Are you building something for regular people?
There are lots of cool projects I see on here, but many of them are targeting developers, other indie hackers, businesses, and so on. I totally get why, because 1) you are also in that space and are familiar with it and 2) it's probably easier to get that audience to pay you for something.
But, I'm curious about products that are targeting regular people, maybe not people in the software industry. I'd love to hear what "regular folk" products people are making.
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Asked that same question today :). I’m also a bit frustrated that most of the startups
I see here and on twitter are for other startups devs… hard to find tips and practices for “non tech” products .
We’re building textomap.com.
It’s a web app the enables users to generate interactive shareable maps from text.
Users are content creators and educators.
That's an amazing product and idea!
Thanks Jasper, appreciate the kind words!
Haha, I've had the same frustration. So many products posted here are essentially ads to their target market as well.
I just checked out your site. Very cool idea! I love the execution of it all. Very simple explanation and super easy to use. I typed in some directions and saw exactly what the video described.
I really liked what I saw, but I can see the challenge being... how do I remember to use it when I need it? (I don't use Chrome, btw.) Are you targeting travel bloggers?
Thanks for the kind feedback!
Yes we started with travel bloggers and agents in mind, but we actually got a lot of users and interest from the educational sector . So basically there are several cases in which visualizing locations in text can come in handy.
We also realized that single users won’t use the product that often enough that they would pay for the premium plans . So basically we are a b2b or b2 org product at the end of the day.
Thank you for the extra bit of info. It sounds like you've learned a lot already about your target market.
Have you written anything about your journey with this particular product? It's such a unique product and the fact that you ended up with interest from the educational sector is fascinating to me. My only product right now is a flashcard app www.freshcardsapp.com and I'm finding there are certain features I could add that benefits education, but I feel like the space is not very lucrative for niche products.
Education is a tough sector definitely. I think for education products that have a cheap plan can succeed as the educator can get a budget of a few dollars if he really believes in the product . I am only starting now to write a bit about our journey, we’re also going to implement our premium plans soon, and then I guess we’ll have to reassess a lot. Freshcards looks awesome and ofcourse really useful for education. Have you reached out to that sector ? Students might appreciate this a lot
I'm building a website for regular people like me who like making cocktails at home. All you have to do is search by what liquor you have at home or just add it all once and always have a handy list of drinks you can make.
As of right now, it's in the alpha stage but I'm planning a first real release on IH next week, please, check it out! I would appreciate any kind of feedback :)
https://www.aperitiffo.com/
I was just wondering about this yesterday!
Im building a text-first flowchart app- definitely a bit technical in nature but absolutely meant for people outside of tech (especially students) as a quicker alternative to things like LucidChart.
https://flowchart.fun
Hey rob, checked it out - awesome. This is fantastic - i love how simple & straightforward it is and I'm gonna start using it! One heads up for this though is that I think the less technical crowd won't like this. Engineers & power users love doing everything in text, but the average person prefers drag and drop (hence why notion supports both).
That's a good point. It's on my roadmap to move more of the functionality, like changing node shapes and colors, to the mouse (without losing what's good about the text-first approach). Thank you for trying it out! 🙏
I am building a productized YouTube language translation service. https://dragoman.carrd.co
Why?
Only 527m people speak English natively. Imagine the size of your audience as a YouTuber if your videos were in other languages?
Why should your videos be in other languages?
We help YouTubers not restrict their demographic to only English speaking viewers by professionally translating their videos to the language of their viewers.
I'm not sure if what I am working on would fit under "regular people". I am building a mobile app for Creators to connect with other Creators. It's like Hinge but, for connecting.
Here's some info about it jemsocialapp.carrd.co
I'm working on creating a course to help people rewire their nervous systems to receive and maintain wealth. A lot of people don't realize that a huge reason they aren't making/holding onto wealth is because as children we're literally wired to repeat what we experienced (especially the first 7 years). So if you come from poverty, you're wired to maintain that state. That's what feels safe. And that's what ensures you remain within your in-group (tribe/family).
I've spent the last several years studying the nervous system (the last three I trained with the Somatic Experiencing Institute) and I've seen over and over again how working to rewire our body's response to receiving and maintaining wealth has a dramatic affect on how wealthy we are. And so few people are aware of this piece.
Anyway, it's a course for normal people! And I've found soo much value here on indie hackers.
Good idea - building up a capitalistic mindset; not just for people raised in poverty, but also raised in socialistic countries brain washed into believing that the state will take care of its citizens' needs.
I believe there're just so many ideas and ways how creators may help other creators while they're actually building something.
Take a look at these guys, they're just making fun stuff: https://tarocchi.vercel.app/
These guys are trying to be a better alternative of board apps, for regular folks, as you say: https://okso.app/
Or have you seen this? Mostly for road trip lovers: https://www.paperoad.com/
All three had launches on ProductHunt though
Thanks for the links. I really like the Paperoad idea. (I also appreciate that the /fr page shows appropriate examples for a French audience and the /en page shows North American examples.) I like seeing products that bridge the digital world and the physical world.
Another thing that's interesting with "regular people" producs is the landing pages are generally easier to understand. 😀
I’m building a documentation app for k-12 teachers to make documenting incidents, behaviors, and other important occurrences as easy as sending a text. I skipped the validation phase (bad practice, I know) because I personally experienced the problem myself when I taught!
