I’m not sure if you’ve seen some of my last posts, but with the challenges of getting older and the world economy, I am considering placing a great deal of my spare time into building an online “platform” of some sorts. The larger questions I need to solve is that of a real-world problem, something that you would (a) may need and (b) be willing to pay say $5-9/month.
Being a single developer too, it cannot be too ambitious in terms of infrastructure costs - therein lies the rub as they say.
Even if it is low-hanging fruit, it could stand out if the platform offers a better workflow; of course, this will require research into seeing what alternatives exist out there already.
One that I’m leaning towards really is educational content, behind a partially closed pay wall.
I’ve seen some really smart developers do amazing things that are really left-field, like Send an online one time fax | JustFax Online this is basically a Twilio FAX API wrapper. Technically, it’s a case of elbow grease, but the actual genius here is that it fulfilled a void in the market with ease of use.
First of all, congratulations on finding the mental space, willpower, and courage to consider taking this step. Second, let me just say that “build it, and they will come” is, in my opinion, the worst approach — EVER.
I run an ML consulting and implementation service, (we also have the skillset to develop custom software and are used to bootstrap technology prototypes for startups). This background is important to understand where this story is going. During and after the Covid era, we had spare cash but a tough market, lots of free time, engineering power, and no urgent delivery pressures. My business partner and I decided to dive into some of our side projects with full force. We launched at least five projects, each with varying levels of time commitment. They were all ideas we thought would fill a void for our customers—products we, as developers, felt were missing in the market or were stupid enough to pursue. And guess what? We made exactly zero money—ZERO!
Over time, we learned a lot and eventually managed to get one side project off the ground. This one was different: it was a joint venture with an advertising agency that had a specific problem they wanted to solve and knew other agencies would need to solve as well. (You can check it out here: https://geotagseo.com/).
There are successful indie hackers out there. For example, Remotion started as a side project and eventually raised $180K. My business partner even built Mathle—a math alternative to Wordle—and made some pocket change through Google ads. It worked, and the ROI wasn’t bad. However, I think the indie-hacker space has a lot of survivorship bias. We only hear about the successes, often from those who already have big communities to attract users and quickly validate ideas.
So, here are my top 3 tips to help you avoid the pitfalls my partner and I went through:
Buy, read, and think about the book Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan.
Find customers first — people willing to discuss their challenges and the solutions you can offer and validate your idea! And then validate it once again!
Understand that technology, on its own, has no value. Solve a real problem to create real value.
HI @Styp - appreciate your pearls of wisdom. As devs, I think we naturally have a tendency to gravitate towards “cool solutions”, and try to find customers after the fact.
