Please stop inventing. Instead, start improving!
Here's a message I want every new IndieHacker and Entrepreneur to hear out loud: Stop inventing!
I spent almost 10 years building innovative digital products. I'd begin with a grand picture of what the markets needed - and built it.
I put heart and soul into creating the best products. I spent nights making my code scalable to 50,000 simultaneous users; when I had none. I made important choices about databases, frameworks et al after spending hours on research.
I wrote the top-class code. Every space, tab and comment in my code was well thought. Months went by; but my ego needed more massage.
Guess what?
No one cared.
No one cared if my site's loading time was reduced by 300%.
No one cared about the javascript wizardry I had implemented.
Heck. No one even cared about my product. The product I built to make people's lives better.
I've fell flat on my face multiple times. I don't want you to repeat the mistakes I did.
Look, the market doesn't care about your innovation. You've to be really lucky to launch something people haven't seen before and make it successful.
Don't waste a decade of your life on innovating things that markets don't care about. Oh yeah, the markets are SUPER BRUTAL, baby!
Instead, start improving established things.
Remember, you are an Indie Hacker; not a world's top innovator. Your top goal should be to build something that markets accept.
Think about making the world a better place after you've built a steady MRR.
Look at the products or services that are already established and make money.
Specifically, look at the growing markets where competition is low. Such markets are hard to spot; but you'd better spend your next 2 months finding the right market (I said market, not product or idea).
Then figure out what is it that you can do better. For example, can you improve the UI/UX for an existing app? Can you make it easier?
YES YOU CAN!
Then build the simplest version of the product (MVP) and test it out in the market.
If you can find a few people willing to pay money for your product or service, you're all set. You know your path forward.
Keep in mind. The biggest innovators were not the 'first ones'.
- Google wasn't the first Internet search engine.
- Facebook wasn't the first social network.
- Tesla didn't make the world's first electric car.
- You got the point.
Don't run after innovation. Outsource it to people with money and time. You simply find some good market and launch your product in it. If the market is good, you'll find buyers. If not, you'll still save a lot of time.
I'm super proud of building CrazyEngineers. Working on it gave me the clarity I needed in life as an entrepreneur.
I'm currently building Testimonial Guru. If you want to automate testimonials on your website/app, consider becoming an early adopter.
If my post offers you some clarity, upvote it.
I welcome your questions, comments and thoughts.
Just execution of an existing business idea is hard enough, even if it's just a clone.
Add innovation and you're really out of your depth as a solo indie hacker.
Pick battles that you have a chance at winning.
"Pick battles that you have a chance at winning" - that's the summary!
Users don't care about what technology or framework you used. They will only pay for the product they need. This applies in any country around the world.
That's true.
My strategy after 21 years of building businesses is to innovate on the familiar.
100% agree that creating a market is tedious and expensive, and not ideal for bootstrappers.
But thanks to the commoditization of code, markets are also becoming increasingly saturated, with many products presenting as [negligibly] better options than dozens of others in a space.
With time at a premium, and perceived high switching costs, our solutions really have to be a WOW right at the outset if we hope to garner much attention, let alone monetizable traction.
A solution still needs striking novelty. Something noteworthy, unique, intriguing, fresh, or surprising.
Consumers and B2B are all thinking more like journalists - what's your angle? Why should I care? Why should I give this the time of day?
Preach! First to market doesn't mean much anymore.
Correct. We are indie hackers, and most of us need to find our own successes first. First to market is risky; but it's could be highly rewarding as well. As someone mentioned, we need to choose our battles wisely.
Very well written post, and I fully agree. Whatsoever, being very much identical version of yourself, I have to add some things here that could be important to some other Software Engineers.
I've spent past 13 years working as a senior software engineer and the way we operate and work is a bit different.
So, let me try to elaborate.
Very often times engineers will want to build something because they can either use it as a learning platform, or to challenge them selves. For instance, a nodejs developer might be tempted to build their next API in Go (Golang) so they have an excuse to learn Go. Whatsoever, that person might be fully fluent in Node and the ecosystem and might be able to build an API in Node in a few days.
Same pattern applies to any other piece of stack (a client framework/library, database, etc).
