What project should I focus on?
Hi Indiehackers,
I don’t know what project to focus on. I work on these projects myself, without sharing too publicly, so I’m looking for some feedback.
These projects have non-recurring paying customers, and they’ll require continued effort to keep alive.
What project sounds the most “exciting” to you? Define “exciting” as you please.
The projects
Speak Zhong Wen
A daily Chinese-language bootcamp. Students record videos of themselves telling a 1-minute story in Chinese every day. The videos are shared in a group chat with the instructor and other students. The instructor gives feedback for each story - pronunciation, better ways of expressing your point, etc.
We don’t provide lessons on “grammar structures” or “new vocabulary.” Rather, we attempt to express ourselves, and get feedback. Daily.
ExcelParser.com
A drag-and-drop Excel Macro editor. You can create macros that edit and clean Excel files using a drag-and-drop interface, rather than learning VBA.
One example use case: I always need to edit the CSV downloads from my Chinese banks the same way before I can use them (delete first x rows, swap columns C and G, etc.). This ExcelParser tool will allow me to create steps to automatically clean and format future similar CSV downloads. Visit ExcelParser.com to see how it currently works.
I’m also looking for additional use cases for this tool. I’m not sure how others would use something like this.
Website audits
I conduct a UI/UX review of a website every day, and publish my findings on Twitter / newsletter / YouTube. Good for collating into a book in the future and for web development lead generation.
Do you think any of these projects have potential? Thank you in advance for your thoughts 😌
I made the mistake to work for 3 years on an app that I disliked—because it made good money ($6000 MRR)
I was so frustrated that it took a year to come back to entrepreneurship.
My advice: Follow your heart. Product-Founder fit is the foundation for a long-term business
Also curious, what was the app, and why’d you dislike it?
https://www.indiehackers.com/product/virallybot
I don't feel close to escape rooms business owners. I would never use the app for myself.
Excellent advice backed by experience. I’ll take this to heart.
I'll bite, since nobody else is.
I think the UX audit site is the most "exciting". You get to improve and hone multiple skills on a daily basis (design and marketing), as well as build an audience in the process. I think it has a ton of potential if you approach it well and don't just phone it in.
Doing anything daily is a tremendously great engine for improvement. I see lots of people who say, "I'm going to do XYZ daily," then come up with an initial plan or format, but then never iterate on it at all. I think you want to be the opposite. Tweak and improve your approaches, experiment, and make sure you're dramatically more skilled at the end of this journey than you were at the beginning.
I really appreciate your comment on iterating on a habit. Tweaking, improving, trying out new formats…you’re definitely right, I think that is key!
As a Chinese I strongly agree with the "speak Chinese" part.
Agreed! It's one of the most spoken languages in the world (mostly because the most people in the world are Chinese like me!)
Good point.
I like excelparser . speak zhong wen is easily replicable by any chinese who is bilingual as it is completely done on wechat. UI/UX audit is already quite competitive so its success would depend more on marketing than on actual product.
I also find Excel Parser to be the most straightforward SaaS play. Though I’m struggling to find use cases.
Speak Zhong Wen was inspired by Ship 30 for 30, a writing cohort course. Their premise: get a community to commit together to practicing a habit (writing) for 30 days.
I found that community aspect to be very powerful. It really helped push me towards reaching the 30-day goal.
The idea for Speak Zhong Wen is to similarly build a community of Chinese learners who commit to telling a story in Chinese every day for 30 days.
Lucky for me, cohort-based courses aren’t yet popular in China, where I’m based. I’m hoping to get that first movers advantage there.
How did you come to know about this problem(excelparser.com)? and in what context? say you are a freelancer and got the idea while trying to reconcile your own accounts than target other freelancers.
For some reason i think that if you convert it into api and provide it to developers they might be interested in using it otherwise they would have to waste time in coding it however i don't know how to validate this for chinese market. For western market i will try to search this problem on stackoverflow and see if any developers are asking for it or i will search it on google and see if others are facing this problem and than try to contact them. Unfortunately i don't have any idea about chinese market so i don't know where chinese developers hang out and how to reach out to them to validate this hypothesis since google etc. are blocked in china.
Nice projects! Rather than saying what you should do, here are a few thoughts:
I've been doing this in monthly cohort batches, so each month requires prep. Engagement through the course naturally dies down, which gets discouraging.
But I'm always drawn to this project because I myself am always longing for a "better" way to continue practicing Chinese, and so I'm designing this program around how I'd like to learn.
Is it an effective way to practice a language? Hard to say, it's still early stages. But I certainly find it more fun, learning with others.
Most interested in? I'm equally stuck between all 3, honestly. I might have to focus on 1 per month.
