Ahoy 👋
I've been looking back at my 2020, which includes about 6 weeks as an indie hacker.
I've always worked for larger companies (smallest was ~200 people, largest was x0,000), so the first thing I did was reach out to people in my network who worked for small companies to chat with them. First, I figured that their problems would soon be my problems. Second, I was curious whether I could notice consistent problems in their responses.
I had an inkling of a problem that I wanted to solve when I left my last job. I've noticed that businesses, large and small, often take provably bad strategies. I've seen this in a variety of contexts, from seeing large companies launch products that have fallen flat, to smaller companies that, if you graphed out their strategy to them, they'd say "wow, we should stop doing that right now!" I imagined there were lots of ways to show this: forecasting, graphing, tooling that analyzed analytics and payments data, etc. I just needed the customer conversations to show me the way.
And when I had the conversations, I learned that yes, this is a "problem" in the sense that literally nothing is optimal. I chatted with people who under-focused on marketing, who built a bunch of stuff without knowing who their customers would be, who rode a growth channel to a plateau and decline without trying to put the business on firmer footing. But I also learned something else, which is that describing the problem to people in the abstract didn't get them any closer to a solution, and each specific challenge would likely have an entire product dedicated to it, if you could formalize the space enough to begin with. There was no obvious way to unify everything.
That briefly pushed me down a related path, which was writing a newsletter with interactive tools about demonstrating business advice. I don't think the format was right, though - newsletters want to be static, and the ultimate version of my format would have interactive tools built into the page. Writing them was a lot of work and I didn't enjoy it. I think there are positives from this: namely, I learned quickly.
So now, I'm entering 2021 focusing on something whose problem space I understand very clearly: GraphQL. I worked on this for multiple years before I left my last job, I've been to conferences, I have a sense of who the players are and what the gaps are in their platforms. I know where the communities hang out, and I know where they go to complain, "I wish X did Y." Each of these is a potential foothold into a problem, and each of these is a potential person to interview. I don't know if entering this space is a good idea, but if you're ever worried about being bad at brainstorming, just think "I'm doing better than the guy who took 6 weeks to even consider that he should keep doing the thing he did professionally"
Happy 2021 everyone, and remember that identifying real and concrete problems gets you closer to success than noticing abstract patterns.
w00t! Sounds like you have founder fit with this GraphQL direction. Best of luck! I look forward to hearing how things progress :-)
Thanks! I'll be sure to post updates 🙂
Great lessons to learn :) Congrats Jacob!
Thank you!
This comment was deleted a year ago.
Thanks for the correction! Edited