So if you are reading this and trying to build a product, I'd really focus on answering the most fundamental question. Are you building whatever you are building because you want to build a product or a company, or because you want to learn. If the answer is the first one, then use the tools you are absolutely the most comfortable with. If the answer is second, you will most probably not end up building the product anyway, because along the way, you will get lost in technicalities, your morale will go down and that project is gonna end up as another private Github repo. And trust me, I know this because I have literally hundreds of those.
For me personally, I'm building https://programmer.network and for the first time in my life, I have truly decided to build a side project that I want to release, and due to that, I want with the stack I've spent more then 10 years with and my main goal, while preserving the absolute quality, is to release the product.
Cheers
Thank you for the appreciation, @programmer_network. I guess the devs and the non-devs read the post differently. The developers think that we'll be judged on the basis of quality of code by the markets. That's not true.
I made a wild assumption that all Indie Hackers are trying to build something that they can sell. If that's the case - sticking to tech-stack you are most comfortable with makes sense. Btw, subscribed to the list at programmer.network and looking forward to beta testing.
Pretty cool to hear this! "The developers think that we'll be judged on the basis of quality of code by the markets. That's not true."
I'm an aspiring developer and candidly this is a barrier to my learning frequently.
I wrote an article to help devs learn to code the right way: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/learn-to-code-the-right-way-4c20f1c0a5
"The developers think that we'll be judged on the basis of quality of code by the markets. That's not true."
Absolutely agree.
I think there's a significant difference between us, Software engineers as indie hackers and non-developers. This can be easily proven by the number of unfinished projects that each of us have, and I have no doubt your Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket is full of those as well (excuse my assumption in case I'm wrong). We build to impress, to learn new stuff, etc. And since most of the time, the actual product is the least of our desires, we rarely reach any meaningful point.
I used to run biggest JS meetup in Copenhagen, and I spoke to many developers over this time period. The irony is, it's very hard to find a co-founder(s) for your idea, because most people are always working on something but almost never finishing anything.
My personal breakthrough was exactly understanding why it was happening to me. I think a good comparison would be game development community. You have many developers who think that they want to build games, and then instead of picking amongst literally hundreds of awesome game engines out there, they start building a physics engine, map editor, etc. and they never actually get to build the game.
And by the way, thanks a bunch for the sub. I'm nearly there with a good working/looking MVP. It's coming soon! :)
Awesome! I'll look forward to testing your MVP. Would appreciate a sub on testimonial.guru ; if you are planning to add testimonials :-)
Something everyone starting out has to read :)
I tend to agree here.
There are just so so so many opportunities to find customers on the internet. There's enough to go around and rarely does it take an entirely novel idea to start earning passive income. Or at least that's what I've seen on indie hackers a lot.
Super cool!
True - this is exactly what we did at Lordicon.com - adding movement to static icons.
Your site is slick - exploring now...
... and it's awesome.
As an engineer, you have probably heard of the "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" saying.
If you have any good load time (under a second or two), you are good to go, don't spend time unless your users explicitly tell you that they have an issue with the speed on your site. That goes for all other features you might have been working on: don't build it, unless someone needs it.
Absolutely! I made that mistake several times. Not anymore. As a developer, it's hard to resist the feeling though ;-).
It is usually called innovation.
I understand the spirit of your advice. Semantics at play though. Imho, whether it's incremental innovation (improving as you state) or moonshots, if you are adding value, it's innovative to me. Innovation horizons is one way to think about it too...
You are right. Improvement or innovation - always needs to create value.
There is something in our human nature that makes us look for new frontiers, I suspect that's the same nature that lean us towards inventing new digital products instead of iterating on existing ones.
The word innovate got too much buzzword energy.
Improving even a small part of an established product will actually feel like an innovation in the correct market.
That's absolutely right.
I like the look of Testimonial Guru! I'll definitely need some help with that on my next couple of projects, so entered my email to try in the future.
Thank you! You'll be among the first ones to get access as soon as we launch in private.
Great post. I think people get carried away with using the latest and greatest tech for their projects and spending too much time perfecting their code as well.
In reality, you can always work on that later. Yes, it may be difficult but at least you got the product out first and validated it rather than wasting a bunch of valuable time you will never get back.
It's also always surprising to see new products take a spin on current ideas. People will cling to anything they feel is valuable to them whether its a game or regular saas product.
