4 ms·
I’m a full time indie hacker, building my own products (several in the pipeline) and doing my own design and marketing as well. Regarding the product idea, it
by ronyfadel 5y ago
I’m a full time indie hacker, building my own products (several in the pipeline) and doing my own design and marketing as well.
Regarding the product idea, it varies from an itch I have, to a neat idea but I’m not the target audience, so I ask around (esp. on Reddit), to someone asking me to make them something and I ask if instead of billing my hourly rate, I can sell them a productized service. I jot down my “itch I have” ideas regularly in a to-do app.
I’ve tried building the product without designing it first (jumping straight to code) and I’ve found that it has always been a mess (re-designing multiple times in code).
I now design the concept first (in Sketch) and only once it feels right, I get implementing. I create a basic styleguide and reusable symbols, which I reuse throughout the app/product.
Then I get implementing. Once I have something that starts to work, I tease it out on Twitter/Reddit and see if people like it. If it gains steam, it gives me enough wind under my wings to continue developing it.
I give myself X amount of time to ship (otherwise the project takes forever).
Once “done”, I send it to a few friends using TestFlight/MS AppCenter for beta testing.
If all goes well I prepare a launch page and launch on ProductHunt.
Depending on the niche I communicate with bloggers on launch day (a big chunk of my buyers are referred from these blogs even years later).
Regarding time and idea picking:
I just do what I’m psyched about, whenever I want. I’m lucky to have financial security at the moment.
What I wish I had in a partner:
Someone who can complement my skills: someone better at design who can still develop.
I’ve already talked with dev acquaintances about teaming up for weekend projects. Would definitely be fun and I don’t care as much about getting 100% of the pie.
The to-do list:
I put almost everything in a to-do, but only check it towards the last 20% of the project. I tag everything as e.g. Design, Client, Server, Marketing. Once the MVP “feels” done, I go through the list to see what’s missing.
- jhunter1016 5y agoI love this process, especially the design portion. A long time ago, I read Sketching With CSS, and I think it took me down a bad path. Lately, I’ve been creating designs for my apps in Figma before writing any code. It’s definitely, as you mentioned, saved me a ton of time on accidental redesigns. I just bought RefactoringUI by the guys who did Tailwind, and it’s great. Highly recommend it. https://www.refactoringui.com/book https://www.refactoringui.com/book