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I just want to share my recent personal experience. Recently I've finally decided to try creating something new that people would find useful hoping that some

by nzach 1y ago

I just want to share my recent personal experience. Recently I've finally decided to try creating something new that people would find useful hoping that some day I would be able to turn a profit from that. So I vibe coded a pretty bare-bones (but fully functional) version of my idea and started to talk about it in several platforms, including IndieHackers. And the main "advice" I've got after talking with a few people was "You are putting too much effort in your product, your focus should be on finding the right market fit for your idea". And after reading the logs in my server I found out nobody bothered to actually try what I built(and no, you don't need to create an account to use), which is fine. But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing? So, after a brief encounter with this community(people that are trying to build products) I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution. I get that many people are in this space only to make money and that finding the "magic idea" is probably a good advice if you don't care about what you will build and you need to make money fast. But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas.

raincole 1y ago
> But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing? Honestly most communities on the internet feel like that. That's one of the reasons why people migrated to discord servers. (This very comment of mine is generic af too and has as little insight as an LLM predicting how a random HN users would comment here.) Anyway, unless you made a tool for other devs (an IDE etc.), there is very little reason to ask what other devs think about your product. They're not your target audience. In the best case they're random people, in the worse case they're your competitors.
bruce511 1y ago
>> But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas. I agree. As long as you make it explicit in your encouragement that they should do this as a hobby with no expectation of income. If their goal is to work on an interesting problem then discussing marketing is irrelevant. If however their goal is to get paid, then the nature of the code is irrelevant. If you want to get paid then marketing (finding a customer base, discussing their pain, solving that need at a price they can afford etc) is more important. Unfortunately in a lot of postings this context is not made clear. So the replier has to assume one or other context. Equally Unfortunately they often don't post which context they assumed. Incidentally marketing might be the most important part of commercial success, but it is not the only important part. It is the most difficult part though so it makes sense to start there. Execution still matters, good execution makes sales easier. But the best execution ever does not mean anything if marketing is missing.
csomar 1y ago
I have lost track of the number of apps I could use and maybe even pay for but that were badly executed (that’s actually being soft as most didn’t even work past the authy login). You do need to validate product market fit but you also need a minimal viable product. I think most people lost the meaning of what viable means.
KurSix 1y ago
There's definitely room in this space for building stuff just because it's interesting or fun or weird. Some of the coolest tools and communities started that way
owebmaster 1y ago
Have you stopped to think about the other possibility - that your project idea is so bad that nobody wanted to try after reading the landing page? I'm not sure it is in your best interest to think first that the problem lies with the audience.
phkahler 1y ago
IMHO you should not be marketing a product to software developers. That market is completely saturated and most of the tools are free. Today's super-simple big market idea: We got my elderly mother a flip phone and it's too hard to use. I'm going to describe what would be ideal for her now, and by all means DON'T think up additional features to "make it better". She needs a phone that when opened/activated it give a list of people (contacts) which she can scroll through and pick one to call. It should call directly, not change screen or show some other shit. Just call the highlighted name and call. Maybe it could switch to a "calling" screen with just the one name until the call is over. That's it. No other functionality so she can "get lost" or confused. Maybe this is an android app? I'm not sure if you can override the main UI to the extent this wants to be. I'll gladly get her a cheap Android phone and pay $5 for an app that turns it into this usable device for elderly people. Yes, five dollars. No adds, no user monetization, no enshitification. Can anyone deliver this? I think there's a large market for it and it should be a one weekend job. BTW, however you load/add contacts should be a sort of hard to find function maybe for someone else to do. Not something you can accidently "get into". There are a million things like this just waiting for someone to create. But talking to developers for ideas is a dead end.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  >> I think there's a large market for it and it should be a one weekend job. You're essentially asking for a heavily customized phone OS, this is not like adding a bootstrap theme - and you're willing to pay FIVE DOLLARS? >> But talking to developers for ideas is a dead end. Maybe for product ideas but perhaps you should find one to critique your "weekend project" idea
  - phkahler 1y ago
    >> You're essentially asking for a heavily customized phone OS No. I'm asking for a "dialer only" phone OS. It can take the form of an always-on-top dialer app over a standard OS. That's it.
- somename9 1y ago
  [dead]
9rx 1y ago
> But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing? 1. Comments are the internet aren't written for you, they are written for the author of the comment. 2. The assertion is sound, even if not particularly useful. Your logs exclaim that you don't have market fit, just as said. What more can be said? If finding market fit was a well defined formula, everyone would do it. This is the magic that, for better or worse, you have to figure out on your own.
riku_iki 1y ago
> I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution. in your situation, if you would have good idea which solves real problem, you would see at least some people come to your site/app and try it, but looks like your idea is not that good, or you failed to contact your audience.