Yes! Developers are focused on problems they like to solve. The problem #1 is always getting the first users; scalability can be handled later on. Facebook was built with PHP and they built HHVM to support the load. The key is to start building with whatever tech-stack you are comfortable with and make money asap. You can always hire the top RUST developer if your product needs RUST.
Hmm, you say people don't care about new inventions I'm not sure people care about existing markets either, or what is similar to existing things. Ultimately it will be something they want or don't want.
I would argue it is just as difficult to find traction with imprvements on existing things as with creating new things, if not harder. It's a really dangerous trap to fall into 'i'll just make a better x and people will come flocking' I have seen this fail so many times. Even big players fall into this trap. Facebook for example thought it could improve on snapchat by making 'poke' a snapchat knockoff but where all your friends already were. Any VC at the time would've agreed, facebook will kill snapchat if it makes a clone, all logic would agree this is a better product as it has a lower barrier to entry. However, poke was a complete flop.
You are saying; find something and make it better which is logical, however human behavior is far from logical. If I got the best business minds together to come up with a better 'Coca Cola' they would say, 'ok we need to make it taste better than coke and be half the price and we will win.' Yet the only serious competior to coca cola in the last 30 years has been Red Bull which tastes like crap and costs twice as much.
I totally agree that people should not waste a load of time building things without knowing if anyone wants it but I do think that you can come up with entirely novel products and services that can be equally or more successful. The point is that getting early customer feedback is the key rather than making improvements to existing products. The danger with the latter is that you forget to understand why the customer uses the product in the first place and you end up making poke as opposed to facebook stories or better coke as opposed to Red Bull.
People don't care about anything. They only care if the product or service solves the real pain-point they have and can't fix themselves.
Finding traction is difficult. But it's more difficult in unexplored markets. You've to be lucky. Who'd have thought that 'link-in-bio' would be a big deal? It's a risky game; but the rewards are insane.
In proven markets, you can build up an improvement over existing solutions and build a sustainable business - I think which is what relates to most of us at IH.
Your coke example is right. This post is meant for IndieHackers, not for the industry disrupters.
"The second mouse gets the cheese" is a saying that has many examples in business.
I don't get why such solid advice might've confused some people. Obviously there's no one single formula for every single scenario out there. Personally, whenever I read or hear a piece of advice, I try to apply it to my unique situation and see how I can use it to better myself. Sometimes the advice applies to my situation, sometimes it doesn't. It's as simple as that.
In this case, what you wrote actually hits a little bit too close to home for me, lol. I'm actually guilty of optimizing something I didn't need to this very day! So thanks for the reminder to focus on what really matters!
I actually thinkg this completely depends on the person and his financial situation...
A. Indie hacker with savings for 5 years and a well dose of creativity? I would suggest her/him to innovate and take some risk.
B. Indie hacker with savings for a year and less creative mind? I would suggest to take the safest route and stablish a good "base income" before getting riskier.
I don't think there is a "strong rule" between the innovate vs improve dicotomy!
Keep rocking @thebigk
Thank you, @ikigai. Sure, there is no strong rule. There will be inventors and there will be innovators.
I think another way of saying this is that it is often easier to create revenue in established markets, rather than trying to create a market from scratch.
If you think about it, one simple model that is time tested is just to take an existing product or service and offer it at the lowest market price.
This instantly becomes your unique selling point (USP) and also means customer have a compelling reason to buy your product over others, assuming all other things are equal.
That said, if you have the talent and desire to invent, try it, what's the worst that will happen? It might not be successful.. well thats the same result as not trying, so you've lost nothing and gained experience.
Yes, that is correct. It's risky to discover new markets. We all are competing against time and success is not guaranteed.
Emotional, but to the point!
I agree, in trying to find his "blue ocean," an entrepreneur may never release his product.
We used the same approach that you described - we analyzed the pros and cons of other online chatbot platforms, plus we collected developers' experiences and decided that just creating a new constructor is boring... Improved it, combined all the good ideas and now the beta version of inqoob is out) http://Inqoob.com
there is no limit to perfection, there is always something to improve, i think so. In all areas and businesse
Thank you for the comment. When multiple improvements come together; it's often perceived as innovation. Inqoob looks promising. All the best!
