I've launched 37 products in 5 years and not doing that again

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/ive-launched-37-products-in-5-years-and-not-doing-that-again-0b66e6e8b3

by AlexandrBel • 1 year ago

242 215 1 year ago

Invictus02• 1 year ago

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.

oc1• 1 year ago

I suspect the 2020's indie hacker community is now a byproduct of the "get rich" enshittification of social media and their role models are tiktok and instagram influencers who teach you how to "build" because with ai no tech skills needed anymore.

askafriend2• 1 year ago

Exactly this.

It's inherent in the process and way of thinking. It's a dangerous path to pursue for entrepreneurs. How can the results be anything but disposable and frivolous when the process treats them as such.

fxtentacle10• 1 year ago

But how do you find that first customer who's willing to pay for a solution?

In a way, that's the same problem as getting a job, which seems to be harsh for recent college graduates.

ambicapter• 1 year ago

It's complicated, but you have to talk to real human beings in your surroundings and learn about their lives.

danjl4• 1 year ago

Or a dozen. Or, better, a few dozen. Read "The Mom Test" to learn how to get useful information from your face to face discussions.

dfex• 1 year ago

So much this! The Mom Test is a rare gem in a sea of startup advice books, but it's the only one I've come across that cuts through all the BS and focusses on the only important thing - finding a market for people who want your product.

Spoiler alert - you can't always do it sitting at home in your office chair.

poulpy123• 1 year ago

From what I perceive of his personality through the media, I totally believe that a 24 years old Steve Jobs in 2025 would do that.

satvikpendem10• 1 year ago

Jobs was a perfectionist and would not have done that, given what I read from Isaacson's biography.

hshshshshsh• 1 year ago

Do you think Steve Jobs give a shit about what customers thought?

ozim• 1 year ago

Steve Jobs comparison is not great. You don’t have to be Jobs or have grand vision to make decent product that will make you money.

„indie hacker community builds worthless, visionless widgets „ - I totally agree with this sentence. Those 37 „products” feel like huge waste of time even ones he sold.

comechao• 1 year ago

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.

LargeWu• 1 year ago

Is making ~8 products a year for 5 years perceived as a viable way to be successful?

tiffanyh• 1 year ago

A lot of people want to replicate Pieter Levels success

https://x.com/levelsio

https://x.com/levelsio/status/1457315274466594817

fxtentacle10• 1 year ago

In that list, "startupretreats" jumped out at me because surfoffice.com has been doing well for at least 10 years by now... So maybe he also lost some opportunities by giving up too early.

apples_oranges• 1 year ago

I guess it's go wide or go deep

dlcarrier3• 1 year ago

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.

KurSix5• 1 year ago

Yep, chasing short-term signals (like launch bumps) can backfire if it's not grounded in sustainable demand

lccerina• 1 year ago

The growing product is something that bolts in the worst of current internet (affiliation links). Hopefully it will fail too

moondowner• 1 year ago

Affiliate links have been here for three decades; (AutoWeb.com doing it since 1995)

olyjohn• 1 year ago

That doesn't mean anything. It's still a huge reason for all the junk and bullshit that's ruined the internet.

forgotmypw172• 1 year ago

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.

nunodonato2• 1 year ago

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.

veidelis• 1 year ago

Can you tell more, please? I'm interested to know what did you build that had an interesting growth to you. Could you please expand on one project of yours? Thank you!

forgotmypw172• 1 year ago

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").

rorylaitila2• 1 year ago

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.

fxtentacle10• 1 year ago

The problem is that feedback is difficult to get without customers. Plus in many cases, the feedback of what people intend to do is not really helpful at predicting what they will do.

I'll go with an example from my past: We built a SaaS for freelance photographers to organize and distribute their images. People loved it. We listened for feedback and people loved the new features. But churn was always a bit too high to make this a truly great business. We asked for feedback and got various reasons, none of which turned out to be correct. Most of our churn was photographers getting frustrated with the freelancer life and either signing up for an agency or changing jobs. That's how I learned the hard way that you cannot succeed in a bad market. But from the outside, it wasn't obvious that this market segment would be bad. You need to "test drive" the market with a product to learn if it can sustain a business or not. And that's what many of those indie builders are trying to do: feel out an acceptable market.

rorylaitila2• 1 year ago

Yeah I agree there. The challenge is the order of the test drive. The ideal validation goes like this in my mind: 1) Will anyone buy it at all? 2) Will they buy it greater than its costs to produce at reasonable margin? 3) Are there enough assessible marketing channels at that margin? 4) Is the overall size of the business viable for my goals?

