What milestones should indie hackers be sharing?
What milestones would you love to be hearing from the indie hacker community?
Perhaps we can help inspire each other write more and better milestone posts.
What would be helpful to you?
What milestones would you love to be hearing from the indie hacker community?
Perhaps we can help inspire each other write more and better milestone posts.
What would be helpful to you?
Honestly, I'd rather not have to scroll past the chest-thumping "milestones" posts at all. I prefer questions and non-promotional discussion about ideas and 3rd-party links.
I understand @csallen is heavily incentivizing milestones and I very well may capitulate by making a product to exploit the channel, but as a reader I don't like them at all.
To offer a counter-point, my favorite feature of the site is milestones.
I like to see concrete examples and progress, first sub, revamp landing page, fiddle with pricing, mmr goals hit etc. These I can take examples out of and think about how they might apply to me and my use cases.
Although the discussions are invaluable, I find there's definitely an IH-hivemind going on where feedback is often repeated and a certain "consensus" is touted more often than concrete examples.
I totally understand what you mean by the "chest-thumping" but I'd much rather take some of that backed by real accomplishments rather than the somewhat clique-ey discussion topics I often see browsing the site.
I really think the hivemind thing is amplified by up/down votes. I've seen a couple of sites before that went from old school PHPBB-style forums to Reddit-knockoffs (and back again in one case!)
In every single one, the hivemind effect kicked in within a month or two of moving to a voting format. On the other hand, forum discussions are random and all over the place and comments just barely decent enough not to get deleted have the same prominence as the very best.
Yes, I've been asking myself what I'm supposed to be sharing as IH milestones recently...
Any guidance @rosiesherry @csallen?
Is it meant as a way to follow along on my 'founder journey' in real time?
Or more as a quick way to see important markers over a few years?
The general idea behind product pages/timelines is that they're a place to keep a log of your journey and accomplishments, both for yourself and for others. If you just want to remember what you've done, that's great. If you want to build in public and show others, that's great too. But either way, it's more for the important markers that you find meaningful than it is for, say, small daily tasks.
That's from the creator's POV. From the reader's POV, the product pages work in tandem with the product directory to allow them to research other indie hackers for practically any purpose: to find people to partner with, to see what kinds of businesses are working in the real world, to learn how things are done and how long they take, etc.
As for the milestones leaderboard, the general idea is that it's a way to actually get attention on the entries you post to your product page. Specifically, that attention should come in the form of people reading your milestones and giving you positive encouragement, feedback, and/or traffic to any links you post. Building something in isolation all alone sucks, and a big part of my goal with IH is to help change that.
From the reader's POV, the milestones leaderboard is a place to give back by supporting your fellow indie hackers, to get inspired by seeing what other people are accomplishing at practically every level, and to learn from those who are willing to show the "how" behind the "what."
Both of these features are works in progress. I didn't envision they would turn out the way they have from the get-go. Rather, I've been watching how people use the features, and surveying IHers on their problems and desires, and making iterative changes in response. There's still a lot of work to go, obviously. Things like…
Etc.
I also second this question - especially as someone in the very early stages of the journey, while I might want to include "Started a Meetup Group" (but do not have any idea what actual idea/project I'm pursuing, yet) as a milestone for myself, I'm not sure it is something others are going to find valuable or noteworthy.
Same. I've also been confused about the purpose.
I started using it as a blogging platform for my "journey". Started to see the value of "building in public" and considered setting up my own blog but then thought "there are so many established content platforms I could use instead". Indie hackers seemed the most relevant for what I wanted to talk about.
I'm sure Courtland will jump in at some point. I raised the question as I'd love to see better milestones being posted and perhaps there is some way we can achieve that together.
From my perspective I see milestones as most useful for logging your indie hacking journey and as a way of helping other indie hackers by showing what is really working or failing.
I put the question to Twitter too, there's some interesting responses there.
Part of improving it is in the writing skills, another part is on choosing interesting things to write about.
Great questions, @rosiesherry.
I've only been a user of IH for a week so put my response into that perspective. I'm in the early stages of my project. Before joining IH, I spent about 2 hours a week on it. Now I aim for at least 1 hour a day. The increase investment is not a result of joining IH, but an internal goal that happen to be at the same time as joining IH.
Not one milestone has blown my mind, but most have been encouraging. It's exciting to see others post their progress and define it however it works for their ventures.
Overall, I would love to read milestones that solved my biggest current need which I think would be different for most users. As a marketplace my biggest current problem is liquidity. That's content that doesn't exist on IH and more likely will be in blog posts.
So until their is a feature that categorizes my biggest pain then sources milestones related to that pain milestones will remain a place I look for encouragement.
I really like the idea that, whenever you're undergoing a particular challenge, you could easily find a bunch of milestones people have posted in the past about how they overcome that. Of course, first I'd have to find a way to prompt people to share milestones about these types of challenges…
Great question @rosiesherry - I am also confused regarding milestones vs. posts. I’ve only been sharing anything noteworthy to the community.
I wish there is a safer place to share quick progress, daily updates that are smaller in size and won’t spam everyone.
Interesting. What do you define as spamming everyone? Is it that you want to make posts that don't appear in the "newest" feed, or that you want to make posts that don't get added to the milestones leaderboard, or something else?
Also, what's your goal with sharing quick progress and daily updates?
I keep small day to day updates (eg. feature shipped, todo list item done) in a notes app, and let it build up to something meaningful before sharing on Indie Hackers.
In WIP.chat - they have a stream of people completing small todos etc.
That said, I'm very early stage so might not have meaningful milestones compared to those that are further along.
My goal with sharing quick progress and daily updates is public accountability. I tend to shift from idea to idea, and a getting into a good cadence of reflecting and sharing what happens week after week keeps me attached to the same project.
I'm not sure if "milestone" is the right term for this, but... difficult or key decisions that IndieHackers faced, and how they determined which course of action they'd pursue.
I'm pretty open minded about the type of milestone people share. However, I prefer when they go into a bit more detail on the challenges they faced and possibly overcame.
Today I was guilty of not going into the full detail about a milestone, however I do intend to follow up on it when I have more time!
I really like milestones, but I think there should be a way to quantify them. These are the types of milestones I really like to see:
The reason I would like to see it quantified is that I see a lot of "milestones" which are really just someone saying "tried Facebook ads and they failed" or something like that. Maybe I'm guilty of that as well, but some guidelines or quantification would help!
This comment was deleted 3 years ago