What's New: 6 steps to product-market fit

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Product-market fit is a spectrum:

• To start seeing product-market fit, ship fast, prioritize ruthlessly, talk to users every day, and write and release a changelog every week.
• Here’s the issue with the human brain: Our memory sucks. Use artificial working memory to make better decisions.
• When he let his project sit idle for eight months, Michael Patrick stumbled across a competitor. This reignited his fire, and he's now at $400 MRR.

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Product-Market Fit Frameworks 🧩

by Shounak

Product-market fit (PMF) is a spectrum. On one end is zero, and on the other is the perfect fit. In pre-PMF, you’re at the very beginning of the spectrum.

Pre-PMF characteristics

1. People give you money for your product.
2. Users tell you what it would take to adopt your solution.
3. Users react sensitively if there’s sudden downtime.
4. Your website conversion rate is >2% .
5. Your active users are growing 3% week-over-week.
6. Your user retention stays at 20%-40% over a six month period.

Going from zero to the first step

This pre-PMF phase is where you see the first signs of PMF. To get to this stage:

1. Ship fast: It’s no use building a roadmap at this stage. Ship fast to get your MVP out there on the market. Do one week sprints instead of two. Set six week goals instead of quarterly goals. Do everything faster and scope accordingly. Take big bets, don’t start with low-hanging fruits.

2. Prioritize ruthlessly: Don’t spend too much time writing user stories and workflows. Instead, prioritize your most important action items for the week. Use the 80-20 principle to identify high-leverage activities that move the needle. Set one goal, then align your incentives.

3. Get feedback fast: Your market and customers will show you what you need to build. Don’t spend time doing user research. It's fine at the very beginning, but once your product is out there, actual feedback from users is key. Think big, scope small.

4. Start a community: Build a community from day one. It’s your moat, and gives you a chance to listen to your users and understand their problems.

5. Talk to users every day: This includes both existing and prospective users. They should help shape your product direction.

6. Regularly write about new product releases: Publishing a changelog at regular intervals forces you to ship fast. A weekly changelog is like a superpower.

Check out my newsletter, where I write about SaaS growth every day!

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In the News 📰

from the Growth Trends newsletter

🤖 Meta previews more generative AI tools.

💲 Get $100 off an In the News section ad with code MINUS100.

🎁 New ways to reach last minute shoppers.

👀 Major advertisers pull out of X.

🧵 Using Threads for customer service.

🕚 A timeline of Sam Altman's firing.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

Make Better Decisions With Artificial Working Memory 🧠

by JYK

Our memory sucks, in both the short-term and the long-term. Short-term memory in particular, specifically working memory, is abysmally small. But everything changes with a simple sheet of paper.

Artificial working memory and decision-making

Paper is a tool that expands your practical working memory. I call this artificial working memory. No, it has nothing to do with AI or machine learning. It is simply any tool that expands your practical working memory, allowing you to solve more complex problems.

Overriding the limit of our biological working memory with artificial working memory is a key to making better decisions.

Decision-making is a hard, complex endeavor. To make better decisions, in simple terms, write things down. Treat decision-making like it is a math problem.

Leveraging artificial working memory for decision-making

There are three simple steps:

1. Write down the problem and everything that relates to it.

2. Break the problem down into manageable sub-problems, and solve those problems.

3. Use the answers to the sub-problems to then solve the main problem.

A real world example

Let’s say you’ve decided to buy a house. You have hundreds of pieces of information. Write down what your choices are, what your priorities are, and what is non-negotiable. Size requirement? Write that down. Budget? Write that down.

When your choices are narrowed down to just a few houses that match all of your most important criteria, start looking at details. Write down what you really like and really hate about each house.

Finally, after you have all this information written down for the houses you think are the best candidates, start comparing them to make a final choice.

Ten years later, when you feel the need to move again, you can look back on what you prioritized and what you didn’t in your house buying experience, and reflect on the mistakes you made during the process.

You can apply this same process to a business decision, engineering decision, or relationship problem.

My knowledge management web app, Aster, can help you streamline this process!

Discuss this story.

Landing Page Hot Tips 🔥

from the One Page Love newsletter

Strengthen your landing page with these design, development, and conversion tips:

Wrap your screenshots in a device.

A device mockup, with a subtle drop shadow, can really bring your digital product to life:

Subscribe to Rob Hope's One Page Love newsletter for his favorite UI, design, and development finds.

IndexGuru is Revived From the Dead 💀

by Michael Patrick

My product, IndexGuru, is a very simple, "set and forget" SEO companion that ensures your content automatically gets indexed by search engines really fast.

The background

I've built a lot of sites over the years, and SEO was always my primary traffic engine. I would build a site, write a lot of posts, then wait.

It was just annoying because it would take so long for Google to even acknowledge that those new pages existed, since I had no search authority.

So, I started researching options. I didn't find any that worked for me, thus IndexGuru was born.

The failed launch

We launched on Hacker News in January. There were a few signups initially, but after a few weeks, MRR dropped to nil, as did traffic.

I essentially gave up on the product, letting it sit idle for eight months.

The spark

In August, I came across a thread on X, talking about a product that was strangely similar to mine. Similar theme, marketing, UI, functionality, everything!

They were openly posting their MRR and other figures. I came to learn that this product launched a month after mine, and that it was generating several thousand dollars in MRR.

We all deal with this; in business, copying is just a thing. However, this lit a fire in me. I realized that my product that was built, ready, and idle, and was actually solving a problem that a lot of people have, and are willing to pay for.

The marketing blitz

Since somebody was making money doing the same thing I was, it was clearly just an issue of marketing. So, I came up with a plan:

1. I launched on Product Hunt.

2. I commented on Reddit posts, in a way that isn't spammy.

3. I started trying harder on X. I got verified, and followed everybody in my niche. I responded to stuff, making myself known and useful.

4. I leveraged existing project traffic to help convert. I run another site, crfyi, a free tool for consultants and freelancers. On every single page, I have a small native ad for IndexGuru.

In one month, all of this resulted in 32 paid users and $400 MRR!

Advice for indie hackers

• Products that are basically simple API wrappers can succeed.
• Copycats are validation.
• Marketing doesn't need to be expensive.
• Put your project in your X profile, and respond to relevant posts.
• If you have any existing platform at all, use it.

Discuss this story.

The Tweetmaster's Pick 🐦

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Shounak, Darko, JYK, Rob Hope, and Michael Patrick for contributing posts. —Channing