What the indie builders are often doing is starting backwards. Starting with something that should ostensibly be a large market (4) or seemingly timely. Then they find that the marketing channels are hard (3) so they work on that. Then they lower their margin or increase marketing spend (2) hoping that fixes conversions. Then maybe they learn that no one actually wants their product at all (1).

It definitely is not easy, especially novel ideas. Existing markets you can largely skip #1 and #2 as proven.

hermitcrab5• 1 year ago

This is my experience as well - it is very difficult to know what a market is really like without actually trying to sell a product into it.

What people say and what they do are very loosely coupled. The only really good validation of a product idea is people giving you $.

nikolayasdf1235• 1 year ago

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).

karel-3d4• 1 year ago

I see one of the products and I already hate the OP. Thanks

https://replyguy.com/

sunaookami• 1 year ago

Hm not sure if you are a legit commenter or if this is just rage marketing ;)

karel-3d4• 1 year ago

He doesn't even own it anymore and, according to the recent reviews of the service (by marketers), it basically stopped working since he sold it (and when I google there are many more like it that works better, this seems to be using 2024 LLMs). So I am not selling it at all.

I just really hate the idea.

n4r9• 1 year ago

I've looked at several and they're mostly aimed at helping to market software. It feels kind of meta. Perhaps this is a particularly tough niche?

weitendorf3• 1 year ago

This is one of the interesting things I’ve noticed about the indiehacker community and software ecosystem, it’s mostly software built for and marketed to other indiehackers.

At one level it makes complete sense to build software that solves problems you understand, and then market it to the people with the same set of problems. That’s what the “well known” indie hackers did. But if the ecosystem is all just people trying to hack something together quickly and sell it to other people hacking things together quickly it seems questionable that there is any real value there unless you are one of the few influencers with guaranteed distribution.

hermitcrab5• 1 year ago

It feels kind of meta.

'circle jerk' would be a less polite way to put it.

fxtentacle10• 1 year ago

I also dislike the product. But I find it refreshing to see that selling LLM slop for marketing is, apparently, not a viable business.

jasonthorsness2• 1 year ago

this is one of the ones he successfully sold, for apparently the biggest amount in fact

hahn-kev• 1 year ago

Are YOU reply guy?

yellow_lead• 1 year ago

It's crazy how AI folks are re-inventing literal Internet spam

spacemadness3• 1 year ago

This is commonly how people choose to use the “greatest breakthrough in the history of computer science” as it was stated in another thread. Great work humanity.

esskay4• 1 year ago

And not only that, people are cheering them on for making slop. The amount of high fiving and patting on the back and the moronic 'bro culture' around these sorts of products especially on Xitter is insane.

conradfr• 1 year ago

I mean that was the most obvious use case from the start.

egypturnash• 1 year ago

same, that behavior's an insta-block.

tsimionescu3• 1 year ago

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.

karel-3d4• 1 year ago

The website doesn't work anymore. But yeah it sucks

phito• 1 year ago

Gross. I would be ashamed to make such software.

tuesdaynight• 1 year ago

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).

satvikpendem10• 1 year ago

There are lots of ads on TikTok too, even more insidious than on forums.

TimPC• 1 year ago

A product with $6000 in revenue selling for only $12,500 seems crazy to me. Why were you so eager to get rid of it?

Arainach• 1 year ago

Revenue isn't profit.

fxtentacle10• 1 year ago

Most likely, they booked some advertisements to push revenue but didn't honestly account for the ad expenses. I've seen that way too many times with Indie products that they brag about large revenue numbers and "forget" to mention that profit margins are negative. I remember once hearing about a start-up that resold baby diapers at a loss. Obviously, they were easily able to scale up customers and revenue ...

beAbU• 1 year ago

It's the whole "we're selling $1 bills for 50c, but we're not worried, we'll make up for it by scaling up."

fxtentacle10• 1 year ago

found it:

"Critically, he did not understand margin. At the end of December when things were getting truly desperate, he said to me “Phil, just bring me a forecast that shows how much we need to sell to break even.” He did not understand, after three years of negative margin, that increased sales resulted in increased losses."

from Ecomom Post Mortem by Philip Prentiss

tonyedgecombe• 1 year ago

I think such small businesses are really hard to sell. It may be the purchaser just wanted the domain.

prawn2• 1 year ago

Might only take months for traffic/attention/fad to completely die off, or a rival to supplant it.

farceSpherule• 1 year ago

Everyone is trying to "copy" Pieter Levels "success" which as of now is "brand effect."

