The indie hacker community builds worthless, visionless widgets and then fails to market them. Could you imagine Steve jobs talking about building 37 products in 5 years?
Instead, talk to a customer. Build something that solves just one person's problem really well. Grow from there.
> Virality is rare and nearly impossible to predict
People see viral products and early hackers who spent years building their reputation, and think that's not too hard, and maybe you need to try as many as possible... Nope, you need to build a business too! Low-hanging fruit saas can be built so fast nowadays that knowing how to build software is not a huge advantage. We know that building businesses takes time and a huge effort. Most businesses will not be Lovable like.
I worked for a company where I designed hardware products at that rate, although not for as long. Someone in management discovered that each time you release a new product you get a huge sales bump from distributors filling inventory. We already had a crowded and confusing product line, so the distributors eventually started sending the old unsold products back and asking for a refund, and that stopped that release cadence.
It did limit the complexity of products, which could be good or bad, but the products were pipelined, so having one employee designing them in ~300 man-hours per design, spread out over six months or so, was totally doable. This included the whole gambit, from conceiving the design to component selection, schematic, layout, design for manufacturing, test fixtures and procedures to documentation and ad copy.
I do feel like it's quicker with hardware than software, because hardware follows something like the theoretical "waterfall" method that software has never used, so everything is clearly documented. For example, I pulled up the cheapest transistor from a common supplier, and it has five pages of documentation plus an index: https://www.formosams.com/upload/product/Mosfets/FMSBSS138-Q...
Everything is always easy to look up, with consistent formatting from every supplier, and you're never dealing with APIs that don't do what you'd expect them to do. You also don't need to continuously fix older releases, because they worked when you shipped them. On top of that, if a component is commonly used, it'll stick around for a lifetime, even as newer products come out, so you don't need to update your product unless it's worth the cost savings.
>Did you find success by focusing on one project and giving it time, or by making lots of new bets?
Mostly focusing on one project at a time on most days, but running several projects in parallel, and cross-pollinating the knowledge I gain from one to the others.
>Has "slow growth" ever paid off for you?
My arguably most successful project (in terms of impact and popularity) went “almost nowhere” for the first 2-3 years. But I wasn’t really trying to make it go anywhere, it was just for the enjoyment of me and my friends.
>If you had to start over, would you pick patience or a high volume of launches?
Both. Be patient, let projects grow slowly, and grow multiple projects at a time while you wait.
Slow and consistent. I truly believe this is the key to growth. Unfortunately, I also suck at it. If I don't see interesting growth after a few weeks ,I'm inclined to give up too quickly.
What has helped me with this is committing to doing one small thing, a very small task, an outrageously small task per day. This might be one minute of meditation; one commit to my project, no matter how small; one pushup. I can then stop, or I can keep going, depending on how I feel. But there's basically no excuse for me not to do that one thing, which keeps me primed and there mentally.
The other thing that has helped me is changing how I talk about myself and my struggles. Diligently and attentively remove negative talk (e.g. "I suck at x") and replace it with positive talk (e.g. I'm learning to get better at x").
Let's call this shotgun capitalism. It's all the rage over at indie X.
It used to be that one had a unique interest, profession or capability. This uniqueness causes them to see a gap in the market that could be filled by a new business. They work on filling out that gap, going as far as the customers and their capabilities will take them.
But that's too limiting. Because their interests and their customers might not lead to infinite growth! So instead you need to burn your life looking for that ONE business that will take off.
So shoot at everything. Burn your business, burn your time, burn your customers (this I detest the most), burn your intellect. Maybe get a shot at joining some club that no one cares about, except the other shooters.
The correct path is neither a shotgun blast on all available ideas, or a march to the death on your pet idea. It's a coherent expansion of effort based on feedback, capabilities, risk and likely return. Otherwise known as being in business.
> Did you find success by focusing on one project and giving it time, or by making lots of new bets?
lots of new bets are technically impossible. unless you doing something super trivial, you will hit roadblocks that require effort and time (e.g. Apple App Store reviews are notoriously slow and can take a month for a single new app).
Wow, they're actually proud of a marketing spam post that convinced a depressed person struggling with debt that they're being listened to and understood, while possibly convincing them to try some predatory lending service (I assume, since that "debt freedom now" site is telling me how much debt "Americans in București" are erasing right now!).
Having this as a success story you brag about is sociopathic.
It makes me sad that I cannot trust comments that talk about products or services anymore. Now I understand why people are using TikTok for search. Seeing the person can helps with the trust, even if the problem is the same (they can be paid as well).
I think Pieter is actually legit, even though his bad takes on things started to increase in the last few years. But his products?
