To all the Indie hackers who have not been able to generate any revenue as of yet what is your biggest hurdle?
Mine is that i have not cracked marketing yet and its what i am trying to improve.
Mine is that i have not cracked marketing yet and its what i am trying to improve.
I’m terrible at finishing -> launching which is step 1. But beyond that I have very little skills in building an audience, distribution, or marketing. And tbh, not much interest in those areas, which makes learning and applying tough.
Same here. Its a good idea to get comfortable with finishing small tasks like publishing a blog post,tweet etc.
Same here 100%. I have a background in hackathons so the entire side of getting my product in front of actual customer's faces, hearing their feedback, and validating/pivoting is still very hard for me.
I think the biggest hesitation I have is about spending money on ads. Each time I pull out my credit card to actually start an ad campaign, I think about all the things I could improve before spending money on launching. Obviously there's organic growth but I don't have any skills in that and frankly also can't put up with cold emailing thousands of people.
Everything takes longer than expected. At first we thought you can launch a so called "MVP" but turns out people want their project management / communication tools to be completely finished first. I went back and looked at the launches of Slack, Trello etc. and they were all in almost completely final form (minus integrations).
Then as you say there is the marketing. We only learned recently how to emphasize our USP and even now the website below the fold and walk through video are not complete.
Yes inexperience no doubt slowed us down but overall these are very hard problems.
Yes, Most good product launches after 2010's are well developed apps.
I waited too long to start charging because I was afraid users would get mad.
I would say my biggest hurdle is gaining exposure to my website. I decided to invest in online personalization since that it the best way to get people to come back to the site. I personally use the website twik for all things personalization.
In my case, it's having trouble deciding, when the project is developed enough already to start doing some marketing. I keep telling myself that I'm gonna add just one more feature and then I'm gonna start marketing, but I always find another feature that I wanna add. Also, I haven't decided on a monetization model yet - that's another thing I keep postponing.
Marketing and personalization is the way to gain attention and success for your online presence. It is worth investing both time and money into these areas. I suggest using the site twik for all things personalization.
I've built my MVP, everything's looking good. Now i'm looking for beta testers and pushing out the MVP to as many people as I can.
However, it's not as easy as I thought.