Title: Indie Hacking Year 1 Review - Tim Wong - Medium

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Published Time: 2023-12-31T09:24:22.734Z

Markdown Content: Indie Hacking Year 1 Review. Some key insights from my first year of… | by Tim Wong | Medium ===============

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Indie Hacking Year 1 Review

Tim Wong

5 min read

Dec 31, 2023

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In December 2022, I stumbled upon a random blogpost.

The opening line read: I make $45K per month with no employees & no meetings, followed by a Stripe dashboard screenshot.

I vaguely recalled that image, which sent literal shivers down my spine.

Per month? No way? That’s crazy.

As time progressed, I continued down the rabbit hole & slowly learned these people called themselves indie hackers.

$45k MRR, $83k MRR, $100k MRR.

Each with even more impressive monthly recurring revenue (MRR), and even more successful businesses as the last.

I got hooked and finally decided I would myself embark on this crazy yet rewarding journey.

After a year, I made around $1500 from one time payments, built 9 projects, only launched 2, made some internet friends, learnt a ton of things I would never in my day job & finally considered myself an indie hacker.

Here are my top 3 takeaways:

1. Staying Focused

This is probably the most important point of the 3 lessons I learnt this year.

Every now & then, I would go on Twitter and see someone experimenting with something cool, or see another indie hacker posting MRR screenshots.

This would make me want to abandon my current project and jump onto the next hype train.

Especially with OpenAI updates, every week, you’d get a huge update with so much more potential to build something crazier.

This made it even more tempting to jump ship and get on another bandwagon.

It became a trap that ensnared me in a endless loop of starting new projects and then deserting them after a few weeks.

I would start a project very motivated, build tirelessly without a proper marketing plan and any research on customer profile.

Just to abandon it few weeks to later to jump on another more attractive project that I got inspired from seeing MRR posts.

Building 12 projects in 12 months proved beneficial for many indie hackers, although the idea became somewhat distorted over time.

12 projects in a year led to impatience and the misconception that merely sharing my work on Twitter would yield significant profits.

However, I’ve learned there’s much more to attracting subscribers to your app than just sharing your project on Twitter.

Moving forward I would want to build more quality projects and spend more time on marketing and distribution.

2. Keep It Simple, Stupid

My second project Harmonize was a desktop application.

Since desktop applications are slightly more limited than web apps. I spent a lot of time trying to design the architecture of the auth flow.

I kept rewriting code to ensure my code was “best practice” and “most optimized”.

I wanted make the best possible UX for the user.

While this sounds good, it was counterproductive since it kept delaying my launch.

In reality, it had really low ROI. Spending 2–3 weeks on an auth flow is opportunity cost to actually doing marketing and distribution.

The most important part of every project is validation and making money.

Any time spent doing something that is not actively towards this goal is time wasted.

Customers really don’t care how well refactored your code is. Most customers couldn’t care less what frameworks, languages, libraries you’re using.

They only care about their problem, and whether your product can solve that problem.

So this analogy Keep It Simple, Stupid is a key point to keep in mind when building the next product.

Don’t overcomplicate stuff.

95% of the things you need have already been pre built. Use libraries, templates and copy and paste stuff.

Don’t waste time building things from scratch. Use whatever that helps you ship faster and makes it easier to reiterate.

With less than $10, you can use all the below services to make it so much easier to build the basic building blocks of your MVP.

Authentication ➡️ Auth0
Database ➡️ Supabase
Landing Page ➡️ Vercel
Server ➡️ Heroku

Furthermore, most platforms usually come with a generous free tier plan for startups.

So please, keep it stupidly simple.

Don’t build rockets for customers who just want to cross the road.

3. Proper Marketing Plans

Build a great product and customers will come.

This is by far the greatest lie ever told by people who have never built a SaaS business.

Bad products can get by with great marketing but great products can’t get by with bad marketing.

It doesn’t matter how cool, how fast, how sleek, how “disruptive” (i hate this term), how revolutionary product is.

If no one knows about it, then it how can they know about the greatness of your product.

Having built and launched several products this year, I learnt to come up with a more definite marketing plan before building.

This realisation includes understanding a process I was unaware of just few months ago called identifying the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Basically understanding what are the type of customers that would use your app, eg. the ICP for my calorie tracker app would be fitness enthusiast.

A step further would be to make a Customer Persona, to better describe the ICP like Emily, 28, investment banker, gyms 630–7am daily, uses mobile primarily.

This gives insight to understand your customer and in turn know where to find them eg. for Emily corporate events, gyms that open early in the morning.

But marketing isn’t just about throwing random ads at people and expecting them to buy your product.

A lot of it also depends on how you convince them.

So that’s where Value Proposition comes in. In order, to convince them to buy your solution, you first have to understand the problem.

There’s no hard & fast rule and one size fits all solution.

But this is a great rule of thumb I like to follow (and continue following in the future):

The key to selling is to highlight your user’s end goal and your product as a tool to reach that end goal.

Don’t oversell your features but rather talk about their end goal and how your features can close that gap.

So moving forward, I would prioritise brainstorming marketing and outlining a proper value prop before building.

Closing Thoughts

Of course, I haven’t even started to make recurring revenue. Not even close to have “ramen profiability” to quit my day job.

But I am one step closer everyday if I continue improving in building, marketing, distributing and selling.

Here’s to a new year and hope that these 3 takeaways will be beneficial in your journey as well.

Take care & happy new year!

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Written by Tim Wong ——————-

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Software Engineer & Writer. Enjoy reading the encapsulations that is formed in the enigma machinations of my mind.

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