Where did you start?
Hello fellow hackers!
I am starting my journey to become an indie hacker and would love to hear where you started. I don’t have a clear idea of what I want to build or who to build for I just know that I have the desire create.
I’m hoping you can help me by commenting on …
Where did you start? Product, newsletter, something else?
What ideas inspired you enough to pursue them?
How did you find the people you want to help and create for?
Hey Travis 👋, in my case I built my product for myself, in a attempt to solve a daily problem I had (I think this is a "save" way to create a product, built something for yourself and then for other people) and then share it with friends a people who I thought had the same problem, after that is just gather some feedback and built around it
Thank you for sharing, @VictorGonz! What tools or resources did you use for your product example above? Appreciate the help!
Well, to give you a little more context... the product is a chrome extension for bookmark managing. To validated the idea with myself I created a notion page with collections (set of urls) and urls, once I saw I really need that tool I created the MVP.
I went for build the app from scratch on the MVP because I think there is not much no-code tools to build chrome extensions, so I used React. And then just iterating over the same code/product to add/fix/delete features
Hey! In my case I started a mini site as an outlet to teach small chunks of content over time. My morning routine consisted of making a post and video. I didn't see any traction for ~6-8 months until organic started to kick in. Now we have ~55K Uniques a month and at the beginning of the monetization journey.
Advice: Start extremely small. What is the smallest unit of work to achieve your goal? Avoid Zero Days [1].
Context: I run a data analysis learning site w/ 55+ tutorials and 5+ blog posts.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/1q96b5/i_just_dont_care_about_myself/cdah4af/
Thank you @gkamradt! Creating content is something that I'm interested in but I find it difficult to pick a topic to write about. Can you explain your process for selecting topics?
Also, congratulations on getting to the monetization phase! That is a huge step 🎉
First and foremost if you aren't interested in the topic, you won't have motivation to write, or put energy into it.
If you have a business goal (increased traffic, quality of traffic, build organic, etc.) then it's easier to pick your content angle-of-attack.
If you're in blue-sky mode (you could pick anything), I would make a short list of 3-4 topics you're excited about (Dogs, web3, programming, entrepreneurship, etc.) and then put them to the test.
The test could include:
For me - I knew I wanted to write about data analysis with the popular pandas library. My route was
Here is a view of the traffic - the majority is organic
[1] https://twitter.com/DataIndependent/status/1448749832844177409/photo/1
This is great, thank you for taking the time to break this down for me!
Hy Travis! I started as a freelancer a long time ago. Then transitioned to an SEO agency, which I've been running for about 15 years now. About 3 years ago I decided I wanted to get into SaaS, so I built 2, but failed. Now I'm on my 3rd, katlinks.io which is doing good 🔥
@RobertoDigital that is a great story thanks for sharing. If you don't mind me asking, why did your first two SaaS projects not work out? katlinks.io looks solid btw.
I didn't do proper validation. I thought I knew what users needed, but I was kinda wrong 😂
I lay it all out in this IH post: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/my-first-2-saas-failed-miserably-4570d47b8d