LVB 1y ago
Yes, and it is very tiresome advice to see continually, especially when given to newcomers whose first instinct is to build a solid, useful app or service, and they're being steered away from that. The number of times I've read that one should put up landing pages, spend time socializing them, and only if there are enough signups to actually build something is rather depressing. These folks are obviously playing a different game than I'm used to. But in my ~30 years at it, I can confidently say that taking the time to build what I feel are good apps, well-crafted, has provided immense satisfaction (I can at least look at a collection of apps, not landing pages), and has always developed or honed my skills, which has opened many doors. The marketing-first approach just sounds painful for someone who, like me, wants to be building things.
- hermitcrab 1y ago
  >and only if there are enough signups to actually build something is rather depressing Yes, but it is also rather depressing to spend a lot of effort building something that nobody wants. Especially if you are trying to make a living at it.
- fxtentacle 1y ago
  "I can confidently say that taking the time to build what I feel are good apps, well-crafted, has provided immense satisfaction" ... but has it provided more revenue that what it would have cost for someone to hire you to build this at an acceptable hourly rate? Because if not, you're comparing your hobby against their business in the sense that you can accept less profitable results which wouldn't work for them.
- satvikpendem 1y ago
  You have a hobby (of making apps), not an actual business. The sibling comment is right, those are two different skills that optimize for different things. Which is fine, everyone has hobbies, but understand that the "game" they're playing is making money, which requires acquiring customers, which requires marketing.
ninetyninenine 1y ago
Then the problem here isn’t there advice but what is it you need to do to get them to try it? Or where do you need to look to get them to try it?
fxtentacle 1y ago
"But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas." I don't think many programmers need that advice ;) Looking at the open source community, there's already plenty of people that freely share their ideas and implementations ... (only to be ripped off by cloud service providers later). And, sadly, the market for cool gadgets or 3D-printable trinkets is even more brutal. There will be 10 clones in stock on Amazon before you get your first batch through customs. My advice would be that nowadays, you should start your product journey with planning what your moat is going to be and how you're going to defend it. Or if you skip that, accept that your moat is only going to last a few months, which seems to be what the article's author was going with.
BoumTAC 1y ago
you should not ask indie hackers for advice and you should not hang out with them. If you build a product for marketers, you should hang out with them and ask them for advices, not indie hackers who know nothing about marketing. If you build a product for bakers, you should hang out with them to understand what they need, not with indie hackers who have never baked anything in their lives. That sounds logical, but for certain types of products, it is not. There is no point in talking with indie hackers. It's only useful if you need knowledge about coding skills, which is rarely the case (especially now with AI).
p0nce 1y ago
Well that meant your users do not hang in IndieHackers
slightwinder 1y ago
> But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing? Is there a website, documentation, any kind of presentation of your product? In that case, depending on your idea, this might be already enough for people to evaluate it. Certain categories are so overpopulated, people don't need to see the actual product any more; some description, maybe a screenshot, that's enough. The other side is, people are also so feed up with seeing the same stuff for the gazillions time again and again, they simply can't even bother with it any more. > I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution. The idea drives your marketing, which brings you customers. The execution is what holds them and animates them to give you money. But if your marketing sucks, you won't get customers easily, so it's important to have a good balance, unless you plan to polish your product for a decade, until serious money shows up.
- nzach 1y ago
  > Is there a website, documentation, any kind of presentation of your product? I do have a fully functional MVP available on the internet (https://leetprompt.io https://leetprompt.io) > The other side is, people are also so feed up with seeing the same stuff for the gazillions time again and again, they simply can't even bother with it any more. That is a fair point, but if you can't even bother why would you give any advice then? > it's important to have a good balance That's why I went out of my way to try my hand at marketing something for the first time, but the only kind of advice I've got is a little bit depressing.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
weitendorf 1y ago
I didn't understand the indiehacker community/product mindset until I discovered the indiehacker "influencers" / lifestyle vloggers / etc. that might be the only ones actually turning a profit on all of this. The influencers sell a lifestyle of throwing a million darts at the board with simple apps and building tiny businesses off the handful that get a lot of interest or seem to resonate with users. And the apps they build that do well are mostly small tools for other indiehackers to use to build/host/augment their apps. So they not only have the distribution and marketing aspects solved already, but they've actually created the demand for their own products by selling what they do as a viable (and easy/glamorous) path to success. The other indiehackers are mostly in it to be like their favorite influencers, so they copy them by making small tools for other indiehackers and trying the million darts strategy. But it just gets lost in a sea of other indiehackers with no audience or distribution, all trying to sell the same kinds of products to each other. It just seems like a really bad community to sell to: very cost conscious, building competing products, familiar with all your marketing/fake-it-til-you-make it strategies. If at first you don't succeed, watch more youtube videos and throw more darts! I don't think "market pull" is a terrible strategy and I'm sure for some it's just a fun way to write software but I worry that it's mostly a hybrid get-rich-quick scheme, parasocial thing for the small number of influencers at the top that wastes a huge amount of time. Personally I don't like the idea of baiting people with fake landing pages and think it's actively harmful for so many people to only build simple apps with immediate traction. It's just poisoning the well and making small-scale software low-trust, trying to get rich quick off other people trying to get rich quick
