Technical guy looking for a KISS project
Hello folks,
My name is Baptiste, a 32yo French living in Paris.
For the past 7 years I’ve always managed to live from my ventures, whether from a failed startup (lasted 2 years) or from technical contracting.
As a contractor I love my job. My clients seem to be pretty happy and I make a confortable living developing systems mostly in Clojure, javascript and unfortunately sometimes in PHP ;-).
I’ve done some open-source work in Clojure, see aws-clj :-).
I am a geek.
I feel I will be happier having all technical control on MY product !
I like solving problem, complex and simple ones.
So why sharing my boring life on indie hackers ?
I’d love to go back to product development but I feel I am really far from finding a good simple project where :
- MVP is not a 2 years development process (I am done with working nights & week-ends)
- target market is not the entire world
- a product that does not change the world but makes someone's life a tiny bit simpler
- you don’t need to raise 2M
- is not a fucking stupid SAAS (I love the "pay once enjoy for life" stuff)
I simply don’t have ideas, at least simple ones.
I feel that I don't belong to any online community (outside of clojure).
I try to look at the wordpress & WooCommerce plugin community where small projects seems to find some traction but I stop using wordpress more than 10 years ago…
I have two simple questions :
- am I the only one with this problem ?
- The 1M$ question : How to find some tiny niche/market when you are outside a market/community ?
Thanks a lot,
Baptiste
Hi Baptiste,
Happy to discuss Wing with you. We're lacking on the technical side (I'm technical, the rest of the team is not) so we've used Airtable, Typeform (now using Paperform), and Zapier to make a lot of the magic happen. We'd be looking for a single-page app/React app to house a customer dashboard (date night itineraries, preferences quiz) and ideally an admin dashboard as well.
We're a spontaneous date night service for couples. Check it out and let me know matt@datewithwing.com
http://datewithwing.com
funny, match.com (europe) was a client of mine, I'll write an email !
Looking out for it!
Nope, same problem here, with a twist: I'm building prototypes for one week, one month and then lost motivation and abandon things.
I have a huge google docs/keep where I collect all ideas, from bad to good, then dedicate one hour at week, every monday to examine ideas, trash them and clean up all the mess.
After 2 years of this, I've build one working prototype ( http://opensourceanalyzer.herokuapp.com ) but I lost motivation after a bit.. and countless prototypes.
Best advice? Talk to people.
My best advice? I don't know. Really. My path is to find someone in that market, validate your idea in person, with eye-to-eye talk, build a mockup, do it again and after a bit build a core knowledge about problems and pains.
Good luck!
to build ideas: keep a log. For every little problem you/friend/you see online. Write it down.
One example? You said :
Go and do it. Create a simple web page. Collect all small problem if addressed can simplify people's life. Not for the world. In your city/region.
It's an excel, right? And people love to complain, so..
the last 10% of any project is always hard :(.
Thank's a lot! Finishing a project is hard...
Most of the time you are alone and you don't have clients during development to validate your product..
Landing page without a product is a good idea, but how to attract people though ? Paid SEO ?
I'm a developer so it's natural for me open my IDE and build things. But what I've learned:
Talk to people, only, person.
Listen and listen well. record everithing. Understand what others says is really hard.
Work on how you choose to define problem and your solution. Focus on words, meaning.
Then build a landing page, with your message.
Share to that people, friends, online communities. Just do it.
Collect people interested. Even one is enough for me.
Collect email a contact. Schedul a talk (again!)
Illustrate problem you found and your unique solution.
Listen again and well (very well!), record is a plus
Then ask "would you like to pay for my solution if fit your needs?"
If you can find one person (maybe five, it depends), you can start to build mvp.
Crappy mvp that barely stands together.
Share your mvp with people interested in it, for free, for a limited period of time.
Prove yourself and to them your solution is right for theirs problems.
Understand how they use your mvp, wher you can improve, write it down. Don't change anything. First listen, record, again.
Meantime put a subscription in front of your landing page.
Work on craft better your message, your solution, your presentation, your marketing.
Find people interested in pay for your solution, with a real money.
Exit from beta phase, move to actual product.
This is my plan :D
note: SEO is important, but not crucial in this phase
Thanks a lot !
That's a great one !
Finding pre-buyer before developing it is aweseome.
If any-one has some feedbacks on this one I would be happy to read them
Thanks, me too.
What I find hard right now is understand people pain points and discern pain points could be solved, can be solved and which one people will pay for it
You might find this inspiring or perhaps useless... but my ideas come from experiencing new things, and wondering why they are so different form the things I usually encounter. For instance, my current website drytabs.com came about as a result of using hl2b.com. Hl2b (How Long to Beat) is a website that gives you user's average completion time for different video games. What I noticed about this site though was that it was so bloody fast. Typing things in the search bar made the results magically appear, and I was able to get all the information I needed straight away without click throughs. Then I compared this to the biggest guitar tablature website, ultimate-guitar.com. On this site, you type in the song title, click search, wait for a page load, scroll through to see if it exists, then when you find what you are looking for and click on it you will come up against a click through advert that makes you wait 5 seconds, and then when you are looking at the tablature and trying to concentrate, there are moving adverts in the banners. Gross! But - I never knew it could be any other way.
Another example is that I started catching the bus recently, and saw that there were lots of improvements that could be made to the public transport app. This isn't something I'm going to pursue, but it does show that there are opportunities for innovation all around, perhaps even in the areas you are already intimately familiar with - you just need that shower thought moment when your brain is linking these experiences together.
Thank's a lot for you response. I find it interesting to derived ideas from day to day pain. But most of the time people are not willing to pay for "really small" problems or the cost of acquisition is so high that it does not worth it.
Maybe I just try not enough ^^
This comment was deleted 7 years ago