Why devs should consider building to sell, and how to make a full-time occupation out of it
Today I spent most of my day scraping IndieHackers, trying to find developers that fit the description for a new project of mine, tinyacademy.io .
I noticed 2 things...
- Almost all of people's projects are making under $100 a month, but most of the time 0 MRR.
- Many IndieHackers aren't equipped with good enough marketing skills to grow their app idea.
Now, please don't take this the wrong way, I'm not throwing shade at everyone trying to create something significant. In fact most of the projects I viewed today were really awesome ideas: An app that turns google docs into blog posts in seconds, A science-based study timer that makes work/studying more efficient, etc.
The opportunity I see is for more developers to focus on building out great app ideas, selling them instead of dealing with the struggle of growth, rinse and repeat. Leave growth up to the buyer of the app and get back to doing what you love which is building.
I could see a future where many developers make full-time jobs out of building micro-saas apps, selling them, and repeating.
What do you think?
P.S. If you truly believe in something you are building, by all means GO ALL IN. Don't let go of it just cause you read a post that told you to sell it :)
What then would you suggest indie developers do to get good at marketing?
I don't see any ideas presented in your post.
Im actually suggesting that you don't and instead make a profitable process out of building, selling, and repeating... Not having to worry about the struggles of marketing and growth
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I guess you're talking about exiting if possible instead of running it as a lifestyle business? If so then I can see various reasons why that's NOT happening:
It's difficult to say whether going for an exit is always a good idea.
Let's assume an ideal situation (which is frequent indeed) where the software is good and provides a useful service.
Your idea is based on the notion that a software is a product. But it is a process.
In other words the buyer of the app would have to hire someone to fix bugs, add features, release, maintain the CI, answer support requests, tend to bug reports. Which is best done by the person who wrote the app in the first place. And you're back to square one.
Selling a failing project sounds like a good exit strategy, but I don't know about other scenarios where someone just builds to sell. If someone doesn't believe in an idea, why would they start building it? When should they stop building so that they can sell it? When an MVP is done, but before they've tried to market it?
Do you also have people pitching ideas to be purchased? i.e. "I would love product X. I will pay $10k for it to be built."