- Nomadlist solved a problem, especially back then: a social network for digital nomads. Nothing wrong with it.
- Remoteok is a job board, but niched down, which is completely ok
- photoai / interiorai: it pains me that an AI slop generator is obviously a viable business model, but apparently many people are willing to pay for this
The rest is indeed brand effect. That shitty flight simulator wouldn't have gotten any traction if it wasn't for being part of "a community".
But, and this is the most important thing I like about Pieter: he doesn't sell shovels in a gold rush. His products solve problems for quite different groups of people and X isn't necessarily the primary marketing platform for his stuff.
There are others in the indie hacker scene that are way more shady, because they make their money from products that sell that lifestyle first and foremost.
I just want to share my recent personal experience.
Recently I've finally decided to try creating something new that people would find useful hoping that some day I would be able to turn a profit from that. So I vibe coded a pretty bare-bones (but fully functional) version of my idea and started to talk about it in several platforms, including IndieHackers.
And the main "advice" I've got after talking with a few people was "You are putting too much effort in your product, your focus should be on finding the right market fit for your idea". And after reading the logs in my server I found out nobody bothered to actually try what I built(and no, you don't need to create an account to use), which is fine. But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing?
So, after a brief encounter with this community(people that are trying to build products) I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution.
I get that many people are in this space only to make money and that finding the "magic idea" is probably a good advice if you don't care about what you will build and you need to make money fast. But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas.
> But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing?
Honestly most communities on the internet feel like that. That's one of the reasons why people migrated to discord servers.
(This very comment of mine is generic af too and has as little insight as an LLM predicting how a random HN users would comment here.)
Anyway, unless you made a tool for other devs (an IDE etc.), there is very little reason to ask what other devs think about your product. They're not your target audience. In the best case they're random people, in the worse case they're your competitors.
>> But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas.
I agree. As long as you make it explicit in your encouragement that they should do this as a hobby with no expectation of income.
If their goal is to work on an interesting problem then discussing marketing is irrelevant.
If however their goal is to get paid, then the nature of the code is irrelevant. If you want to get paid then marketing (finding a customer base, discussing their pain, solving that need at a price they can afford etc) is more important.
Unfortunately in a lot of postings this context is not made clear. So the replier has to assume one or other context. Equally Unfortunately they often don't post which context they assumed.
Incidentally marketing might be the most important part of commercial success, but it is not the only important part. It is the most difficult part though so it makes sense to start there. Execution still matters, good execution makes sales easier. But the best execution ever does not mean anything if marketing is missing.
I have lost track of the number of apps I could use and maybe even pay for but that were badly executed (that’s actually being soft as most didn’t even work past the authy login).
You do need to validate product market fit but you also need a minimal viable product. I think most people lost the meaning of what viable means.
There's definitely room in this space for building stuff just because it's interesting or fun or weird. Some of the coolest tools and communities started that way
Have you stopped to think about the other possibility - that your project idea is so bad that nobody wanted to try after reading the landing page? I'm not sure it is in your best interest to think first that the problem lies with the audience.
IMHO you should not be marketing a product to software developers. That market is completely saturated and most of the tools are free.
Today's super-simple big market idea: We got my elderly mother a flip phone and it's too hard to use. I'm going to describe what would be ideal for her now, and by all means DON'T think up additional features to "make it better". She needs a phone that when opened/activated it give a list of people (contacts) which she can scroll through and pick one to call. It should call directly, not change screen or show some other shit. Just call the highlighted name and call. Maybe it could switch to a "calling" screen with just the one name until the call is over. That's it. No other functionality so she can "get lost" or confused.
Maybe this is an android app? I'm not sure if you can override the main UI to the extent this wants to be. I'll gladly get her a cheap Android phone and pay $5 for an app that turns it into this usable device for elderly people. Yes, five dollars. No adds, no user monetization, no enshitification.
Can anyone deliver this? I think there's a large market for it and it should be a one weekend job.
BTW, however you load/add contacts should be a sort of hard to find function maybe for someone else to do. Not something you can accidently "get into".
There are a million things like this just waiting for someone to create. But talking to developers for ideas is a dead end.
> But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing?
1. Comments are the internet aren't written for you, they are written for the author of the comment.
2. The assertion is sound, even if not particularly useful. Your logs exclaim that you don't have market fit, just as said. What more can be said? If finding market fit was a well defined formula, everyone would do it. This is the magic that, for better or worse, you have to figure out on your own.
> I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution.
in your situation, if you would have good idea which solves real problem, you would see at least some people come to your site/app and try it, but looks like your idea is not that good, or you failed to contact your audience.
