Things I’ve Learned from Reading IndieHackers

Don’t target the low end market if you can avoid it. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was early on when talking to someone about low-cost forum hosting. This guy basically grabbed me by the lapels and gave me a thousand yard stare and said SWEET JESUS WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T DO LOW COST FORUM HOSTING! This… turned out to be excellent advice!

At this point I would never create a business ever again which charges less than $10/month.

Ship. Ship. SHIP. The overwhelming failure case among people who read interviews like this one is that they spend 98 units of effort reading about running a business for every 2 units of effort running a business. Flip that on its head.

Your idea doesn’t even have to take months or years to implement. It can be as straightforward as some simple proposition attached to a payment form.

I launched with zero custom software. I used Gumroad, Zapier, Memberful, and Campaign Monitor to basically duct-tape my own product together. I slowly started putting together an app that made sense, but I honestly think that not starting from scratch was a huge help in making the project successful.

The first version of Founderkit was actually just a spreadsheet which we shared with other founders within YC.

Spending tons of time coding early on is a dangerous form of procrastination, because it feels productive. Just build something minimal and start selling ASAP.

Launch things! If you’ve worked your butt off to build something and give up on launching it, no one will care about it. We live in a very capitalist society where people will judge you based on real results. No one cares about your initiative and the reasons why you didn’t launch.

We didn’t realize that we were on a bad path until we really went to market, and then we realized: this brand is weak and the product is too complicated. Then we had a wake-up call, in part due to some candid feedback with a brand consultant, that triggered a rewrite from the ground up.

Face the facts early — and always.

Figure out the core benefit of your product vs. the existing offerings and reduce until that is the only essence of the product. Then develop it. That’s your foundation. If we had done this, we would have saved a year of work and, at minimum, tens of thousands of dollars, to say nothing of the opportunity cost.

Start simple. Don’t build a document management system until you absolutely cannot move forward with Google Docs.

Keep it simple. There are a lot of features that users say they want that I haven’t added because I thought it would stray from my main goal, and I think this simplicity has really helped the company.

We didn’t employ any particularly clever marketing strategies. It was all very logical. Tell people what you’re going to make, provide ways for them to be involved and to stay up-to-date on what happens, and repeat. We tried to just keep everything as simple, honest, and high quality as possible.

I literally commented out (hid) 95% of the sidebar menu items, leaving only the “social media” item. Then I assembled a simple landing page for it, and after a week it took off.

If they pay, build the feature. If they don’t, don’t build the feature. It won’t help.

Try a lot of things, see what sticks. Don’t build out more than necessary, keep it simple. Use existing solutions where possible. Try to promote your ideas early and see what happens. If it looks promising, iterate.

Any time I find myself doing something over and over, I try to write a piece of code that will automate it. I have so many automated processes running now that I feel like I have a team of 50 employees working around the clock, constantly and accurately, always in the background. park.io is set to break over $1M in revenue this year and I am the only employee, but only because I am able to leverage all of the automated processes that are able to do the work for me.

Cloud all the things! We use AWS, BitBucket, Pivotal Tracker, Stripe, and Slack.

Get something into the hands of those who can pay for it ASAP.

Right out of the gate, day one, we charged for Baremetrics. In fact our very first sign up was for our $250/mo plan. In the early days we had no free trial… you had to pay immediately. We had a generous money-back guarantee policy that we kept in place for our first year, and we did a lot of refunds based on folks not actually being compatible.

We kept track of all incoming feedback using Trello (which we still do to this day). As the feedback came piling in, we tried to determine what was absolutely crucial for launching and what wasn’t. We knew that the longer we waited to charge, the longer we were waiting to truly validate the product.

Before Stamp, I created numerous projects that failed, and this is what I learned: All businesses have to make money, and you need to quickly kill the ones that do not. Treat your side project as any other business. If it doesn’t make money after a few months, either change something in your product or kill it and start something new.

Launch something you charge money for (even if that’s just a Typeform connected to Stripe) immediately after you have an idea, and start marketing it.

I see too many young entrepreneurs who don’t charge, because they are scared to annoy people. What they don’t get is that you want to annoy some people. That’s when you find people who love you. That’s when you know you have something worthwhile.

