Cognitive switch from developer to entrepreneur

I spent 6 months developing my first product, after which I learnt some very hard lessons. I'll try to summarise my learnings for others as well as myself.

As a developer, I tend to think about everything, plan everything in detail. Basically I spend a lot of time researching. I've made it a point to now limit my research early on by spending no more than 1 day. At the end of the day, I open a diary and start describing the Problem my product is aiming to solve, using up 1 entire page. The main questions I try to answer here are "Who is the product for", "How many people exist", "How much will they be willing to pay". "Is the problem urgent/important". A tip, I've found it useful to force myself to fill up an entire page, as the process leads to new perspectives on the problem statement at hand which you might've overlooked initially.

On the next page I write down my understanding of the Distribution channels, which one is most important and will be my primary focus for eg. ProductHunt (this would take up maybe half a page for me). The import question I want an answer to here is "How am I reaching my customers" or "Where can I find my Customers". Tip: it's better if most of your customers are part of a group or identify as something like "developers" so that you can target them easily.

Finally, I write about how my Solution is going to solve the problem described in page 1. Usually this takes the other half of the page. Try to keep this part as concise as possible, thinking of it as a marketing pitch really helps. It feels counter intuitive at first to not describe your solution at length but I always remind myself the fact that I am not bound by my solution as I can probably build anything I can think of. What's more important is understanding the Problem Statement and figuring out Distribution Channels since those two usually are the make or break for us developers. Never limit your solution, ideally you would want to keep yourself most flexible of your solution. As soon as you write this down, start writing up the specifications of your product, and maybe then get started.

The most important point of this method is to avoid overthinking at all costs, but also spend enough time initially understanding the problem statement deeply. I've realised that as I build out these products, I tend to improvise and make the solution marginally better every day, which compounds over weeks and months so spending less time thinking of solution and more time understanding problem is key.

The other thing I have to keep reminding myself is to always think small, instead of thinking/dreaming big. As it helps me limit myself initially and reach beta/alpha/launch date quicker. And launching quicker results in faster feedback loops which greatly increases chances of success.

Just realised I ended up writing a lot, if a lot of people find this helpful I wouldn't mind turning this into a post and going in-depth about my process. NOTE: I am quite new to IndieHacking, previously I was part of a traditional startup with a non-technical co-founder who actually carried a lot of load for me.

Also a dev. Here are the key things:

• Know exactly where you're going to be getting your target customers before you write a single line of code.
• Evaluate the competition and differentiate. Understand that differentiation doesn't just have to be a better feature set. There are marketing/branding ideas you can tap into to set your product apart.
• Understand the value of time (specifically your own time). Spending a bunch of time working on optimizing devops stuff when your time could've been much better spent validating your idea and getting user feedback, for example. It's a daily struggle but you'll need to prioritize and focus on activities with the best ROI.
• Start small. Literally the minimum viable product.

I really can't reiterate point number 3 enough.. always be aware of what you're spending your time on. It is very easy for us devs to get wrapped up in little details that are inherently meaningless. You should always be thinking from a user's perspective: is this decision going to bring my users more value more quickly? If not, sideline it until the product is more mature and growing naturally.

I find the Effectuation Model to be the most mindset for early stage market exploration and company building.

Dev/founder here - I found this YC talk on finding product-market fit especially encouraging.

The sooner you actually sit down with someone and start asking questions to (sneakily) steer the conversation towards the problem you’re trying to solve, the more insight you’ll have.

I remember leaving the first few of these kinds of conversations with a “holy crap” energy and head full of new ideas. Reddit & forums are great, but the volume of information you get from talking with someone behind a glass of beer is another level. You’ll see which specific aspects of “your problem” they light up about and which they hardly flinch at and that’s something that can’t be accomplished through online surveys.

https://youtu.be/0LNQxT9LvM0

I tend to always start from developing something (feels more natural) and easier, than diving into unknown field

https://get-mobdro.com/home/

My challenge has been switching back and forth on a daily or weekly time scale. First piece of advice is just do it. When it's time to change hats, the 5s rules is 5,4,3,2,1 hats changed.

The next piece of advice is about preparing for what is actually a career switch. Fortunately, you can use, rather than erase, what you already know. Developers and entrepreneurs both solve problems. Developer tools are confined by the hardware, entrepreneurship by human experience. Learn about your tools. Get to know the boundaries.

My personal experience is that it is a difficult journey and one that is frustrating. I've constantly felt like as a developer with an eye for design that I have all the tools at my disposal to be successful. Until recently I have got in the way of myself by being overly analytical.

Its very tempting to go down the saas route because of your skillset, but its important to ask yourself why you want to do this. Lifestyle design is talked about in the latest IH podcast and its worth listening too. @arvidkahl had two goals ( albeit after selling a saas ) to have an empty calendar and to only do things he enjoys doing - that resonates massively with me as I don't want to replace a hire pressure job with an even higher pressure saas business.

