Work on things that excite you and other key lessons from 2 years of building a business

Hey IH,

This is a bit of "lessons learned" post from a decade of hustling to build stuff and how I fell out of love with it, until recently.

I'm super excited to be contributing to this community after taking an accidental couple of years break from Indiehacking and being a reader/listener since the beginning.

FYI the links I'm posting in this are not intended to gain any promotional business from them - CheersNHS has successfully ceased trading (you'll see why in the post) as has Regular Pledge (officially stopped working on it, hence this post).

For well over 10 years I've created a ridiculous variety and number of side projects. Some for fun, some for profit, but all to learn something new (a new tech, framework, library, marketing method, etc.). The common thread is that I enjoyed the creation process, the hustle, iteration, the stress of being the sole developer/creator finding production issues, and so on.

My problem has always been shiny object syndrome - moving on from one shiny project to the next without baking in consistency and being persistent on any one thing.

I realised that if I wish to create something truly successful that I need to work with a co-founder to see products past that initial delightful moment of the first production deploy.

It's interesting that all of my prior indiehacking has essentially let me earn the experience of 2 careers simultaneously. I've always had a full-time job (initially marketing specialisms through to 7+ years as a Product Manager and now VP of Product) and in my spare time enjoyed the hustle and learnings from building things.

The act of building on the side lets you learn so much that you simply could never learn within your full-time career that you stand out when going for any role. When I interview anyone these days I put significantly more weight into any passion projects than educational achievements.

Anyway, at the start of Covid I addressed this "shiny object" problem by identifying a problem I wanted to solve and then building a team of volunteers to build it for me, leaving me to work on the bits that I'm good at as opposed to the development.

This worked great – my team and I built a product (cheersnhs.com - I've now closed the company) that allows everybody to say a tangible thank you to our amazing healthcare workers during the first Covid wave back in April 2020.

We did over £25k in revenue at an 8% margin, and all profits were donated or used to thank the team for building it. I incorporated the company officially as a non-profit such that nobody owned shares, including myself.

I have tonnes of lessons learned from building it. I managed to get all of our costs covered by some awesome partners, had corporate donations for around £17k, ended up being invited to meet the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to talk about my use of tech for good (https://twitter.com/JoeTannorella/status/1362159088361168900), and came ever so close to having some A-listers on board as influencers (I did end up working with some UK celebs, which was cool).

I spotted many problems in the charity sector in building CheersNHS, and I decided to embark on solving them with a much bigger and more ambitious product (for profit) called RegularPledge.com (no longer operational).

The problem I spottes was that most people care about causes and not specific charities, which leads them to never actually donate as they don't know who to donate to. My product solves that by acting as a robo-advisor that maximised charitable impact.

I took on an awesome technical co-founder to build the new product and I'd work on everything else because this partnership worked well for CheersNHS.

Our MVP was a LinkedIn post (this exact one https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/charity-broken-heres-how-we-can-fix-joe-tannorella/) and Typeform survey at the bottom.

The post articulated my vision and the Typeform ultimately netted around 15 customers and £150 in revenue (due to be recurring when the MVP is built).

From this success, we then built a simple MVP and set an artificial cap of 11 monthly recurring customers while we figured out the legal implications of innovating in the charity sector.

The problem I came across then was not the technology, product, or marketing, but in fact how to navigate innovation in this sector in a legal and compliant way. And therein lies the problem.

To create a product that takes people's charity donations for redistribution is a super complex problem legally, and there is no clear precedent for it. This was both a barrier to entry to others, but also to ourselves!

I spent around 1 year of my time and many thousands of pounds on legal/accounting fees only to be back where I started from a product point of view.

This was SO demoralising. I KNOW that there is demand for this product, and I know if I can navigate the compliance/legal barriers I can make a good go at creating a huge business out of it.

Spending many evenings (especially with my first newborn baby!) researching charity legal issues and the likes made me begin to resent side projects.

I was no longer doing things I excelled at or enjoyed, but spending my valuable time on things that I both did not enjoy and was not qualified to do. Unlike software development or design, you cannot "wing it" when it comes to legal issues, especially when your reputation is on the line as well as potential donor funds.

You cannot iterate on legal issues quickly. You cannot wing it when it comes to financial regulations.

I became so tunnel-visioned on solving the charity problem that I'd completely neglected myself and my intrinsic "why". I'm an indiehacker deep down, but I'd stopped being able to indiehack and had been blocked by everything else.

I recently made the difficult decision to cease trading for Regular Pledge, at least for the time being, and go back to my roots of starting fun stuff and most importantly being able to hustle.

I still have a few old side projects which I've kept on the side, like a little affiliate blog that brings in around £100/month, but importantly I'm now able to start new things and ENJOY doing so.

I've just started running some customer development interviews for a new product I'm building (built on top of Slack), again with a technical co-founder, and I couldn't be more excited about getting back into the indie hustle.

One day I hope to pick Regular Pledge back up and innovate in the charity sector, but I've decided to listen to my heart and actually act upon my key takeaways from the last 2 years of trying to build things which were too big and not indiehackable:

1. When you enjoy what you're doing, it doesn't feel like work. Work in a domain and on skills that you enjoy and you'll see more success more quickly, and be more likely to stay consistent on a single project.
2. Bring in the correct help at the correct time. In hindsight I should have brought on board a partner who knows the legal side of things and given them a vested interest in helping out. Legal fees add up quickly and ultimately lawyers who you pay hourly are not on your side commercially.
3. Momentum is SO important. We had 15 paying users within a month and then a year later still only had that many or less users. The initial momentum carried so much quality conversation, but then a year later conversations with those same people were much more difficult to justify lack of progress to.

It's interesting to reflect and get these thoughts into writing.

I'm now going to go back to my new product and finally get back to Indiehacking! :)

Over and out.