The best thing was that the idea had already been validated by Vlad. We just needed to wrap it into a nice web application, bring together a group of “flight experts”, and start getting customers.

Test marketing channels by spending $500 and tracking cost per click (CPC), conversion percentage, cost of customer acquisition (CAC), and revenue. You’ll get product and marketing improvement ideas from every test you do. $500 is very cheap. Much cheaper than spending another week developing a product no one will ever use.😀

I think most development companies fail as product companies because they think, “Hey, I have 3 available devs I couldn’t sell this month. Let’s build a product!” And they throw them at some product idea which they don’t know how to market or sell. Then they spend a few months with it, and it fails.

No one is willing to pay for what that company calls a “product”, but what is in reality the hobby of 3 available developers with no good product management or marketing whatsoever.

A lot of people want to spend a lot of time building something crazy technical or complicated. Don’t. I spent a lot of time figuring out the real issues with the service and the management of it (canceling, refunds, customer concerns, etc) and really get my hands dirty. I also spent time getting my assumptions about the service debunked by the customers buying it and changing major parts of the product to fit that feedback. Then, once the business had validated itself, we used technology to scale it.

First, Reddit is an incredibly powerful resource. In addition to learning on r/entrepreneur and r/startups, the sheer volume of people on Reddit is astounding. We’ve had a few successful AMAs, both in r/IAmA and r/entrepreneur, that have made the front page. You can’t just go start pimping your business though, you need to contribute to the community — we donate our time to help Redditors search for cheap flights, for example — and only subtly mention our business.

Most of our marketing strategies have been submitting our content to different communities like Reddit, Product Hunt, Designer News, Hacker News, etc. (Some important subreddits that work well in our area include /r/web_design, /r/html5, /r/frontend, and /r/webdev.)

Blogging openly about progress with Candy Japan has been helpful, as it has often resulted in hundreds of helpful suggestions on sites such as Hacker News and Reddit. It can be quite overwhelming, however, when you have only limited time and energy, but unlimited amounts of suggestions for things that you should be doing.

At the beginning we found users on Reddit. I was active in a community that dedicated itself to starting online businesses from anywhere in the world. I realized that these same people would be my target market, and so I found similar Facebook groups and joined them.

With all these long form entries, I took to Reddit and stayed active in the /r/gamedev and /r/apphookup communities. I’d give out promotion codes on /r/apphookup if they’d read my entries, which provided a means for users to see that I was a real person and not a nameless company.

We created a page which compared our offerings to those of our competitors, and we promoted it heavily. As a result, people shared it on sites like Reddit and Quora.

Starting over I’d also focus on direct sales sooner. The feedback from each rejection is so much more powerful than just having your online sales pitch silently rejected hundreds of times each week.

We win so many sales just because we’re willing to pick up the phone.

We discovered this completely by mistake, but the benefit we’ve received by offering fast phone and email support for free is immeasurable. I’d even go so far as to say that the most important thing I do right now as CEO to help grow the business is recruit the best support people possible. The rest takes care of itself.

Our almost religious focus on customer feedback is what drives our development team. Even today, Victor, who’s serving as the CEO, is actually doing most of the customer support by himself. That’s how important we think that customer support is.

We quickly learned that if you are ridiculously nice and helpful, web visitors reciprocate. The trick is to have no life — you literally have to be there pouncing on user questions morning, noon, and night. Maybe 1 in 20 conversations results in a sale, but 20/20 result in useful information.

It was more like a hobby — I just worked on it in my spare time. I’ve told other hackers I know not to even start with an idea. It seems like every time I started a project with an idea, it never really worked out. But with park.io it was just kind of a flow — action/reaction — I can’t even claim it was a real idea before I started it. When something is fun and a hobby, you don’t really think of it as an idea, and you put more time and care into it. And I think it shows in the product.

Another thing I would advise, just from my own history and experience, is to move on quickly if it isn’t working. You will know when it is isn’t working and when it is, and it is best to just move on to the next thing quickly when it isn’t .

