Startup advice from a professional founder coach

Besides being a solopreneur himself, there are few indie hackers with more experience around successful entrepreneurs than Charlie Ward. The founder of Ramen Club, Charlie has built a community of 3,000+ indie hackers in four countries and is now coaching 300+ makers to ramen profitability.

I caught up with him last week to get his take on how to be a successful indie hacker:

1. What’s a mistake you often see new indie hackers make?

I think the most common one is just working on the wrong kind of thing. People often try to do stuff that is really creative or unique, but the problem with that is there’s often no existing demand, and it’s really hard to create new demand as a bootstrapper. Your timing has to basically be perfect, you need a lot of resources, and, frankly, you need to get a bit lucky. That’s not something you can count on.

You’re much better off choosing an idea that has existing demand. So that can be taking something that works in one market and trying it in another. For example, a Chrome extension would probably work on Firefox too. Or taking something that's already got a well-known competitor and doing it cheaper, faster, and better.

2. How do you know you’re on the right path?

I'd say, generally, if you've been working on something for three to six months and you don't have customers, that's a really bad sign and means you need to change something drastically. That could mean doing more marketing, building a new feature, or just choosing a new idea entirely.

3. What are some of your favorite ways to get early traction?

The people that I see doing really well tend to pick a good idea and a single channel to focus on. They then obsess over becoming great at that one channel. Obviously, it’s important to pick a channel that you can realistically win. For example, if you are building a car insurance product, SEO probably isn’t the best choice for you because it’s already so saturated. So you should figure out where you have an edge.

Building on this, one thing I see a lot of successful people do is choose a product based on search traffic that’s easy to rank for.  And so if you find your idea based on that, something that's high volume and high volume on Google search but still easy to rank for, you have your distribution channel and your idea in one place.

4. How do you know when it’s worth it to pivot?

If you're a solopreneur, you should be constantly experimenting. Constantly trying new things is a part of every successful startup.

In terms of pivoting your entire business, though, if it’s been three to six months with no results and you’re burnt out, or can’t afford it anymore, or you have a much better idea, then it’s probably time to think about shutting it down and doing something else. 

5. How can founders incorporate community into their products?

I think people have slightly different definitions of community, but for me, it's a group of people with a common objective who are brought together to help each other towards that objective.  And so I think that it lends itself better to some things than others. Like if you're selling washing detergent, do you really need a community? Probably not, right?

Likewise, I think there are some online businesses and SaaS’s in which their customers don't really want to know each other. Sometimes they are even all competitors, so they hate each other. So you really need to be quite context dependent. 

If a community does make sense for you, I think it’s good to start small. For example, you can try a simple group chat for your power users. Or a Discord or Telegram channel where people can give you feedback and get to know eachother better.

If this is something you’re really interested in, the book The Business of Belonging is a must-read. 

6. What do successful founders have in common?

They are very determined, they don’t give up easily, they’re quite realistic and honest with themselves about what is and isn’t working, and they tend to pay very close attention to what other successful founders have done. 

I’ve also noticed that they are very good at delegating. They'll figure out ways to leverage themselves and do more at scale. So that can come from using AI, using bots, and outsourcing as much as possible.

Finally, I’ve found that a lot of them are very focused on just one thing. Everyone knows the two or three founders who are successful with multiple simultaneous products, but I can name 20x that number who are focused on just one thing. There’s a lot of power in zooming in and niching down. The upside can be that it spreads out your bets, and can be fun and add variety. But realistically, it’s harder to execute three things well than just one.

7. Should everyone learn how to code?

I think everyone should learn at least some of the basics you know, like how to use an IDE and ship updates via GitHub, even at a basic level. But I don't think everyone needs to become a professional software developer to build a good tech business. There's still a lot of value in being a good designer or a good marketer, and you can always work with someone to handle the bulk of the coding.

8. Should everyone be building in public?

I think these days you need to be careful with what exactly you share. There's definitely still value in the process of sharing your work, because you'll get tons of feedback. 

But if you’re sharing stuff on Twitter, you need to be careful about sharing too much because there’s a lot of copycats out there. If you find a really great idea that has traction and post it to Twitter, I guarantee you’ll have three copycats before you can even blink.

So I think if you're going to be sharing lots of details about your product, you need to wait until you can defend it a bit better. It can be safer to build inside private communities (e.g. a Slack or Discord) where there’s more of a code of conduct – it’s a lot less likely someone will copy you.

9. How do you think indie hacking will be different in five years?

I think the barriers to entry are getting lower, which is a good thing. It’s good especially for the customers because there’s going to be more competition, which means the standards are going to go up and the costs are going to go down. The result should be an economy that grows for everyone.

On the flip side, I think it’s going to get more competitive for indie hackers. The bar is going to go up. You won’t be able to sell the same stuff at $20/mo as you do now. People are going to expect more.

I think that makes for a very exciting time to be making stuff, because as stuff gets cheaper and quicker, the kind of ideas that are viable also changes. There’s about to be an explosion of interesting ideas. 

I truly believe that this is the era that will bring about the first billionaire solopreneur. 

10. Final piece of advice?

Read as much as you can. Listen to podcasts. Observe others. Keep your ears to the ground so that you can adapt quickly. Turn yourself into a learning machine, and you’ll be unstoppable.