When i started my career a while ago I really appreciated the spirit of people I met. All tinkerers and curious types. They dreamt about doing interesting things. These days it only seems about the money. I don't see that spirit anymore.
> I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas.
That would be more of a indie engineers kind of community to be honest. The money focus on indie hackers is fairly implicit. And the fact that they are sponsored (or acquired) by Stripe tells you everything you need to know
I've wondered about low-sum acquisitions commonly celebrated on indiehackers/build in public... I thought they were often likely scammers in some way, like using domains with traffic for then nefarious purposes? But maybe not, maybe this is just a way to avoid the dozens of $0 projects on OP's list, and the buyers sincerely want to grow. Navigated to a few OP sold and they still seem to be what they were.
For many people, building out these projects feels impossible to avoid. Selling them on for almost anything at all gives them: some amount of cash, the positive signal of achieving a sale, and also clears headspace otherwise occupied with "I really should do some work on idea #3487."
He hasn't bribed the government to make any of them mandatory, so they're all effectively worthless. It's just regular capitalism.
He'll either randomly hit on something that's actually useful, or leave the low-effort software sector, or get a regular job writing low-effort software at one of the big conglomerates that already bribes the government to make their products mandatory.
The biggest problem I have, is that, even though I know from experience that I should talk to customers to understand their problems and build a solution that provides them value, and spend time talking to them to understand the value proposition, how to communicate it, and how it fits into their workflow, I don't enjoy those bits, and I prefer to just code things I want to build. I prefer to willfully delude myself into thinking that the thing I want to build is something other people will want to pay for. Oh, wait, and I prefer not to charge people and not to sell ads. So there's that too. Am I doing this right?
Sounds like you could use some input from someone experienced with product marketing. They are all about this kind of communication, both expressing ideas to potential customers and hearing their feedback from initial exposure.
37 is one of those numbers that keeps popping up in certain places. Whenever I see it in a headline, I go in feeling like I'm about to be bullshitted by the author.
It’s because it’s what people think of when trying to come up with a random number. So when people use it it’s generally not because they naturally encountered it but they needed a relatively high random number to make a bullshit point.
"After launching 37 different products over the last few years, I've had one go viral and almost all the others struggle to get any traction at all."
Imagine if these "products" were subject to the laws of product liability in the United States like real products sold there.
Why do software developers call websites or apps "products". Why not just call them "websites", "apps" or just "software".
For example,
"After creating 37 different websites and apps over the last few years, I've had one go viral and almost all the others struggle to get any traction at all."
Is "products" more descriptive. Is it some sort of signalling. Do developers want there software to be treated like tangible products.
agree. if those websites were like "Google" that literally indexes whole internet, or "New York Times" which is 175 years old, or "Bloomberg" which is biggest financial data provider — then those can be called products. website is just a surface to provide some real value, backed by really good design and execution, marketing and operations.
what we see instead is a myriad of half-backed, useless, un-maintained, poorly-executed, poorly-operated, poorly-designed solutions to non-existent problems, like shooting a gun into the sky and hoping it will land on a target.
"product" just means "something you sell for money to customers". Saying "37 products" rather than "37 websites" makes it clear that each of these were business ventures, and that "going viral" means "finding many paying customers" not "finding many users curious about my fan site". Wikipedia is a site, for example, but not a product.
> Imagine if these "products" were subject to the laws of product liability in the United States like real products sold there.
Software products are products and they come with liability. Maybe many bullshit apps can't cause any harm and don't really matter, but most evident is software in the medical space. Also, if you step outside of the US, software products in the EU must comply with the GDPR. If you fail to comply, you are held liable.
Ok, guesstimating that the 6 figure sale was around 3x earnings, the total of all the revenue is less than $450k for 5 years. Then you need to allow for expenses and taxes. Might be Ok as a side hustle, but probably insufficient to replace a typical income.
A reality check to counteract all the startup boosterism.
I feel like this is the same story for products that don't really solve a problem. Its probably a lot easier to focus on one broad market segment like e.g. marketing and learn as much about it as you possibly could. That way you'd know what to do next and maybe even have the power to shape the market.
Earning $150000 + 1 viral product sold for 6 figures over the last 5 years isn't that bad in terms of experience which can help grow Refgrow faster using organic SEO and marketing.
I guess all those ideas that never made $1 were because of the "If you build it, they will come" marketing approach.
Slow growth can feel like failure in the early days, especially in the indie/startup Twitter bubble where people post their $10k MRR screenshots two weeks after launch. But what was said really resonates: many of those "failed" projects are actually just early
Wait, are these considered products?