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.

jf22• 1 year ago

How are you defining garbage?

satvikpendem10• 1 year ago

Probably because Levels says he codes each product in a single PHP file. But then again, there's a reason he's successful and the parent is not (at least to that same level, pun intended). Technologists think code is an end unto itself while true entrepreneurs that it's just a means to an end, and that the end itself is money (otherwise, why are you running a business? If you don't make money, it's simply a hobby).

nikolayasdf1235• 1 year ago

like his flying simulator.

nikolayasdf1235• 1 year ago

single file 30,000 of PHP code.

satvikpendem10• 1 year ago

I agree with half your comment while disagreeing with the other half. Yes, it is very true that he now has a brand and can get users much more easily, and that trying to replicate his success is very survivorship bias heavy. However, if he hadn't been solving problems for people, he wouldn't have made the money he has in the first place, because no one would be buying his products (I, for example, bought NomadList a long time ago and met many people from it due to their Slack channels). And see my other comment about "garbage" code, it does not matter if they're making money, Levels is by his own proclamation not a software engineer, he uses code as a tool.

nikolayasdf1235• 1 year ago

same. his websites are indeed garbage.

WA2• 1 year ago

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.

nzach3• 1 year ago

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.

LVB• 1 year ago

Yes, and it is very tiresome advice to see continually, especially when given to newcomers whose first instinct is to build a solid, useful app or service, and they're being steered away from that. The number of times I've read that one should put up landing pages, spend time socializing them, and only if there are enough signups to actually build something is rather depressing.

These folks are obviously playing a different game than I'm used to. But in my ~30 years at it, I can confidently say that taking the time to build what I feel are good apps, well-crafted, has provided immense satisfaction (I can at least look at a collection of apps, not landing pages), and has always developed or honed my skills, which has opened many doors. The marketing-first approach just sounds painful for someone who, like me, wants to be building things.

fxtentacle10• 1 year ago

"I can confidently say that taking the time to build what I feel are good apps, well-crafted, has provided immense satisfaction"

... but has it provided more revenue that what it would have cost for someone to hire you to build this at an acceptable hourly rate? Because if not, you're comparing your hobby against their business in the sense that you can accept less profitable results which wouldn't work for them.

satvikpendem10• 1 year ago

You have a hobby (of making apps), not an actual business. The sibling comment is right, those are two different skills that optimize for different things. Which is fine, everyone has hobbies, but understand that the "game" they're playing is making money, which requires acquiring customers, which requires marketing.

hermitcrab5• 1 year ago

and only if there are enough signups to actually build something is rather depressing

Yes, but it is also rather depressing to spend a lot of effort building something that nobody wants. Especially if you are trying to make a living at it.

ninetyninenine• 1 year ago

Then the problem here isn’t there advice but what is it you need to do to get them to try it? Or where do you need to look to get them to try it?

fxtentacle10• 1 year ago

"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 don't think many programmers need that advice ;) Looking at the open source community, there's already plenty of people that freely share their ideas and implementations ... (only to be ripped off by cloud service providers later).

And, sadly, the market for cool gadgets or 3D-printable trinkets is even more brutal. There will be 10 clones in stock on Amazon before you get your first batch through customs. My advice would be that nowadays, you should start your product journey with planning what your moat is going to be and how you're going to defend it. Or if you skip that, accept that your moat is only going to last a few months, which seems to be what the article's author was going with.

BoumTAC• 1 year ago

you should not ask indie hackers for advice and you should not hang out with them.

If you build a product for marketers, you should hang out with them and ask them for advices, not indie hackers who know nothing about marketing.

If you build a product for bakers, you should hang out with them to understand what they need, not with indie hackers who have never baked anything in their lives.

That sounds logical, but for certain types of products, it is not.

