What advice do you have for the indies who are just starting out?

I have built 2 SaaS products, Micro SaaS Ideas Newsletter with 25K subscribers and Closed community of builders and also created Zero To Founder

Here are my pointers:

• Do more research
• Start small
• Don't build full blown products to start with
• Build MVPs and Improve Waitlist Signups
• Build Side projects, Free High quality Content as part of marketing
• Send time on marketing also in parallel to building product
• Read 'The Mom Test'. This helps asking better questions to your wait list users
• Leverage closed communities
• Leverage Betalist, ProductHunt, IH, Reddit as much as possible.
• Share your stories and build traction on social media if you have some presence
• Leverage Cold outreach if required
• Leverage Ads but stay small and limit to less than $100 to build your waitlist

Start small. It's important to start small and focus on building a minimum viable product (MVP) that includes only the essential features. This will help you get your product to market faster and allow you to test it with real users.

I started this indie hacker journey one year back and these are the things I learnt

1. Launching sooner is more important than anything
   2.No need to worry about fonts or colours or minute things, all it matters is customers and sales. So, launch even if your product is not looking good
2. Always validate the idea before building. Saves a lot of time and money
3. Start promoting your product from Day one
4. Build in public
5. Launch on platforms like Product Hunt, Betalist, and communities like Indie Hackers, and subreddits

I curated some of the resources that will help you in launching and promoting your product

1. List of places to promote your product
2. Product Hunt Launch Guide

• niche tighter than you think you should. It's easier to market a service that's super-well defined and targeted to a small constituency
• read the book "The One Thing" by Gary Keller (or listen to his pod with Tim Ferriss). This is probably the single most powerful idea for startup founders IMO. It's how to prune a massive todo list down to the 1-2 things that can actually move the needle and as a bonus you don't constantly feel underwater and behind.
• "fall in love with the problem not the solution" <- ie. develop empathy for your users. Most founders start with an idea, build it, then talk to prospects only to find they built the wrong thing. To the extent you can, try to have those conversations ASAP
• Do Steve Blank's free Udacity course. It's so incredibly valuable in teaching customer development
• think of everything as an experiment. Even at the point when you have revenue you're still just running experiments to learn the next optimization
• find the pods and conferences that resonate and help motivate you but don't become a conference junkie (it makes you feel like you're making progress but it's just an escape at that point)
• develop an advisory board of people who have been through it and sanity-check your approach. This accountability will force you to write things out and anytime you have to explain your own thinking you usually learn just what that is
• to the degree you can minimize your personal burn rate you extend your runway considerably.
• lastly, take care of your mental health. There's this weird dynamic that develops where killing yourself with insane hours is a "badge of entrepreneurship." That's dumb. Burnout is real. Work smart, not hard. good luck

Think global, but act local!

Stop thinking and get started. You'll find it much easier to learn as you go.

Problems seem huge initially, but once you solve a few small ones you'll gain momentum.

Try to enjoy the learning process, rather than getting frustrated with failures.

Hey Basharath! as you mentioned your tech stack includes serverless. Could you suggest some serverless cloud providers for a beginner who's launching his first product?

As a new indie - this thread is super timely.

What are you using for your tech stack? Feels like there's an overwhelming amount of options...

Love the replies from everyone thus far!

– Start small

– Be consistent

– Get early feedback

– Celebrate small wins

– Don't engage with haters

– Ask for help when needed

– Balance build/marketing

– Experiment with pricing

– Share your progress

– Talk to customers

– Get enough sleep

I want to add my experiences as Backend Dev and to the "Just do it" mantra:

Yes, just do it, but plan ahead what your MVP will be, what are you key features. But don't overthink all possible workflow.

• Forget perfection.
• No full blown (remember MVP and key Features).
• Start marketing parallel, if building the product takes longer than 2 weeks.
• Make at least a todo list for the development phase, then you know what are you building and you see what is already done. Trust me, you can save wasted hours this way.
• Everything takes longer to build as planned. But remember, you don't need all features for MVP

Just do it: If you never start you will never get there. Just start working on something, anything at all!

Don't strive for perfection: when start working on your product. To quote, "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." — Reid Hoffman

Learn marketing: New features won't help you land new customers. Marketing did! Promote your service shamelessly because if you don't do it, nobody else would do it for you.

Just work like fuck on your product (that includes doing everything you can to speak to users) and don't waste time and energy chasing likes / followers on social media.

I agree with basically everyone here, especially with the validate as soon as you can and with as little building as you can.

I am actually doing a sort of "experiment". While I have been an entrepreneur for awhile now, I am starting over with a new project, and I find myself having to re-give myself beginner advice. Because as you advance I feel like you soon forget what it was actually like to live those very first steps.

For anyone interested, I am recording my journey on medium.
Part 1 - https://medium.com/@guastavino.m/rerouting-starting-again-as-an-entrepreneur-5a678a43ffbc
Part 2 - https://medium.com/@guastavino.m/advice-to-my-older-self-part-2-8e2d7afe2277

I would say SHIP fast!

