[HN Gopher] Learnings from a Year of Being Indie
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Learnings from a Year of Being Indie
Author : wallflower
Score : 82 points
Date : 2020-07-10 16:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ryanashcraft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ryanashcraft.com)
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I've spent years tracking my food intake and indeed most apps
| (even from great brands) are crap.
|
| I built my own web tracker and diet creator but I ended up not
| using it at all. These days my diet is stable enough that I know
| roughly what I'm going to eat. When I'm lean cutting or lean
| building I just throw in / remove a snack rich in protein.
|
| The app look really amazing but the value it provides is not life
| changing. If I were a potential customer I'd be put off by it
| being subscription based. Sure, it's great for you to have MRR
| but as a user I'm not adding a monthly cost for a fancy ui and
| the hope to lose fat.
| volkk wrote:
| slightly off topic but what app do you use for the blueprint
| style notes/drawings? ive been googling around but all i get are
| CAD programs
| mguerville wrote:
| Not OP but the Carbo app does this, you take a picture of a
| drawing and it converts to faux chalkboard or blueprints
| volkk wrote:
| can i write in the faux chalkboard/blueprint style or is that
| only an export functionality? hoping to edit that way
| mguerville wrote:
| You can adjust the sensitivity of the writing scanner so it
| looks more organic if you want, and you can draw directly
| in the app although that doesn't allow for sensitivity or
| pressure based influence on thickness of the lines of the
| things you draw
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Most iPad note taking apps I've tried have that as a
| background option and then you just draw in white using the
| pencil
| vivekweb2013 wrote:
| I like this article a lot. Such learnings has the power to shape
| the path of indie development journey.
| Jack000 wrote:
| sustainable customer acquisition is the hardest part of being an
| indie dev, it's a lot more difficult than building the product
| itself.
|
| You got amazing press coverage though, should be able to leverage
| that for SEO and content marketing.
| mtlynch wrote:
| My friend Matteo Mosca (@matteomosca_, also an indie dev) is
| working on a tool called HustleJet[0] to help founders find
| customers. You give him your product and the type of customers
| you want, he scours social media and forums to find people who
| have recently posted about the pain point your product solves.
| Then he finds contact info for those people and provides a
| dashboard with the relevant screenshots and contact info.
|
| I'm not involved with the product at all. He just did a recent
| demo for me, and I thought it was neat.
|
| [0] https://hustlejet.io/
| hef19898 wrote:
| My biggest pain right now. I am loycking at outsourcing the
| actual leg work, like cold calling people. That would free up a
| lot of my time and will most likely still be cheaper than
| hiring someone full-time. Not sure about it yet, so.
| mtlynch wrote:
| > _While I wish that I had made more than just $7.5k in my first
| year doing indie development, I am more concerned about the lack
| of downloads and growth._
|
| I'm surprised the author sees $7.5k as a low number. $7.5k in
| your first year as an indie developer is great! That's 3x what I
| made in my first year and even slightly higher than what I made
| in my second.[0] I'd estimate that $7.5k in the first year puts
| one in ~90th percentile or higher of revenue.
|
| There's maybe survivorship and availability bias at play because
| you only hear about massively successful startups, but I think
| the vast majority of startups or solo software projects struggle
| to find revenue, especially with their first product.
|
| [0] https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-2/#how-i-made-and-
| spe...
| jlokier wrote:
| That may be "great" for an indie, but it's a disaster for a
| business you're hoping to live off, unless you have reason to
| believe it's going to change radically.
|
| As an indie you almost certainly have no investment and are
| living off personal savings during that time.
|
| $7,500 won't cover essential cost of living for most people.
| And if it does, you're probably doing without healthcare,
| aren't investing in a pension or generally in your future, and
| are living in a shithole.
|
| If revenue is that low and there is "lack of [...] growth",
| even if that's the upper 90% of indies for the first year,
| you're probably going to end up running out of savings and
| desparately looking for a perm job in due course.
|
| At least, with those metrics it's advisable to have some kind
| of second project, part-time job or similar.
|
| EDIT: Above assumes you don't have a partner paying for your
| costs of living during this time. I didn't think about that.
| semicolonandson wrote:
| Lessons I learned in my first year (prolly 2010)
|
| - Dip your toes into a few different markets in as inexpensive a
| manner as possible. The difference in ease of marketing you'll
| see between lackluster ideas and winners will literally be 50x -
| i.e. you will _know_ when you've got product-market fit. If you
| are in doubt, you don't have it.
|
| - You gotta spend money (or serious marketing sweat labour) to
| make money. Nothing happened for me when I first released my
| product. It was only after taking out some AdWords and planning a
| sensible, scalable SEO strategy (more here:
| https://www.semicolonandsons.com/episode/seo-strategies-for-...)
| that I started getting sales.
|
| - This one is embarrassing to admit but I'll put it here anyway:
| keep every receipt - you'll need it for accounting (and can save
| a lot tax deductions)
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