There is no point in talking with indie hackers. It's only useful if you need knowledge about coding skills, which is rarely the case (especially now with AI).

p0nce• 1 year ago

Well that meant your users do not hang in IndieHackers

slightwinder• 1 year ago

But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing?

Is there a website, documentation, any kind of presentation of your product? In that case, depending on your idea, this might be already enough for people to evaluate it. Certain categories are so overpopulated, people don't need to see the actual product any more; some description, maybe a screenshot, that's enough. The other side is, people are also so feed up with seeing the same stuff for the gazillions time again and again, they simply can't even bother with it any more.

I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution.

The idea drives your marketing, which brings you customers. The execution is what holds them and animates them to give you money. But if your marketing sucks, you won't get customers easily, so it's important to have a good balance, unless you plan to polish your product for a decade, until serious money shows up.

nzach3• 1 year ago

Is there a website, documentation, any kind of presentation of your product?

I do have a fully functional MVP available on the internet (https://leetprompt.io)

The other side is, people are also so feed up with seeing the same stuff for the gazillions time again and again, they simply can't even bother with it any more.

That is a fair point, but if you can't even bother why would you give any advice then?

it's important to have a good balance

That's why I went out of my way to try my hand at marketing something for the first time, but the only kind of advice I've got is a little bit depressing.

weitendorf3• 1 year ago

I didn't understand the indiehacker community/product mindset until I discovered the indiehacker "influencers" / lifestyle vloggers / etc. that might be the only ones actually turning a profit on all of this.

The influencers sell a lifestyle of throwing a million darts at the board with simple apps and building tiny businesses off the handful that get a lot of interest or seem to resonate with users. And the apps they build that do well are mostly small tools for other indiehackers to use to build/host/augment their apps. So they not only have the distribution and marketing aspects solved already, but they've actually created the demand for their own products by selling what they do as a viable (and easy/glamorous) path to success.

The other indiehackers are mostly in it to be like their favorite influencers, so they copy them by making small tools for other indiehackers and trying the million darts strategy. But it just gets lost in a sea of other indiehackers with no audience or distribution, all trying to sell the same kinds of products to each other. It just seems like a really bad community to sell to: very cost conscious, building competing products, familiar with all your marketing/fake-it-til-you-make it strategies. If at first you don't succeed, watch more youtube videos and throw more darts!

I don't think "market pull" is a terrible strategy and I'm sure for some it's just a fun way to write software but I worry that it's mostly a hybrid get-rich-quick scheme, parasocial thing for the small number of influencers at the top that wastes a huge amount of time. Personally I don't like the idea of baiting people with fake landing pages and think it's actively harmful for so many people to only build simple apps with immediate traction. It's just poisoning the well and making small-scale software low-trust, trying to get rich quick off other people trying to get rich quick

andai• 1 year ago

That's hilarious. The post reminded me of Marc Lou, who's launched like 30 SaaS, and from what I gathered by far his most profitable one is the one that helps you launch your own SaaS...

9cb14c1ec0• 1 year ago

influencers sell a lifestyle

Oh, you mean that thing called the internet?

spacemadness3• 1 year ago

Kind of like all the investment and finance influencers. If they’re so good at it why do they need to spend all that time trying to be an influencer? They should be rich already. They even beg for likes and subscribes so they’re obviously not doing it as a hobby. It’s simply because they’re trying to get rich selling advice to gullible people.

jacquesm• 1 year ago

Something very similar applies to VC investing. Sure, some founders get rich. But founder returns averaged across all founders are horrible. The VCs however... they are like those influencers. They'll tell you exactly how you should maximize for their return, just in case you strike it big. They're not going to tell you how to minimize your risks, unless that happens to align with their increased returns.

svnt• 1 year ago

The thing about MLM schemes (or I guess MLH schemes in this case) is that the pyramid at the bottom is flat and small, and this example illustrates that intuitively more immediately than Avon. Are you interested in being a follower of a follower of an indiehacker? No? Then as a follower of an indiehacker you have no market.

benjaminwootton• 1 year ago

Yeah, I spent some time researching this crowd and most of the ones I found have the playbook of selling to indie hackers and talking about how successful they are with fake MRR screenshots.

narrator• 1 year ago

Well Pieter Levels has a negative customer acquisition cost because he gets most of his business off of X and he gets so many impressions that he gets paid to post there. That's a pretty incredible marketing hack if you ask me. I invest in startups and the ones who do really well hack marketing. They have tech in their stack that is specifically devoted to automating and scaling their marketing.