The worst thing that you can have is an idea but you don't take any action on it.

For example just this week, I had a viral app idea. Instead of sitting on the idea, I coded it immediately and got it up and running in 3 hours app that generates AI comments of Karen. Keeping momentum and always having bias for action is key!

Make yourself a plan and assess your progress. What do you want to achieve in 1 month, 2 months, etc

Reverse the process of mvp->marketing->sales to marketing->sales->mvp

1. Don't jump into building mvp's.
2. Create a landing page of your product
3. Create a guide of how to use your product
4. Create blog posts about how your product is useful before writing single line of code
5. Talk to users, point them to your landing page and user guide. Tweak your features and messaging based on user input and get commitment from your customers that if this is built they would indeed use it and pay for it.
6. Start building mvp and posting about your development in public also keep your users updated and involve them in beta testing.
7. Launch

Start with a small product first before trying to build a more ambitious business. Read Rob Walling's stair-step approach for more:
https://robwalling.com/2015/03/26/the-stair-step-method-of-bootstrapping/

Don't listen just do!

Exactly, just keep it simple! Even if the idea might be really cool, when you are a newcomer - you just might have no experience for realization.

I launched 6 mobile apps as an indie and 4 apps as a lead developer. Here is what I can say from my current experience:

1. Launch as fast as possible. Faster you've got first lead from ads and promotion, first users's feedback, first $1 from sale on your bank account, then faster you understand how full cycle of micro-business works. And as a result the direction of scaling.

2. Let it burn. If something goes wrong and you haven't resources to solve it, don't panic. Just prioritize things, be honest with your users and keep moving.

3. In any case, advices are subjective. As an Indie, everything depends on you. From your skills, your mentality, your motivation and your boldness. Someone, like me, need months and even years to get to first sales, because of lots of fears that isn't exists in reality. Someone, can fail big, get up and build new product in one month. So, listen to yourself first.

• Be aware of the survivorship bias.
• Be self-aware of your idea, product and yourself.

Move in with your girlfriend/boyfriend. In the very likely case you run out of money, it's always nice to have someone pay the rent.

Find a product with existing demand (aka other companies are successfully selling) and find a way to differentiate your offering in a way that convinces the target audience to buy from you and not the existing competitors.

The traditional way is to focus on the product - better quality, different features, lower price etc. but IMO that's not the best approach. It's hard. The one that I advocate (as detailed on forum and on my website) is based on differentiating your business by building an ideology/belief system that only you sell.

I would say creating stage based experiments focused on Demo, Sell, Build ideology is great when thinking about testing business models.

This helps make it so that you're more likely to build something people want.

Before programming lately I've been starting with creating a landing page or pitch deck then getting emails or generating revenue.

After validating the idea then I start working on the actual application or delivering the value promised.

If you focus on building first then you may build something that people aren't interested in and deciding what to do with that kind of product/project can be stressful.

Don't try to change the world with your first startup. Do something small and boring instead. There are lots of boring ideas, if something doesn't work, move to the next one.

"Validate" doesn't mean "ask your fellow indie hackers if it's a good idea". It means "send your prospect a Stripe payment link and see if they pay". If they want to see your project first, build a prototype that does what they would pay for.

Some people manage to get their first paying users even without an MVP. But that requires certain sales skills. I got 3 customers without a landing page but I only build an MVP when someone told me they would pay X but they wanted to see it first.

On the other hand, if you build a plugin/extension/addon, you'll be able to get a few dollars even without validation or much marketing. It will probably make you more confident and move to the next step.

I just wrote a post about this!

Here's an excerpt:

Try to get one stranger’s email address online.

Then try to generate $1 online.

If that thing that generates $1 feels like it has legs, keep going with it.

If not, try to come up with something to make $100. And keep going from there.

You know you can create products, so start getting used to trying to exchange it for money. But start small, it’ll help you move faster, and force you to spend less time on the product before trying to get it in front of people.

If you aren’t sure what to make, you could:

• Look on sites like Fivver, and see what jobs people are looking to get done, and see if you can automate any of them

• Create a PDF of something you know about and put in on a site like Gumroad

• Create a PDF compiling information about, well, anything and put in on a site like Gumroad

• Find a Chrome extension that has a good number of installs, but low ratings, and see if you can make a better one

• Find a useful script you’ve written and offer it in exchange for an email address

• Offer to make a friend a website, and note any time you’re having a hard time getting it to do what you want. How can you simplify that for others?

There are endless ways to approach this, the point is to just thing small, don’t overthink it, and keep trying things. You’ll learn so much and you’ll gathering momentum and it’ll build. Eventually you’ll realize how far you’ve come!

Full post here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/what-i-wish-i-was-had-been-when-starting-on-my-entrepreneurial-journey-3376fa1005

My advice:

Don't keep building forever, bring the MVP as early as possible.