Why you shouldn’t build a wheel

The wheel as we know it was invented 5,500 years ago. Has it changed all that much since then? Not really, and why would it? The wheel is the perfect tool for the job. So why all this talk about wheels? When it comes to thinking of a business idea, why reinvent the wheel? Just make the wheel better.

Reasoning

Coming up with a brand new way of doing something may sound exciting, but often it is done with needless and inefficient effort. If you are a seed-funded company, maybe reinventing the wheel makes sense; throw a bunch of money at development and make something from scratch. But, in the case of many of us bootstrappers building stuff during off-work hours, the time and effort exerted reinventing the wheel for a side hustle sounds like a big waste.

Here are some of our reasons for not reinventing the wheel:

1. As nine-to-fivers, we did not want to be inverters; we wanted to build passive income.
2. We wanted validation before starting, and researching the competition revealed that the concept was useful and utilized in our target industry.
3. Rather than inventing features, we could choose the most important ones from the competition.
4. Having 10+ direct competitors at three different pricing levels helped us hit the sweet spot of pricing, features, and compatibility.

So, the moral of the story is don't exert unnecessary effort into a project when the framework has already been perfectly laid out for you. If you take this advice, you can expect a quicker time-to-market, have pre-launch proof of concept and have fewer headaches. So what are you waiting for? Do your research and start building!

How’s it Going?

Well, we have yet to land our first paying customer, but we are not giving up. The general feedback from the Indie Hacker community is that we have a great concept. The nice thing about piggybacking off of the competition is that if we were ignorant and just started building without doing our research and had no sales to show for six months after launch, our confidence at this point would be much lower. So, we just need to keep firing out marketing emails and figure out the ideal buyer persona.

Our Story

About a year ago, during the COVID lockdown in Canada, three friends decided to build a SaaS product. While thinking about what to build, we referenced online resources, newsletters, and YouTube videos. The quickest way for us to get a product up and running was to take an idea that has already been perfected and spin-off it. Our reasoning was, why reinvent the wheel when it has already been invented for you?

We’re a team of 3 Canadians building and selling a product walkthrough tool. SimpleTour is ideal for web platforms/dashboards. As your product scales, the onboarding support increases and if users are confused with how to use your platform, they are 95% more likely to churn within 90 days, which is what we are trying to solve at SimpleTour.

Off-load some of that onboarding work to SimpleTour. Download our plugin and build your first tour right on top of your website. Show your users how to use your product to the best of its ability. In no time, your users will turn into experts and the amount of time you spend on support and onboarding will fade.

How Can You Help?

We need users to sign up for our free trial and give us some feedback on what we built. You can get started for free with SimpleTour here.