KurSix5• 1 year ago

The sad part is, there are people building genuinely useful tools or creative projects, but their stuff gets buried under the avalanche of low-effort trend-chasing

wingerlang• 1 year ago

might be the only ones actually turning a profit on all of this

I don't think this is true at all. How many such influencers are there, really, a dozen? I'd guess there are a million people making everything from absolute bank, down to pocket money. Most of them are probably not even aware that these influencers exists.

TrevorFSmith• 1 year ago

I don't know why people gave you that advice but it's pretty easy to tell when a designer hasn't spent enough (or any!) time defining their target market and then spending time with those people to listen instead of force fitting a technology. Without that up front work we're all just rolling the dice. That said, building stuff is fun by itself so it doesn't always need to be about money and growth. Just know it's a hobby.

satvikpendem10• 1 year ago

You are putting too much effort in your product, your focus should be on finding the right market fit for your idea

How is this not excellent advice? There are lots of stories of founders building first (sometimes for years, even), then finding out that there is no market for it (as it seems you have done). The people evaluating your product might have even just read your post and concluded that there's no market, a tarpit idea [0], from their own experiences.

I am assuming this [1] is your product, from looking at your profile and searching the name on IH. The comments are exactly as I've stated, and they apparently have visited your website too, so maybe your logs are not accurate, or they have an adblocker on.

Hey, I checked out your website—looks great! Just wanted to share some honest feedback. I think you should hold off on going too deep into development right now. Instead, treat this as your MVP and focus first on getting real customers.
This is a common trap many founders (myself included) fall into—building out the full product before validating if there's a real market fit. Get users, collect feedback, and then iterate. That’s the fastest and most efficient path forward.

If all you are doing is making apps, you have a hobby, but it is not guaranteed that you will have a business from it, so understand what it is you are optimizing for as the two require different actions to succeed.

[0] https://mikekarnj.com/posts/tarpit-ideas

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-build-this-iCFJ3kI9WLa...

nzach3• 1 year ago

How is this not excellent advice?

I do understand that in order to create something popular you need to create something good but you also need to properly communicate what you do. And proper communication is as hard as creating something good. So, I do know you need to "find an audience", and that is why I've posted it in a few places.

Having said all that, reading these comments made me feel somewhat demoralized because the advice wasn't really actionable. As a noob in this space I went in expecting to get some advice along the lines of: "your idea is bad", "the website design needs to improve", "your app keeps crashing", "there is no way to make money from this", etc... But all I've got was this generic "find users" advice.

"Find users" isn't intrinsically bad advice, but the way it was delivered felt really bad. How do I find users? Should I post about it in some platform? Maybe I should write a blog post about it? Running ads is a viable approach? Given what I have, what communities should I try to engage?

so understand what it is you are optimizing for as the two require different actions to succeed

But I don't want to create a business right now. I just want to create something that people find interesting. I already know how to build things for myself, now I want a different challenge. But right now I feel stuck because I've built something, nobody seems to care and I don't really know how to improve my situation.

raincole2• 1 year ago

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.

bruce511• 1 year ago

> 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.

csomar• 1 year ago

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.

KurSix5• 1 year ago

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

owebmaster2• 1 year ago

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.

phkahler2• 1 year ago

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.

skeeter20203• 1 year ago

> I think there's a large market for it and it should be a one weekend job.

You're essentially asking for a heavily customized phone OS, this is not like adding a bootstrap theme - and you're willing to pay FIVE DOLLARS?

> But talking to developers for ideas is a dead end.

Maybe for product ideas but perhaps you should find one to critique your "weekend project" idea

9rx• 1 year ago

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.

riku_iki• 1 year ago

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.

smrtinsert• 12 months ago

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.

netdevphoenix• 12 months ago

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

jasonthorsness2• 1 year ago

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.

prawn2• 1 year ago

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."

deadbabe• 1 year ago

Looking over his list of products, it is clear the author is the quintessential late stage capitalist.

alchemyzach3• 1 year ago

"I cranked out 37 unoriginal, shitty products that have countless existing competitors and zero moat... and none of them made me rich :( "

GianFabien2• 1 year ago

Best TLDR;

dlcarrier3• 1 year ago

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.

danjl4• 1 year ago

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?

larrik• 1 year ago

Probably if not you are trying to build a business.