I was building this first version for me. I did basically zero customer research. I wasn’t going after a specific market. I was scratching my own itch. This version solved my problem, and given I was juggling so many other things, it seemed unwise to spend a huge amount of time researching this.

We’d taken an existing technology (drag-and-drop editor, similar to Wix) and implemented it in an industry that never seen anything like that, and this was enough to make quite a lot of fellow eBay sellers excited.

Here’s the difference between successful and not-so-successful software companies almost 100% of the time: customers come to successful products of their own accord, whereas the not-so-successful companies have to spend lots of time and effort finding and reaching customers. See if you can build something for which people will come to you.

Put people first. It sounds simple, but so many business leaders miss this point in their quest for global domination. Our core focus at MyClean is to: Create and keep happy homes for our clients while building sustainable careers for our team. The only way that is possible is by keeping the best interests of our employees and customers at the heart of every decision.

One more general piece of advice that I’ve also written about before is “to make it personal”. Whatever you are creating, build your own ideals, values, and opinions right in. Don’t pretend to be a big, faceless brand, but instead embrace your nimbleness and independence.

I rely heavily on people knowing who I am as a person (and how much I care about game development, the end product as much as the progression). Interacting genuinely with people that reach out to me has become an incredibly important component of my “brand”. You can’t fake this, so don’t try to.

Solve a Real Problem — Create a product that actually solves a problem for the masses, not just a problem that exists in your head. Build a product for your customers, not for yourself.

Native advertising is probably the most fruitful and influential form of advertising we’ve used. No one wants to hear you talking about your business, and paying for ads all the time is just too expensive. However, creating share-worthy content that’s rich in research and facts is the best and the most effective way of reaching out to potential customers. Also, it helps greatly with your SEO, so we focus 60-70% of our time on this marketing channel.

We eventually figured out that we had to create content that was unique, high quality, and extremely shareable.

For content marketing, one of our most effective methods for generating authority has been to build expert roundups. We choose a relevant topic and gather answers from dozens of influencers. This usually leads to a lot of engagement and backlinks. We’ve also published guest posts and joined podcasts on blogs aligned with our target audience.

The point here is that our content directly drives our sales. We’ve frittered away a few dollars here and there on Twitter and Facebook ads. We’ve set up affiliates. But nothing has worked as immediately, consistently, and effectively as our content.

It’s absolutely an amazing time to be building Micro-SaaS businesses as I call them. As a business model, recurring revenue software blows everything out of the water, and there are still so many niches for products to fill.

When I first launched Baremetrics, there was a small group of other founders I knew. I reached out to them, they became users, and they started the word-of-mouth snowball. Simple as that. Our first 100 paying users very much came from that.

In the end, my SEO advice is simple: (1) choose a market with high search volume and (2) go overboard trying to create value for people searching those keywords.

I think readers have a sixth sense for bullshit and can sniff out inconsistencies. In the long term it’s far better to invest in creating value for readers.

They loved the idea for the product, but the biggest objection was that it was too much work to switch email providers. So on a whim I said I’d do it for them. For free.

That worked. We later called it concierge migrations and started doing that for hundreds of customers.

The tweak that set it off, which seems like a no brainer in hindsight, was to stop trying to charge people to share their Face Juggle. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but was obviously really stupid!

From the very beginning we made it extremely easy for non-developers to use the product. Compared to other solutions, Maître was ridiculously simple to install. Literally as simple as copy and paste. That early focus on user experience was the key to winning our first customers, along with a superior customer support.

I think that the US market is super-saturated with all sorts of SaaS. To acquire users, to get opportunities to guest post, and to do pretty much anything else, you have to have a story. The US market and the Bay Area are hungry for stories and very much fed up with yet another Twitter-Bootstrap-SaaS.

Your pitch is everything. The most important question your website needs to answer: “How will my life be better if I use your product?”

“We all love stories. We’re born for them. Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmation that our lives have meaning. And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories.”—Andrew Stanton, director and writer at Pixar

Sending follow-up emails (based on customer profiles and segmentation) goes a long way in converting leads and getting repeat clients. It’s definitely something that everyone should focus on.

