The "aha" moments that changed everything for these founders

"Aha" moments are crucial for founders, but they tend to be few and far between. Let's speed things up.

Here are the aha moments of 18 successful indie hackers so that you don't have to wait around for your own. 👇

Decouple input from output

👤 Tony Dinh of TypingMind:

Decoupling your input with your output.

Maybe not an aha "moment", but over time, I slowly realized that people don't buy my app because I spent 1,000 hours on it, but because the app is useful to them. That means as long as the app is useful, they'll buy it at a reasonable price. How many hours I spent building the app is irrelevant.

Realizing this changed the way I look at products and helped me find new ideas much more easily. I can build an app in 1 hour, and if the app solves a painful problem, people will pay for it. I can build an app once and then sell it forever.

You can't decouple your input from your output with a 9-5 job.

Transferable concepts

👤 Arvid Kahl of The Bootstrapped Founder:

A media business is just like a SaaS: Churn and retention are central to the revenue I can achieve, the content I create needs to solve people's critical problems or they won't consume it, and diversification of dependencies is paramount. For a SaaS, that's vendors like the kind of hosting and customer service tool you use; for a media business, it's the distribution platforms like Twitter, YouTube, or newsletters.

The products are wildly different, but the mechanics are the exact same. This is why reading business books "outside your lane" can be very helpful. Most of the concepts are transferable.

"Then what?"

👤 Charlie Clark of Liinks:

I've recently been thinking a lot about the short story commonly known as "The Tourist and the Fisherman". It's a quick read, but a life-changing one. The moral is basically to ask yourself, "Then what?" every time you make a decision, whether in business or life.

It's so easy to get sucked into this grind for more — more growth, more revenue, more everything. But what are you really hustling for?

For me, the lightbulb really went off when I decided not to chase VC funding for Liinks. It just clicked that the whole "go big or go home" route wasn't really what I wanted. So instead, I doubled down on keeping things lean, cutting costs, and running a business that practically takes care of itself. This lets me enjoy the best of both worlds: I get a nice stream of passive income and still have time to kick back and do other things I love.

Product-market fit

👤 Iron Brands of Simple Analytics:

The feeling of product market fit. I built an internship business for three years, and it was super hard to make it grow and keep our clients happy.

The opposite was true at Simple Analytics. People loved it and told other people about it. We started growing organically. It was something I had never experienced myself before.

Product-market fit is a gut feeling. You can feel it when it's there. Especially if you have experience with not having it.

👤 Steven Goh of Proxycurl:

It came when we decided to focus on a very specific target market. Everything fell into place. We knew how to price within this market. We knew where to reach out to our target audience for our marketing efforts. And most importantly, we learned to say no to customers a whole lot.

Saying “we're not a good fit for your needs” is a superpower.

Nail your niche

👤 Eric Alli of Siimple:

One big “aha” moment came when I realized that competition matters less and less the more deeply I understand my specific users and their pain points and needs. I’ve focused most of my business strategy on the niches and depth in serving users rather than breadth in trying to be everything to everyone.

👤 Mike Strives of Upvoty:

Nailing down our target audience. At the start, we wanted to be a user feedback tool for anyone building an online product, which makes sense, but real growth comes from solving a particular problem for a specific audience. You can always expand from there.

Distribution > product.

👤 Daniel Ch of SignHouse:

The moment I realized distribution > product.

That doesn’t apply to everyone. I’m not in it to innovate. I’m in it to make money in a healthy way by providing a lot of value to people and charging for it.

Actually do the marketing

👤 Tim Bennetto of Pallyy:

Starting to actually do marketing was my "aha" moment. Not just doing a social media post here and there, but actually doing things that drive traffic even if it takes time.

Decrease the BS in your brand

👤 Kevin McArdle of Big Band:

When we launched Big Band, we were very intentional about the brand and how we spoke to people. I have a low tolerance for BS and business speak, so part of the intention was just being honest and authentic with people.

The "aha" moment has been how much that no-BS brand has connected with people.

No one cares what you think about your product

👤 Jay Tan of Zylvie:

The most effective marketing is marketing that comes from other users, not from you. There's no greater social proof than seeing/hearing someone other than you waxing lyrical about how wonderful your product is and the specific benefits that they got out of it.