But! That's just one reason to code anything, and you are probably "doing this" well enough for the other reasons (education, experience, job hunting, and the best one: fun).

m0llusk• 1 year ago

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.

alchemyzach3• 1 year ago

"You failed because you had the wrong dream." - Diego Delgado

bob1029• 1 year ago

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.

satvikpendem10• 1 year ago

You might be interested in this video by Veritasium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6iQrh2TK98

Torwald• 1 year ago

I think that Jason Fried knew about that.

DanielVZ• 12 months ago

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.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 1 year ago

"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.

nikolayasdf1235• 1 year ago

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.

tsimionescu3• 1 year ago

"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.

WA2• 1 year ago

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.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 12 months ago

Is social media a "product"

By "social media" I am referring to websites that only as intermediaries (middlemen) and fail to produce any content themselves

oulu20062• 1 year ago

3 products

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

nunodonato2• 1 year ago

what do you think was the cause for that kind of increase? quality? different target? complexity?

oulu20062• 1 year ago

right people mostly, I partnered with someone different for the 3rd startup; from my experience with the first 2 i realized the sort of person I needed as a co-founder.

Someone to compliment my deficiencies, domain expertise and with the same focus and mindset to succeed -- most startups fail because of founder issues.

GianFabien2• 1 year ago

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.

raincole2• 1 year ago

It seems that all these products are 100% online. Therefore it's a very viable income source for people who live in, well, the majority part of the world.

misiek08• 1 year ago

$33k per year, so $165k for 5 years is good enough salary e.g. in Poland where I live, not achieved by 80% of people in country. Why I chose $33k? It's enough to have decent life with some good holidays and local trips along the years. Having $450k income, even if half will be taken by expenses - you still can live a very decent life in many places around the world.

reactordev2• 1 year ago

I gave up after 20. Now I just work on other people’s ideas or consult.

I burned myself out trying to make something of my own.

KurSix5• 1 year ago

Burnout's real, and stepping back means you're being smart about your energy.

another_twist• 1 year ago

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.

kookamamie• 1 year ago

37 different products

I guess we have different understandings of what a product is.

bschwindHN• 1 year ago

Yeah I feel kinda petty saying it, but given how easy it is to crap out a web app, I hardly consider most to be "products". That word in my mind is at least reserved for something that at least has some tangible aspect to it.

shahzaibmushtaq2• 1 year ago

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.

Oras• 1 year ago

It is SO bad actually. That's $30,000 a year, a salary of a junior developer with 10 times less responsibility compared to running multiple products.

I am not discouraging building tools, I do that myself but most of these could be done while having a full time job and learning on the side.

shahzaibmushtaq2• 1 year ago

You missed the other part of that equation.

One viral product ReplyGuy would have sold for in the $300,000-$500,000 range (my guess) is equivalent to 4 years of salary of a senior developer.

But the level of experience he has now cannot be achieved while having a full-time job and learning on the side.

KurSix5• 1 year ago

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

mgax• 1 year ago

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

alt227• 1 year ago

If you look directly under that you will see that replyguy was his biggest win at a 6 figure sale.

kypro• 1 year ago

Indiehackers was the place that finally made me realise trying to bootstrap a tech product is almost always pointless. There's almost always a far better way to allocate your time.

esskay4• 1 year ago

Yup same, the whole toxic culture of lies surrounding it makes things worse as theres people trapped in this weird little bubble of believing half the stories on there. Most are completely fabricated.

For me personally I gave up on SaaS a couple of years ago and shifted my focus elsewhere. I ended up building a site in a niche I've always loved, and it ended up making me love that hobby even more, and now I have a place to share knowledge on it, with the bonus being it puts a small amount of cash in my pocket (not at all job quitting kind of money, but that wasn't the goal).

satvikpendem10• 1 year ago

Lots of products on IH are Stripe verified though.

satvikpendem10• 1 year ago

That's a strange conclusion to come to just based on some people on a website. What's a a "far better" way to allocate your time?

3stripe• 1 year ago

The author states "Virality is rare and nearly impossible to predict" and yet one of his products aims to automate the creation of "viral LinkedIn posts"! Much irony.

