PuppetVendors

Just want to share a few things I picked up along the way getting to $1000 MRR in 5 months in the hopes that this will help you, fellow IndieHackers adapt to your way of working or your business. I am sure a lot of you will be able to relate to some or all of the points but we all have our break-throughs at our own time.

Here's to getting to the next milestone of $5000 MRR.

1. The Key is to launch something niche but good - We all get into this endless loop of having to build that one more feature before being able to launch. Make sure you have that ultimatum feature where no matter what, you will launch. We are all shit scared of failure but knowing that you have tried is much more important than not knowing how it would have worked out if you didn't at all.

2. Listen to your customers - Assume less and listen more. Make sure you listen well but also make your own judgment as to whether the request they are asking for applies to more than just a few of your customers. Take time to decide and don't rush.

True Story: During the 2nd week of launch, I got one big customer whom I thought would be the customer that will stay on forever. I listened, added new features that made sense at the time, got very anxious when the customer was unhappy as I didn't want them to churn, and tried my best to do whatever necessary to keep them. After having added a number of features consistently for the customer. They ended up churning anyways. Hard lesson learned but glad it was early on. Now I take my own sweet time to decide whether it should go into the roadmap or not. Been using the RICE framework (Intercom's product framework) to help with this. I follow it loosely but have been of tremendous help.

3. Build your business as a side project (might not work for everyone) - We hear from the startup world all the time to take risks, quit your job and go full into your startup, raise capital from VCs yada-yada-yada... but we are all on Indiehackers because we feel otherwise.

Working on PuppetVendors as a side-project and not have my back against the wall has allowed me to make much better business decisions (that's what I believe). I feel blessed to have a full-time job that covers my basic needs which also allows me to work on my side-project without the financial stress one would have if they were completely dependant on one's new startup. I am truly grateful for the position I am in, so if you can, stick it out until you reach a point where you have significantly lowered that risk for yourself before making the leap. I don't know when I might take the plunge to go full-time on it but not for the foreseeable future.

4. Saying No - An extremely difficult thing to do but very important. A customer asked for a custom feature ($4000 SGD) that would require me to add custom functionality to the app which didn't align with where I wanted the app to go. So I simply and respectfully said NO but kept the doors open. I still get feedback from the same customer almost daily. #3 helps as well when you are not under financial stress.

5. Tech. Stacks - For the nerds - I am one of you! - Use what you are most familiar with and don't go into this endless loop of learning new technology to build that next product. Ask yourself if upgrading to that tech. adds any value for your customers? If so, is it worth the switching cost? If not then just stick to what you are best at. Improvements and upgrading the stack can always follow as you have traction.

PuppetVendors works on simple NodeJs, MongoDB, Redis + basic HTML, CSS, and javascript hosted on a VPS. Nothing fancy but it works.

I hope you found the above useful. Always happy to chat with like-minded founders.

This took a while but it's finally here. The first two paying customers. A total of $44 MRR. It's just a start and I am hoping things will take off as I tweak the app listing, observe and talk to more customers.

My goal is to get to $1,000 MRR by the end of the year. Too conservative? Maybe but it will be awesome to get there as a start. I am currently focussed on completing a couple more features and will make changes to the app listing on the Shopify app store as they go live.

It took a while, I don't necessarily remember as I have been working on this on and off but definitely took a couple of months, but I'm finally done building the minimum viable product for PuppetVendors.

I worked mostly after work wherever I could fit in time and weekends, and I coded the whole thing in NodeJs and MongoDB since that's what I am most comfortable with. This can definitely be improved and I would like to make the tool much more interactive but I am quite happy with what I have for now. Also, I could have definitely done better with the testing process as that took some time.

In hindsight, there were a few features I built that probably could've waited until later. But I'm excited to start talking to customers and see what they think about the product so far!

I've read so many times that you should solve your own problem, and so last week I sat down to think about all the problems in my life.

It turned out that I had quite a few problems worth solving, and the most interesting one led me to the idea for PuppetVendors! It's a Shopify app that helps drop-shippers and marketplace businesses better manage their sales, commissions, and payouts reporting with 3rd party vendors.