And thank you) your thoughts and ideas are nice to discuss
It's pretty much a risk assessment:
Focus on improving if your capabilities are limited. Innovate if you have the knowledge, budget and manpower.
As @thebigk recommends "Think about making the world a better place after you've built a steady MRR.", it makes sense to work incrementally first and dive into innovations as soon as you have a foundation.
Thanks for your sharing, though I think the point shall be studying your market before randomly setting off.
A speak to a lot of creators on Twitter who say things like...
"someone has already built my idea, so what is the point..."
I try and tell them that it is a good thing that someone else has built a similar product or service. This means there is already a market and your competitor may have already have validated this for you.
It is much easier to enter an existing market than to create a new one.
Yes, that exactly is the point!
Amen.
I think there's a lot of innovations out there that can be reapplied to different niche/market. To actually innovate something that's not done before is either really easy or really hard.
Agreed. It's either easy or hard; but this post is about finding the right markets for the innovation. That's ALWAYS hard, unfortunately.
No one care if you improve the speed of your site, but if your sites are too slow for SURE no one will care about your services imho
Yep. I'm talking about countless hours spent in making site go from 800 ms load time to 200 ms. No one cares in the initial days; as long as the service is useful and has decent load time. Of course, this does not apply to every use case out there. Some sites need to be faster to serve the purpose.
Great point on the historical examples. It's important to remember Google, Tesla, et al were definitely not the first in their fields, but they reign completely supreme bc of a better user experience.
Do you care to briefly discuss what other things you've "poured your heart and soul into" that there simply wasn't a market for and nobody cared about? I think concrete examples would be very helpful here.
Sure thing! At CrazyEngineers, I built a large community of engineers, with a few thousand daily visitors. I thought the next logical step for me to evolve the platform as an 'app ecosystem' - a platform that'll host multiple web-apps specifically targeted at engineers. Like resume builder for engineers, jobs for engineers and so on.
Since I love playing quizzes, I thought engineers will love playing real-time quizzes. I began building 'Quizzr' - a real-time quizzing app. The app would ask engineers to register for upcoming quiz. Registered members would then participate in the quiz in real time and get their scores and rank. I even built a payment system to let people pay to get access to quiz analysis.
The system was ready for 20,000 simultaneous users because - who doesn't love quizzes? :-D
I only got to 40 simultaneous players even with the best of efforts. No one paid for quiz analysis.
I will relaunch the app in future; in a new avatar. But it was a lesson for me.
I hope this helps. Will be happy to answer any questions you may have.
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Haha, yes! It's meant to be a simple post. English ain't my first language; and I don't inspire to be a grammar ninja. The tone may have gone off a bit; but I'm happy that majority of people seem to have liked what I wrote.
I'm not against innovation. All I'm saying is - we have limited resources (time and money). Spend it wisely.
lol I agree. I didn't take it as a commend either. Sometimes stating a firm opinion can agitate people's sense of self, it seems.
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That’s not a simple lesson, especially if you come from deep technical background.
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If you have been living long enough, you might have realised that people learn differently.
I wouldn't hammer anybody after they've said they learned something just because I think they took longer than I expected them to take.
Maybe I think like that because I've seen people taking off at different stages in their lives.
Yeah, because for the first 10 years I actually built a very successful product and failed building new innovative products. Doesn't mean I was a gross failure for 10 years. :-D
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@Primer Why should he stop telling people what to do? We are all adults capable of assess what’s best for each of us.
I wish you all the best, friend.
Correct. Following trends can be a very easy road to disaster too.Ask me how I know. The main point is that as a solo founder your time and money are very limited, so you need to test things fast, iterate fast, kill your children if they dont show signs of traction and so on. You can loose it a little bit if you have a supplementary income, partners, investors...and even then, not too much, life is still short.
@Primer indeed, you just told him what to do: "Please stop telling people what to do" 😅
That's his opinion, obviously we are all adults to evaluate and act on it.
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No hard feelings, I just found it funny the fact that you were doing exactly what you were asking him not to do! I am sure you have our best interest in mind you did so! ☮
Indeed, I totally agree with you, but I wouldn't write it because...I don't like telling other people what to do unless they ask.
I think he just wrote a strong title to grab the attention, and the post is a bit "too strong" and biased. But, hey...this is his post, so let's let him express his opinion and we will evaluate whether we like it or not! :)