Imustaskforhelp4• 1 year ago

I am actually a little intrigued in the inner workings of replyguy.com (the app OP sold for 6 figures)

It just sounds like it relies on scraping reddit/twitter/some basic google/brave search api shenanigans...

Seriously, all the posts on replyguy.com seems to particularly target reddit and I am pretty sure that they might be scraping since eating reddit's api cost might be hard.

The autogenerate reply feature might be really easy to build (I think)

I mean, I don't condone scraping since it might be a little grey area but apify has reddit scraping too with the ability to search for keyword.

I mean, they are also raking as in as much if not more dollars per month than replyguy.com while being an api..

Now, we don't know if they are scraping or using api but I have assumed that they are scraping and so I may be wrong, I usually am but I am kinda impressed by how reddit scraping can lead to 6 figures.

OldfieldFund• 1 year ago

6 figures is not that much to a company that wants that specific product and it's well-built. It also has a user base with somewhat decent monthly visits.

bberenberg• 1 year ago

I build random things in the “indie hacker” way but it’s always more about doing stuff for me than others. I find it enjoyable and fun, and that’s what drives it. If I get some traction, then great, but if not, I also get the tool I wanted and the fun experience and learning of building it. While I wish this didn’t come at the expense of reading less, I am happy it means my TV backlog is growing.

tnolet• 1 year ago

Why, in all that this holy, won't anyone focus on one thing and stick with it until it stops making sense. Building a business takes time.

- Stop diluting your attention.

- Iterate, iterate, iterate.

- Stick around for long enough so people have a chance to know you exist.

jokoon• 1 year ago

It felt good to hear what Gabe Newell had to say about startups.

I don't mean to criticize how capitalism can turn sour, but the startup system can easily turns into some sort of pyramid scheme or snake oil, where some actors benefit, like online advertisers.

Startuping feels like it comes from a libertarian, Reaganian beliefs of how capitalism works.

ErikAugust• 1 year ago

I don’t get how anyone thinks that spending 100s of hours over and over again on projects that make $0 is a good idea. “Definition of insanity” and all that. You are in denial that you are unemployed, you might as well do something more interesting or enjoyable.

NilMostChill• 1 year ago

There is an argument to be made that it's good training, like coding kata's just with the end to end.

If you're looking to make a living off of it, the training argument only works if you then go on to used the trained skills though.

In this instance, if the numbers provided are to be believed they made bank.

i'm seeing a six figure sale on a five figure investment, among others.

Though i suspect, like is usually it, that the provided cost numbers are much higher in reality when factoring in time and opportunity cost etc.

tomcam• 1 year ago

My instinct normally is to bat for a single or a double, not a home run. But we have different needs than most people. For us, owning our real estate outright and making mid 6 figures or below pretax in a HCOL area is the target. Any higher income and you spend too much time on business trips, emergencies, hiring people, HR issues, etc. Too old for that. Inflation and property taxes are running much hotter than we'd like but we assumed years ago it would happen at some point. It hasn't affected us at all on a day-to-day basis.

So when my wife and I evaluate business ideas, it never crosses our mind to assume it will be picked up by a VC and hit the front page of HN. We try to project the worst, best, and most likely scenarios. We project these same terms a few years out to understand where problems might arise.

Our businesses are always medium- to long-term plays that we can run with minimal to no staffing. We have about a 50% success rate, about 30% higher than we normally bet.

pbrum• 1 year ago

This stuff is hard. Today was the first time my little startup started sending out little videos of demo features to the group of about 20+ people (all friends/family/close colleagues) I'd interviewed in round 1 of customer work. How did it go? Ok, but not great. The disappointment in there is not from any negative reactions, but rather to the large amount of non-reactions (simple things like "oh cool" and nothing else from someone who knows full well how important this is to me).

But that's ok! I know maybe they'll have more time later. If not, I will nudge them. And I have other people to ping and later will move on to cold pitching anyway. And I've read in countless founder books, testimonials, etc about how hard and laborious this is. Keep a firm mindset, be systematic about going through all the steps, never skip a day of work, meet your own deadlines, have a bulletproof work ethic. Rome wasn't built in a day!

amadeuspagel• 12 months ago

Many of these tools seem to be targeted at other indie hackers.

I've launched 37 products in 5 years and not doing that again

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