About Validating An Idea?

If you’re in B2B like me, there are six ways to do so:

1. Social media. So either you post to your audience, or you post on a platform where your content can spread beyond your audience if it’s interesting, like Twitter or TikTok. And then all you need to do is track the ratio between views and sign-ups. 

2. A waitlist. Just launch a very simple one-page waitlist with your value proposition, your name, and an email field. And then just watch how many people sign up. 

3. Blog. Write something interesting and post it on Hacker News, Hacker Noon, Reddit, and Indie Hackers, and at the end of the blog mention that you’re looking for feedback on a new idea you’re working on. People usually want to help others. All you need to do is ask.

4. Ads. Just pay for Google or Meta ads.

5. Influencers. You can pay for them to post your stuff for a couple hundred bucks, and then you’ll be able to see how your idea does in front of a larger audience.

6. Find people who seem to fit your target audience, DM them with your idea, and see how they react. If they want it, then you’re probably on the right track. 

4) Is Cold Outreach Effective?

There’s a lot of debate about every channel, but most of the time when people say something doesn’t work it’s because they aren’t doing it right.

Cold outreach has been the best way to reach customers if you aren’t rich for basically all of capitalism. So I think it works really well.

The key is to put a bit of effort into it. Don’t just spend 10 minutes on a mass DM and think that you’re going to be landing deal after deal. You have to constantly iterate on your message to see what works best.

5) What Are Your Top SEO Tips?

Most founders make very simple mistakes on SEO. For example, they have websites that are client side rendered instead of server side, which means that Google can’t even see your content. You’re basically invisible. Or their main title on the hero section has nothing to do with potential queries. Instead, they’ll have something like “welcome to my tool”, but nobody ever searches for “welcome to my tool”. 

I also see a lot of founders, especially those that use no-code tools, suffer from slow page speeds. Your landing page speed is really important. You don’t need to obsess over making your website the fastest website in the world, but it should load in about one second. 

Finally, you have to focus on getting backlinks. 80% of the people I see failing at SEO have no backlinks. Blog articles by themselves won’t cut it.  No backlinks, no SEO.

Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to get backlinks. All you need to do is go to directories and list your tool there. 

6) How Do You Grow On Social Media?

When I first started, I was convinced that social media is a game of tricks. I thought that you had to do collaborations with influencers, or run giveaways, or whatever else. But then I realized that those things are easy to do, and even if you gain followers doing that, they won’t be the kind of followers who will buy from you.

What actually worked for me was keeping things very real and simple. Everyone tries to act like a celebrity or an expert, but that’s not the best way to do things. The best way to standout on social media is to just be yourself. Because then you can actually figure out kind of content from your life is resonating with people. 

When you try to be someone you aren’t, it becomes really hard to repeatedly come up with good content.

7) How Do You Deal With Failure?

It’s really important to have people close to you. It can be your wife, children, mother, father, best friend, or whoever else, but you need somebody.

And I don’t think the answer is to “network” and “surround yourself with successful people”, because if stuff hits the fan and things get really bad, your network is going to disappear. But if you have people who are genuinely close to you, you’ll never be alone. 

8) How Do You Manage Your Time?

Be lazy. People think they’re lazy, but they aren’t. 

For example, grocery shopping. Why would you go to the store instead of using an app? And that’s just one example. In the developed world you can now outsource 90% of your tedious work. If you do that, you’ll really free up your time.

This works so well that even though I have 24 projects, I still have plenty of time to work on new ideas.

9) How Will Indie Hacking Be Different In 5 Years?

I think it will turn into something we don’t even call indie hacking anymore. It will be called startups. And I think that 99% of those startups will start on their own without any seed or pre-seed money, validate their idea, get some sales, and then go to the VCs. So basically, I think that VCs will be pushed into the later stages and disappear entirely from the early stages. 

10) How Can Founders Stand Out?

It’s already difficult today. Just look at all the newcomers today struggling to get attention. I think that’s only going to get worse in the future as the regular B2B SaaS products become so crowded that only established founders can make the economics work. 

So I think most hackers will be forced to go into other verticals like agro healthcare, bio schooling, and teaching. You have to look for fields where there’s a lot of potential, but where nothing is currently happening.

11) Final Piece Of Advice?

Wire your brain to enjoy the process, not the outcome.