I learned this quite soon with Zlappo, when I realized nobody gave a damn when I wrote long blog posts expounding the benefits of my own product, but, when I surveyed my users who ended up upgrading, I discovered they chose my product because their favorite influencer swore by it. This is why I firmly believe that the "benefits" section of your landing page should really just be a bunch of testimonials from happy customers, instead of stuff you come up with on your own (self-praise is no praise after all).

And your marketing taglines should also just be specific phrases lifted verbatim from your happy customers' testimonials. There's no better copywriting strategy than simply using your customers' own words back at them.

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Perceived value > actual value

👤 Jay Tan of Zylvie:

And this also leads me to the realization that perceived value > actual value. Customers are human beings, and human beings are herd creatures. They don't necessarily pay for what's objectively good. They pay for what appears to be good.

And this goes beyond social proof. Sometimes you can create non-value-adding features that cause your users to stay onsite longer or keep coming back to check for new updates. Vanity metrics/analytics are a great example of that. If your customers keep using your product, and they spend a lot of time on your app, it will feel very useful to them, regardless of whether it's actually useful, thus justifying your price tag and reducing churn.

An example for Zlappo was the "unfollowers" feature -- I added a feature where you can track who unfollowed you on Twitter, and it's updated daily. So many users checked their unfollowers list daily, even though it added very little value to their audience-building efforts. But it made my app sticky and increased the perceived value of it.

Perception is everything. Customers don't buy logically. They buy emotionally, and they justify their purchase later using logic.

Entrepreneurship through acquisitions

👤 Andrew Pierno of XO Capital:

I'll never forget the first business we bought and the next day we started getting stripe notifications about new customers. That was addictive, given how long I'd struggled to get even a single customer of my own.

Go B2B

👤 JT of No Code Founders:

Businesses spend money WAAAY easier than consumers. Targeting businesses is a much easier way to make money as a small business.

Don't forget enterprise tiers

👤 Arjun Jain of pre.dev:

When we first built pre.dev, we thought we would solely focus on founders who are looking to build their MVPs. While there is an abundance of such founders, the likelihood of them using pre.dev on a day-to-day basis was low. They were great for getting us one-time build payments, but not the recurring revenue we wanted.

We then decided to reach out to agencies. We changed the pitch and talked about using pre.dev as a way to drastically reduce their own client onboarding time. It hit well and inspired us to quickly build out our enterprise interface.

Harness nocode

👤 Dustin Stout of Magai:

I think the biggest "aha" moment was really when I learned to use no code tools to connect APIs to front-end apps. When I realized how to do this it unlocked SO much for me. Not having the high-level coding skills always seemed like my ideas were going to require heavy capital to execute. But no code allowed me to unleash those ideas without the capital-intensive barrier.

Focus on the simplest factor

👤 Sébastien Night of OneTake.ai:

About six months into the project, my friend asked me why the hell my MRR was still basically flat.

I gave all sorts of answers about how we hadn't reached product-market fit yet, and our webinars didn't convert yet because of missing features X and Y, and so on.

He made me see that all of these were just really smart excuses. Everything changed as soon as I started focusing on one simple thing: "How can we grow our MRR +10% or +20% compared to last month?"

It was clear which features to build. It was clear how to talk about the product, including renaming the company. And it was clear which team members to hire.

You can't just say, "I'll just keep making the product better, and more people will come." That doesn't work.

But somehow, "I need more people to come and I'll focus on that," will drive you to make a better product.

Don't quit too early

👤 Kyle Nolan ofProjectionLab:

The time when I was one day away from halting work on it.

I had built an event-based finance simulator to replace one of my convoluted spreadsheets. I was satisfied that it did most of what I needed for my own planning, and a few shares to places like Reddit were met with little (i.e. no) fanfare. So I thought, "mission accomplished, time to move on."

I posted the link to HN just for kicks, but didn't bother checking back in... then an hour later I found my email inbox blowing up.

That unexpected surge of interest and enthusiasm from a notoriously critical community gave me the push I needed to really believe in the project's potential.

No "aha"; just grit

👤 Alexander Isora of Unicorn Platform:

Progress is made up of countless small steps. There's no sudden revelation. The only "aha" moment I had was when I realized that pursuing "aha" moments was futile.

Just make consistency and grit a lifestyle and you'll achieve everything you want.