What I wish I knew before I quit my job to become a full-time indie hacker.

I quit my job to build Crewcharge.

It's going great now and I've finally gotten 80+ leads, 4 pre-sales (ready to pay).

Here's a simple story.

You lease an apartment 🏠

It looks great, you love living here but there are a few things that piss you off. It could be built better and sold for a higher rate.

You take an architecture class 👩‍💼

You love how beautiful buildings are constructed and you want to build your own someday.

You decide to build 🏗 a house for someone else? 🤔

Does this process look right to you? Probably not. Ask yourself why.

The apartment is an analogy for software you already use to solve the problem, the architecture class is you learning how to code, and the house is the product you're selling.

Just because you know how to build a house that people might love, no one's going to trust you to do it for them.

Have you built houses before? Have you built your own house?

Developers look at a product and look behind the curtains. While software runs on the technology you could build, it's not entirely solely sold because of its technology.

Put sales and value first.

Don't build a product, give free stuff away first. Get people hooked onto stuff you're giving away - stop - ask them to pay. This is great because it builds credibility, an audience that validates your stuff.

Sometimes this free stuff backfires because the audience you build might not be able to pay for the stuff you produce, YMMY. This is still great for analyzing the market and getting a plethora of testimonials.

We all love to think our product would be so good it'd sell itself but discoverability is a bigger problem than you'd expect, especially in a world where there are 144,000 domains registered per day.