I like it! Scratching your own itch, especially when your niche is unique is a great place to start.
I am building an app for couples to easily track memories and visited cities / countries
https://CoupleJoyApp.com
I am building Visual PDF, a web app to do many things with PDFs (100% free for now).
Nothing really new, there are already many web applications like mine. But I try to make a place for myself among them, adding exclusive features and trying to make them more intuitive and complete.
The ultimate goal is to offer the functionalities of Visual PDF via an API. In this case, it will no longer be a product totally for regular people, but partly for developers 😄
I'm building Cruise for freelancers!
It's a lightweight iOS app ($4.99/m) that lets freelancers separate their personal and business expenses, track their tax bill in real-time, and easily export their tax data (Schedule C) when they’re ready to file.
😵 The problem
I’ve been freelancing for 5 years and every year I scramble to do my books two weeks before taxes are due. Whether I used an accountant or used TurboTax, filing taxes as a self-employed person was always confusing and stressful.
🤔 I tried solving this problem with existing tools
Over the years, I tried many accounting tools, but they all felt overly complicated and expensive. For example, Quickbooks is clunky and starts at $15/m, and Wave is free but they have no mobile app and their support sucks. 🤷♂️
I'm 100% building PodQueue for regular people who just want to bookmark & listen to things they find that interest them! A big part of why I built it is that while there are some sites which almost-kind-of-sort-of solve this problem, none make it as easy to just save a link in seconds from your phone (or anywhere!) and have the audio automatically show up in your favorite podcast app—you know, how regular people want to do it, without going into their browser's developer tools and spending five minutes trying to find an audio link with network inspector.
Yep, hardy.app is for regular folk who lift weights in gym. It's also free and we plan to keep it free forever. A free app for consumers.
Also we'll try to keep it ad free and won't sell data. Hopefully at some point we can monetize private trainers who could sell their programming through our app, but it's a loooong road ahead until that can happen. So far 850 signups and counting.
I am building MovyDick a movie/show recommendation app for movie/show lovers.
For now you can get a random and blazingly fast recommendation in one click and you also can see where this movie or show is available: Netflix, Amazon Prime, Paramount, HBO Max...
Next feature that I am working on is "Personalized Recommendations" where you can have full control on the recommendations you get by selecting your favourite genre and favorite streaming service.
I'm building a productivity tool (Sidekick) that blocks distracting sites and runs your focus sessions.
Our users span all different roles (yes, some indie hackers) like students, doctors, lawyers, authors, etc. We even had a musician and a construction worker on there! Even though they all differ in everyday life, they have one main similarity - have a specific goal to reach or have a reason to get focused.
I recently tried my hands on Notion and built a Course Tracker to help organize and track online courses in a single dashboard.
Made around 250+ sales within a week and must say - it was fun and exciting! (I never imagined I could make this no. of sales just by selling Temaplates)
My Course Tracker was tailored for people who take up courses but often keep them pending.
I guess that counts as a regular folk product, doesn't it?
hiii
Yes! Indie hackers can use it but it's not explicitly marketed to them, I guess.
It's a stock discovery algorithm which so far is averaging 4.1% increase per day and 5.9% for the best stock of each day. We've recently started posting to twitter if anyone wants to check it out. Right now I'm sending data out every Monday that it finds something and days where I'm fairly confident it's going to do well.
My first project was a climate change app for "regular people". But now I am making tools for indie hackers
What was the main motivator to build for other indie hackers? Also, I think I’ve seen you post your link on most articles, so I suppose I’m familiar with it. 😆
Haha, yes I have been plugging it quite often these days...
Posting in IH is like talking on a conference, you know that there are other makers there but you don't really know who they are.
The WBE Space is like talking in your local meetup group. You know each other really well.
Always selling, nice 😅
Everyone sends professional emails, and a lot of people (me included) struggle with starting with a blank page and trying to figure out what to write. That's why I'm building kaduapp.com, the AI assistant that turns simple instructions into professional emails, so you can skip the writing process and jump straight into editing. It's currently in public beta and completely free to use.
Regular people have smartphones. Regular people hate using passwords.
We built HYPR so businesses & consumers can stop authenticating with passwords. We use smartphones, PKI infrastructure & federation protocols too easily & quickly deploy MFA that is adopted & used at scale.
I work with a handful of companies as a freelancer. All of the products are for "regular people" which I find to be kinda cool. That's not to say they aren't "niche" but we aren't making them for devs, or techies.
One product is a SaaS for lawn companies. Another is for writers. Another helps non-profits with volunteers and people management.
yeah, kinda. I'm building Flowful, which is an ambient music procedural generation app designed to keep you focused. IHhers / Devs may like it, but 'regular folk' / general knowledge workers do too.
I agree with you though. The shovel businesses can be annoying, especially when I am coming to a place like this and get sold things repeatedly. It can make you think that it's the only option as an IHer.
Not exactly regular people, but for SUALVI, I've been building templates and tools for people that edit with DaVinci Resolve. But I guess if IH start making videos and use DVR then they could fall into the target market aswell haha.
⚡️⚡️⚡️The metaverse is cool but there’s so much oppty in the universe right now!
You can turn that into a slogan. "Don't build for the meta-verse, build for the uni-verse!"
When I’m explaining my app to people I tell them our solution works from the universe to the metaverse. They always smile and laugh 😊
I am making greetsapp.com - a crypto fuelled kindness app.