I think the whole indie hacker scene has totally lost it.
A product takes time. ”Painkillerideas.com” doesn’t sounds like a product - and this was his biggest win
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 77.3 ms ] threadInstead, talk to a customer. Build something that solves just one person's problem really well. Grow from there.
People see viral products and early hackers who spent years building their reputation, and think that's not too hard, and maybe you need to try as many as possible... Nope, you need to build a business too! Low-hanging fruit saas can be built so fast nowadays that knowing how to build software is not a huge advantage. We know that building businesses takes time and a huge effort. Most businesses will not be Lovable like.
It did limit the complexity of products, which could be good or bad, but the products were pipelined, so having one employee designing them in ~300 man-hours per design, spread out over six months or so, was totally doable. This included the whole gambit, from conceiving the design to component selection, schematic, layout, design for manufacturing, test fixtures and procedures to documentation and ad copy.
I do feel like it's quicker with hardware than software, because hardware follows something like the theoretical "waterfall" method that software has never used, so everything is clearly documented. For example, I pulled up the cheapest transistor from a common supplier, and it has five pages of documentation plus an index: https://www.formosams.com/upload/product/Mosfets/FMSBSS138-Q...
Everything is always easy to look up, with consistent formatting from every supplier, and you're never dealing with APIs that don't do what you'd expect them to do. You also don't need to continuously fix older releases, because they worked when you shipped them. On top of that, if a component is commonly used, it'll stick around for a lifetime, even as newer products come out, so you don't need to update your product unless it's worth the cost savings.
Mostly focusing on one project at a time on most days, but running several projects in parallel, and cross-pollinating the knowledge I gain from one to the others.
>Has "slow growth" ever paid off for you?
My arguably most successful project (in terms of impact and popularity) went “almost nowhere” for the first 2-3 years. But I wasn’t really trying to make it go anywhere, it was just for the enjoyment of me and my friends.
>If you had to start over, would you pick patience or a high volume of launches?
Both. Be patient, let projects grow slowly, and grow multiple projects at a time while you wait.
The other thing that has helped me is changing how I talk about myself and my struggles. Diligently and attentively remove negative talk (e.g. "I suck at x") and replace it with positive talk (e.g. I'm learning to get better at x").
It used to be that one had a unique interest, profession or capability. This uniqueness causes them to see a gap in the market that could be filled by a new business. They work on filling out that gap, going as far as the customers and their capabilities will take them.
But that's too limiting. Because their interests and their customers might not lead to infinite growth! So instead you need to burn your life looking for that ONE business that will take off.
So shoot at everything. Burn your business, burn your time, burn your customers (this I detest the most), burn your intellect. Maybe get a shot at joining some club that no one cares about, except the other shooters.
The correct path is neither a shotgun blast on all available ideas, or a march to the death on your pet idea. It's a coherent expansion of effort based on feedback, capabilities, risk and likely return. Otherwise known as being in business.
lots of new bets are technically impossible. unless you doing something super trivial, you will hit roadblocks that require effort and time (e.g. Apple App Store reviews are notoriously slow and can take a month for a single new app).
https://replyguy.com/
Having this as a success story you brag about is sociopathic.
The guy started his thing over a decade ago and people look at it now and think they can replicate it.
The stuff the guy codes is garbage and what he does is far from solving any problems.
And, I do not believe his revenue numbers. At all. But people on the Internet see some shit posted, believe it, and then compare themselves to it.
Gleaning anything from his "1 in a million success" is falling prey to survivorship bias.
- Nomadlist solved a problem, especially back then: a social network for digital nomads. Nothing wrong with it.
- Remoteok is a job board, but niched down, which is completely ok
- photoai / interiorai: it pains me that an AI slop generator is obviously a viable business model, but apparently many people are willing to pay for this
The rest is indeed brand effect. That shitty flight simulator wouldn't have gotten any traction if it wasn't for being part of "a community".
But, and this is the most important thing I like about Pieter: he doesn't sell shovels in a gold rush. His products solve problems for quite different groups of people and X isn't necessarily the primary marketing platform for his stuff.
There are others in the indie hacker scene that are way more shady, because they make their money from products that sell that lifestyle first and foremost.
Recently I've finally decided to try creating something new that people would find useful hoping that some day I would be able to turn a profit from that. So I vibe coded a pretty bare-bones (but fully functional) version of my idea and started to talk about it in several platforms, including IndieHackers.