“Sell to people who have money!”  Jeff Atwood explains how targeting high-value businesses instead of consumers helped grow Discourse’s revenue to $120,000/mo.

Sell to other businesses if you can, customers that won’t flinch at $200/month… Sell to people who have money

I would seriously recommend anyone launching an internet-based B2C start-up without previous experience to begin by seeing if there’s a way to target other businesses rather than consumers. If it is possible, go with that.

Initially, we found sub-contractors to do the cleaning. However, two years in we realized we were churning customers too quickly, and I identified quality as the issue. We quickly learned that to ensure quality and consistency, we needed to hire and train our own staff.

By far the most important factors in our growth are low churn and high word-of-mouth. I really don’t know how to market and no one should take marketing advice from me, but once we get a customer, we’ve had great success in keeping them and getting them to tell their friends. Almost all of our growth is organic. There are downsides to this: it takes a long time, there’s no way to step on the gas, etc. But it’s way less fragile and more sustainable than any marketing channel I’ve ever tried.

Low churn is the key to strong long-term growth. Without it, adding users is just pouring water into a leaky bucket.

Trust your gut when it comes to outside capital and other major business decisions. Starting in 2012, we saw the rise of “Uber for X” companies and the home services space became a “hot sector.” Over the next three years we would see two competitors raise $64M and $110M in VC funding respectively, and a handful of others who raised anywhere from $2M-$10M. At one point we were receiving inquiries from a new venture capital fund nearly every day. They all wanted to “invest” and “scale” my business with “hockey stick growth.” However, we knew that the “Uber for X” model did not work in the cleaning space due to the quality control issues we experienced early on. We also knew that VCs who are looking for a 10x return on their investment in five to seven years had a different vision of what “scale” meant than we did. We therefore have never and will likely never take on venture capital.

Figure out what you want out of this, and use that lens anytime you take advice from anyone (including me). The vast majority of startup advice is written by and for people who might not share your goals (like VCs for example), so it might be irrelevant, or even harmful for you.

We honestly just built a good product. The key to logo design is presentation. Some people pay $65 for an extremely simple plain-text logo solely because we present the logo in a beautiful way.

The main site that’s free (https://nomadlist.com) keeps being covered in mainstream press like Time, Times and HuffPo. I don’t do any PR or marketing. So my CAC=$0. It also ranks very well in search as it’s linked to by so many other sites. Also not actively worked on that, it just happened because people liked my site. I’ve tried FB ads last month but only saw 4 conversions. So I think organic acquisition works best for me. Which means: Make a cool site, add paid features, make it recurring. Win.

A great product will find its fit in the market. Once you have that it is all strategy and execution. But getting that first part right — building a great product — is undoubtedly difficult. The more you surround yourself with people who are interested in what you are doing, the more quickly you will get there.

The best time to start is after the idea becomes feasible due to technological or market changes.

Previous to mugpods I tended to start businesses that were already in a saturated market. This was the first where I was genuinely lucky enough to see a gap in an existing market and find something not already available.

My advantage was that I was a first mover in the space just after the solution became technologically feasible. There are vacuums created in markets just after the technology changes. It is a good time to strike.

Some people ask, “You literally built it and they just came?” and that’s true to a point. The broader lesson though is to find something where there’s a mismatch between demand and the market. This applies to startups and regular businesses too: solving an existing problem that’s unaddressed is the best form of marketing.

What I do want to underscore is audacity. There can be a negative connotation to solving tiny problems and having side hustles, so one thing I always tell people I meet is always solve real problems and have skin in the game. It’s easy to see when an entrepreneur’s heart isn’t in it. It’s easy to ride a wave, but make sure you are riding and not coasting.

And definitely go for the craziest idea you have in mind. That’s how most of the successful companies started (talk Facebook, Uber, AirBnb). You probably don’t want to spend your most precious resource (⏰), building yet another Snapchat clone. Every problem has a solution. You just have to be creative enough to find it.

Selling physical products rather than software or information is definitely going about things the hard way. If I had to start over, I’d rather not have to worry about the real world as opposed to bits.