Once you are comfortable with the direction you are going in, develop your own framework that will help you get from where you are today to where you want to go. Definitely use the experience of others to develop this framework, but don't just copy what someone else is doing as it won't work for you. I've tried to copy what is working for others verbatim in the past and it mostly results in frustration, especially because you know someone else is making it work for them.

Focus on high value activities that get you closer to your goals and timebox to avoid spending more time than you should.

I found this post on mental models by Julian Shapiro very insightful - https://www.julian.com/blog/mental-model-examples

I found Richard Koch’s Star Principle and 80/20 Principle were both great eye openers, along with Perry Marshall’s 80/20 marketing, Dan Sullivan’s ebooks, and Lean Startup.

Hi Jason, I am in a similar path.
Really I've always been an entrepreneur, but at a web development company developing applications for customers. That is quite easy: if you give high quality dev services and support, customers come to you even if you do nothing. I also tried to enlarge the company, but, instead of programming, I was just jumping from a desk to another solving other programmers' problem: that was not what I wanted to do.
In 2019 I found there was space for a new king of CMS and then at the beginning of 2020 we had the first lock-down in Italy, so I used that time to write the first prototype of the product and released an MVP.
My idea was to leverage the React community to sell it and that worked for the first customers, but then I understood that customers don't come by themselves, even if you have a very good product. So I started learning marketing and sales and now... I am still learning and try to apply what I learn. We have more that 2000 users, but a few paid customers.
So, I think that the management mindset is not very different from programming: it is easy to learn how to manage a small <10 people company. The very different mindset is that of selling your product to the market: that is completely another thing to learn.
It requires time, resilience, actions that don't scale, ability to recover quickly from the moment when everything seems to go wrong. It's tough, and interesting.

Try to limit your coding time in project, that helps a lot

I am on a similar path, and so far I’ve found the following materials really helpful to me:

• Indie Hackers (Podcast)
• Lean Startup (Book)
• The Million-Dollar One-Person Business (Book)
• Actual execution of what I have in mind

All of them are helping me shift my mindset towards product development, bootstrapping, hypotheses testing.

I’d highly recommend listening to the interview with Mike Perham on Indie Hackers podcast.

It’s a great question how to shift gears and think more like an online marketer and business owner.

I found Richard Koch’s Star Principle and 80/20 Principle were both great eye openers, along with Perry Marshall’s 80/20 marketing, Dan Sullivan’s ebooks, and Lean Startup.

There’s a great debate on starting something totally new versus finding an established product category where people are already spending money, and differentiating within that category. The ‘scratch your own itch’ argument is also compelling because you can presumably spend more time building and defer some market research.

Another smart approach is to begin with the end in mind and create a landing page, advertise it on Google, and get an idea of your search terms and cost per lead (eg “join the waiting list” signups) before writing a line of code. Maybe even split test two project ideas that way and choose the winner before writing any code. You can build an MVP with more confidence if you already have a funnel started, and you might even get feedback from some early waiting list signups.

I transitioned from enterprise systems integration and consulting into a bootstrapped full time SaaS that covers my costs. It took a lot of trial and error but it’s been really satisfying. Good luck!

Heh, I feel you :)
Been a cofounder of 5-6 small size startups and the main lesson is that, you have to validate the ideas. The best approach for that is to learn to make a market reasearch, and being able to quickly test those via different channels

I tend to always start from developing something (feels more natural) and easier, than diving into unknown field

So, now less development and more reasearch
Reddit is super interesting , you can get quick quickly feedback on anything if you do it smart :)

It takes time. Read stories about engineers that have made the switch completely ex. Embedded Entrepreneur, Minimalist Entrepreneur.

Jason, I was you. As I worked in Oracle I started side SaaS dev on the weekends. My journey started in 2015. Lessons learned. Don't use your super tech experience to help you select a project/company. Start as small as you can, with a eye on early revenues. And Marketing/Sales is 55% of the requirement, not tech. Maybe even buy something small that already has some traction. .... https://medium.com/@yegg/78-takeaways-from-traction-book-1b44d2a03dda

One eye-opening thing for me when I first got started was the value of a good marketer. I thought I could do the marketing and designs myself - it didn't seem too hard - but when I teamed up with a marketer, the results went from 0 to 1. So these days I only create SaaS projects with a marketing partner. Preferably one that has deep understanding of the target audience.

Hey! I'm a founder of a couple of projects/tools (the latest one being BotMeNot) and after trying to multitask between various projects I've learned a couple of important lessons -

• Learn to manage your time properly
• Prioritize
• Delegate tasks that somebody else can do as efficiently as you

I think that once you shift to an entrepreneurial mindset you need to (for a lack of a better word) "leave behind" of the small-scale thinking and elevate your outlook to a more strategic one.