Yes, ExcelParser would likely have the lowest operational costs, a proper SaaS business. Am thinking this would be a good enterprise software, so perhaps sales costs would be significant? But am getting ahead of myself :)
Though as I'm currently living in China, I've come to learn to not be scared of scaling manpower. As long as there's something powerful about your product (proper PMF), scaling teachers with students can done. The company would be a wonderful and powerful force for creating jobs, which is important to me.
This is a very difficult question to answer. If you are having problems focusing on one project, it may be better to do something that has lots of steps. For example, if you are trying to write an article for your school newspaper, start with a plan to write one paragraph. Then write another paragraph, and so on.
How would you rank them based on how enthusiastic you are about the product?
How would you rank them based on how potential+profitability?
then add the numbers together, pick the lowest sum. If tied, flip a coin. If you don't like the answer the coin gives you, then your heart is truly set on the other one.
Glad you're focusing though. Better to do one thing with your full heart than 3 things at 25% each.
I’m going to rework “potential” to “potential market size”
Ranking of potential market size (my guess)
Ranking of profitability
Today I tweeted about idea evaluation based on the Startup School lecture from today. https://twitter.com/octocode/status/1544368171511070723
You need to choose for yourself. My recommendation - choose this project which gives you more fun doing it.
I think Speak 中文 is a great idea, Chinese, English and Spanish are the three most spoken languages in the world
I would go with website audits. You'll have better luck in monetizing this in the future. Maybe have people pay for a UI/UX review?
Yes, that’s the idea. Pay for a review in the end, or get a free review if you sign up for follow-on web projects with me.
Go with whichever idea you're most likely to stay focused on. Good ideas are great, but ideas you actually want to follow through on are even better.
Excellent advice. I have a history of not staying focused 😝. I hope to build some more consistency and habits in whichever project I choose.
Of these three ideas, I think the first one is the best combination of sellable and direct/future income.
People who use excel often enough to have to deal with files like your bank CSVs will already use macros and will also already know how to just record a macro. Excel has made this super easy in the past few years, and you just need to do what you want the macro to do, no need for VBA anymore. So I don't see there being a huge market there. People who need this will use the solution they're already paying for.
The website audits could lead to business in UI/UX consulting, or in web design, and those jobs could be VERY lucrative, but it sounds a bit like you're still trying to get enough of a portfolio of case studies to prove that you're an expert.
Speak Zhongwen sounds like something that's already in use, and because of its use of groups, can be scaled organically. You do need to add more teachers when you get to a certain point, but that point is flexible. Maybe you have an ideal group size of ten, but a teacher could theoretically work with up to fifteen students. And maybe the students don't even have to see how many other people are in the group. So you could overexpand a little bit, give each teacher a few too many students just to make sure that when you hire an extra teacher, you can shift those extra students to the new teacher to immediately start them with a full group.
Re: Speak Zhong Wen, you hit the nail on the head. I find this (new?) paradigm of teacher/student interaction to be more scalable than existing scheduled 1-on-1 private tutoring. Essentially, teaching through group chats (WeChat in China).
An impossible question to answer for anybody except you.
It is your "duty":( and privilege :) as a creator to decide.
In a way, the theory is simple.
If it helps you (aka solves your problem, and you happily are using it in your life or work) and the problem is common and your solution is nonobvious and better, given that any person is not exceptional nor unique, what is good for you should be good for others. Another issue is would they pay for it, but it is secondary as there are many ways to monetize any service or product.
I like this frame of thinking too.
In terms of projects I use the most, it would be Speak Zhong Wen, given I live in China and need to constantly improve my Chinese, plus it’s a daily lesson plan.
For ExcelParser, I currently only use it like…once every 2 months. Every time I update my personal finances. Obviously that might make it a non-starter already.
But I know in my previous professional life, I’ve had too many colleagues who had trouble with basic Excel operations. In some instances, macros were the answer, but that was way beyond their skill level.
Excel macros are overdue for a paradigm update.
It looks to me, on the surface that the linguistic app is more of a startup project, that is you would need to scale up and compete with VC-backed startups, for which you would need to build a team and raise funds. In the case of the Excel tool, you have users, and it is a smaller project.
Yes, true.
ExcelParser has 1 user, me ;) But certainly is more maintainable with a 1-man team.
For SpeakZhongWen, I’ve hired Chinese contractors to help teach the courses. They weren’t profitable yet at the rates I was charging. But that was OK at the time - I just wanted to experiment, see if the students appreciated the new way of practicing Chinese. For some, it was OK, but they lost interest. Only 1 or 2 students really appreciated the program. So we have to go back to the drawing board.