Once a year we host our Mailbird Hackathon, where we get together for one month to get to know one another and to work intensively on a certain feature — and we usually do this in Bali.

I ran a small workshop at Dragon*Con this year for makers wanting to turn their hobbies into businesses. Many of them were hung up on stuff that was largely irrelevant to their success, like what form of ownership their business should take, how to protect their ideas from getting stolen, etc. These types of questions are far less likely to have an impact on your ultimate success than whether or not somebody will buy what you’re selling. So get out there and sell it.

We did experiment with paid Google and Facebook ads, but we quickly determined we’d never come close to making a positive ROI on those ad spends.

Just to give you an idea of how basic the MVP (“minimum viable product”) was that we took to Kickstarter: A good 50% of what we showed in the video was faked. It was a real, working Node.js application, but the majority of it was missing. Huge parts of the UI were simply screenshots of UI mockups with loading animations. We knew we could code this if we needed to, but it didn’t make sense to put in all that work just to make a video that might flop. So we did the minimum!

One thing that helped us grow faster was to implement features we noticed people asking our competitors for. For instance, our competitors did not have the ability to schedule videos, so we implemented and offered this feature to our users.

We always want to maintain this as a lifestyle business. We’re big believers in remote work, and we do not want to have 300 employees/contractors in the future.

Jumping in when a new market is emerging is the best way to grow fast. The market itself expands so you just have to hold on for dear life. This would be like a star expanding because the space it exists in itself expands. The hard part is of course seeing the trends before others do.

Finally, we found ourselves riding a trend created by others. The growth hacking trend has made lots of people curious about tools like Maître. People like Vincent Dignan have done an amazing job in educating people about Growth hacking and growth tools.

Being small also lets you do things manually. You can talk to people on the phone all day long, or send manual emails. It’s okay because you only need a few people to say “yes” to move the needle.

“Cash is king.” Because we have a physical product and demand has been increasing month over month, our issue becomes cash flow. You have to be constantly on top of your funds and practice operational efficiency to make every penny count whilst your growing. If you can, get additional funds to cushion you.

Throughout the entire history of the company, we’ve never had a single individual thing that resulted in a meaningful surge of new customers all at once. (And we’ve been at the top of HN a couple of times, it just didn’t actually do anything for us.) It’s been an incredibly slow boil for the past seven-and-a-half years, and I expect that to continue indefinitely.

The gap on your CV? I’m pretty sure any potential employer would love to employ someone who has spent a couple of years building their own businesses.

“All the evidence suggests that business books are not in fact about learning, but about escapism, just like a romance novel. The business book is about imagining yourself a success, not making yourself a success.” So skip the entrepreneur-porn.

After I caught up with Hiten he added more: “Or, you take ConvertKit seriously and give it the time, money, and attention it deserves. But whatever you’re doing, it’s not working.”

That stuck with me. It’s not often a friend gives such pointed advice. He was basically saying shut it down or double down.

Looking back, I learned that a bad year doesn’t necessarily spell certain doom for your business. You hit a wall for some time, but you just have to keep trying and exhaust everything you know before giving up. We’ve taken advantage of every opportunity we’ve been able to find!

Work/life balance, duh! I don’t work more than 40 hours a week. I take mornings off to ski the powder days. I live a good life. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

When I first started digital entrepreneurship, I felt like I lacked good examples on how an introverted solo developer like myself could have success. A lot of podcasts I listened to and blogs I read about entrepreneurs felt like I was listening to super humans who never made mistakes and were robots who had no hobbies or interests other than BUSINESS AND HUSTLING ALL DAY EVERYDAY. I never felt I could fully relate to that mentality, and I desperately wanted validation that other entrepreneurs made mistakes, and bad decisions, and that sometimes nothing goes right… that success was not linear, but often started from humble beginnings… that they had pointless hobbies and deep friendships. I wanted to know it was okay to be a real person as an entrepreneur.

Success is just a long to-do list. It’s straightforward and simple; it just isn’t easy.

Here are a few of our mistakes:

• Not interviewing our customers all day every day. So incredibly important.
• Not implementing load balancing and autoscaling sooner for our servers. This caused many a sleepless night.