And the main "advice" I've got after talking with a few people was "You are putting too much effort in your product, your focus should be on finding the right market fit for your idea". And after reading the logs in my server I found out nobody bothered to actually try what I built(and no, you don't need to create an account to use), which is fine. But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing?
So, after a brief encounter with this community(people that are trying to build products) I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution.
I get that many people are in this space only to make money and that finding the "magic idea" is probably a good advice if you don't care about what you will build and you need to make money fast. But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas.
Honestly most communities on the internet feel like that. That's one of the reasons why people migrated to discord servers.
(This very comment of mine is generic af too and has as little insight as an LLM predicting how a random HN users would comment here.)
Anyway, unless you made a tool for other devs (an IDE etc.), there is very little reason to ask what other devs think about your product. They're not your target audience. In the best case they're random people, in the worse case they're your competitors.
I agree. As long as you make it explicit in your encouragement that they should do this as a hobby with no expectation of income.
If their goal is to work on an interesting problem then discussing marketing is irrelevant.
If however their goal is to get paid, then the nature of the code is irrelevant. If you want to get paid then marketing (finding a customer base, discussing their pain, solving that need at a price they can afford etc) is more important.
Unfortunately in a lot of postings this context is not made clear. So the replier has to assume one or other context. Equally Unfortunately they often don't post which context they assumed.
Incidentally marketing might be the most important part of commercial success, but it is not the only important part. It is the most difficult part though so it makes sense to start there. Execution still matters, good execution makes sales easier. But the best execution ever does not mean anything if marketing is missing.
You do need to validate product market fit but you also need a minimal viable product. I think most people lost the meaning of what viable means.
Today's super-simple big market idea: We got my elderly mother a flip phone and it's too hard to use. I'm going to describe what would be ideal for her now, and by all means DON'T think up additional features to "make it better". She needs a phone that when opened/activated it give a list of people (contacts) which she can scroll through and pick one to call. It should call directly, not change screen or show some other shit. Just call the highlighted name and call. Maybe it could switch to a "calling" screen with just the one name until the call is over. That's it. No other functionality so she can "get lost" or confused.
Maybe this is an android app? I'm not sure if you can override the main UI to the extent this wants to be. I'll gladly get her a cheap Android phone and pay $5 for an app that turns it into this usable device for elderly people. Yes, five dollars. No adds, no user monetization, no enshitification.
Can anyone deliver this? I think there's a large market for it and it should be a one weekend job.
BTW, however you load/add contacts should be a sort of hard to find function maybe for someone else to do. Not something you can accidently "get into".
There are a million things like this just waiting for someone to create. But talking to developers for ideas is a dead end.
1. Comments are the internet aren't written for you, they are written for the author of the comment.
2. The assertion is sound, even if not particularly useful. Your logs exclaim that you don't have market fit, just as said. What more can be said? If finding market fit was a well defined formula, everyone would do it. This is the magic that, for better or worse, you have to figure out on your own.
in your situation, if you would have good idea which solves real problem, you would see at least some people come to your site/app and try it, but looks like your idea is not that good, or you failed to contact your audience.
That would be more of a indie engineers kind of community to be honest. The money focus on indie hackers is fairly implicit. And the fact that they are sponsored (or acquired) by Stripe tells you everything you need to know
He'll either randomly hit on something that's actually useful, or leave the low-effort software sector, or get a regular job writing low-effort software at one of the big conglomerates that already bribes the government to make their products mandatory.
Imagine if these "products" were subject to the laws of product liability in the United States like real products sold there.
Why do software developers call websites or apps "products". Why not just call them "websites", "apps" or just "software".
For example,
"After creating 37 different websites and apps over the last few years, I've had one go viral and almost all the others struggle to get any traction at all."
Is "products" more descriptive. Is it some sort of signalling. Do developers want there software to be treated like tangible products.
what we see instead is a myriad of half-backed, useless, un-maintained, poorly-executed, poorly-operated, poorly-designed solutions to non-existent problems, like shooting a gun into the sky and hoping it will land on a target.
Software products are products and they come with liability. Maybe many bullshit apps can't cause any harm and don't really matter, but most evident is software in the medical space. Also, if you step outside of the US, software products in the EU must comply with the GDPR. If you fail to comply, you are held liable.
By "social media" I am referring to websites that only as intermediaries (middlemen) and fail to produce any content themselves
1st one didn't sell
2nd one sold for 000s
3rd one sold for 000000s
4th one ?
so really went the other way, quality over quantity
A reality check to counteract all the startup boosterism.
I burned myself out trying to make something of my own.
I guess we have different understandings of what a product is.
I guess all those ideas that never made $1 were because of the "If you build it, they will come" marketing approach.