What do you do when you don't know what's next?

Short answer: pick one thing and go.

The cost of not making a decision is greater than making any decision at all.

I tend to assemble a short list of things that could make an impact on the product - deprocrastination.co - and then pick 1 and go.

If you don't know what to do next, make a list, think about it for 5-15 minutes, and if you still don't know, just pick 1 thing and go. It rarely matters in the end which of the steps you took first.

Something to watch out for is working on the thing you like working on the most, if it's not necessary, e.g. working on small product refinements, when where you are actually lacking is sales, or marketing.

I generally take 'sprints of focus' - I divide the business into 4 overall parts:

1. Product,
2. Sales,
3. Marketing,
4. Internals (tools for yourself, learning, etc.)

(There is also support, but that is more ad-hoc.)

Then I take a good hard look at the different parts, and see where I am lacking the most. I then work to improve that part for a week or two - I think of it as improving the bottle-neck - then I repeat the process. It works well, but the key is in defining what 'lacking' means, and often, 'lacking' should be considered in relation to an end goal, which is either making more money, or spending less time in the future.

Early on, the "just pick something and go" is OK. But that quickly starts generating diminishing returns as the product grows and can even have an inverse effect on growth if you bloat the product up with useless features.

IMO: Prioritizing is the most important thing you will do as an entrepreneur. You have to come up with a system for prioritizing or you will look back after months/years and realize you never moved the needle.

We took Baremetric's framework and tweaked it a bit for ourselves: https://baremetrics.com/blog/feature-framework

It forces you to plan, score, and prioritize. Give it a shot.

2nd piece of advice is: Prioritize efforts/projects that will grow the business before the product. Your business should fuel the product, not the other way around.

What works for me is dividing each too-large-to-focus-on task into smaller sub-tasks, then do one. Usually once I'm started I can't stop there and I go on with the rest of the list or take a tangent into a specific area

Make a list of all the tasks and priorities each one and then concentrate on the priority tasks.

Another option choose a small simple task and try get that done. Getting a couple of small wins teens to give you the motivation to then make a start on the more complex/time consuming tasks, at least it fits with me

Hi Connor,

I think the most important thing indiehackers and entrepreneurs alike should focus on is product market/fit - that is, understanding who your target market is, why they need your product and why the buy the product. The second most important thing is positioning.

I'd focus on initiatives that would help you get product market fit.