- benjaminwootton 1y ago
  Yeah, I spent some time researching this crowd and most of the ones I found have the playbook of selling to indie hackers and talking about how successful they are with fake MRR screenshots.
  - hermitcrab 1y ago
    It is also noticeable that IndieHackers talks a lot about revenue and very little about profit. Easy hack for revenue: sell $1 notes for $0.50.
TrevorFSmith 1y ago
I don't know why people gave you that advice but it's pretty easy to tell when a designer hasn't spent enough (or any!) time defining their target market and then spending time with those people to listen instead of force fitting a technology. Without that up front work we're all just rolling the dice. That said, building stuff is fun by itself so it doesn't always need to be about money and growth. Just know it's a hobby.
satvikpendem 1y ago
> You are putting too much effort in your product, your focus should be on finding the right market fit for your idea How is this not excellent advice? There are lots of stories of founders building first (sometimes for years, even), then finding out that there is no market for it (as it seems you have done). The people evaluating your product might have even just read your post and concluded that there's no market, a tarpit idea [0], from their own experiences. I am assuming this [1] is your product, from looking at your profile and searching the name on IH. The comments are exactly as I've stated, and they apparently have visited your website too, so maybe your logs are not accurate, or they have an adblocker on. > Hey, I checked out your website—looks great! Just wanted to share some honest feedback. I think you should hold off on going too deep into development right now. Instead, treat this as your MVP and focus first on getting real customers. > This is a common trap many founders (myself included) fall into—building out the full product before validating if there's a real market fit. Get users, collect feedback, and then iterate. That’s the fastest and most efficient path forward. If all you are doing is making apps, you have a hobby, but it is not guaranteed that you will have a business from it, so understand what it is you are optimizing for as the two require different actions to succeed. [0] https://mikekarnj.com/posts/tarpit-ideas https://mikekarnj.com/posts/tarpit-ideas [1] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-build-this-iCFJ3kI9WLaqSw3g3uOQ https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-build-this-iCFJ3kI9WLa...
- nzach 1y ago
  > How is this not excellent advice? I do understand that in order to create something popular you need to create something good but you also need to properly communicate what you do. And proper communication is as hard as creating something good. So, I do know you need to "find an audience", and that is why I've posted it in a few places. Having said all that, reading these comments made me feel somewhat demoralized because the advice wasn't really actionable. As a noob in this space I went in expecting to get some advice along the lines of: "your idea is bad", "the website design needs to improve", "your app keeps crashing", "there is no way to make money from this", etc... But all I've got was this generic "find users" advice. "Find users" isn't intrinsically bad advice, but the way it was delivered felt really bad. How do I find users? Should I post about it in some platform? Maybe I should write a blog post about it? Running ads is a viable approach? Given what I have, what communities should I try to engage? > so understand what it is you are optimizing for as the two require different actions to succeed But I don't want to create a business right now. I just want to create something that people find interesting. I already know how to build things for myself, now I want a different challenge. But right now I feel stuck because I've built something, nobody seems to care and I don't really know how to improve my situation.
smrtinsert 1y ago
When i started my career a while ago I really appreciated the spirit of people I met. All tinkerers and curious types. They dreamt about doing interesting things. These days it only seems about the money. I don't see that spirit anymore.
netdevphoenix 1y ago
> I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas. That would be more of a indie engineers kind of community to be honest. The money focus on indie hackers is fairly implicit. And the fact that they are sponsored (or acquired) by Stripe tells you everything you need to know

by nzach 1y ago

raincole 1y ago

> But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing? Honestly most communities on the internet feel like that. That's one of the reasons why people migrated to discord servers. (This very comment of mine is generic af too and has as little insight as an LLM predicting how a random HN users would comment here.) Anyway, unless you made a tool for other devs (an IDE etc.), there is very little reason to ask what other devs think about your product. They're not your target audience. In the best case they're random people, in the worse case they're your competitors.

bruce511 1y ago

>> But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas. I agree. As long as you make it explicit in your encouragement that they should do this as a hobby with no expectation of income. If their goal is to work on an interesting problem then discussing marketing is irrelevant. If however their goal is to get paid, then the nature of the code is irrelevant. If you want to get paid then marketing (finding a customer base, discussing their pain, solving that need at a price they can afford etc) is more important. Unfortunately in a lot of postings this context is not made clear. So the replier has to assume one or other context. Equally Unfortunately they often don't post which context they assumed. Incidentally marketing might be the most important part of commercial success, but it is not the only important part. It is the most difficult part though so it makes sense to start there. Execution still matters, good execution makes sales easier. But the best execution ever does not mean anything if marketing is missing.

csomar 1y ago

I have lost track of the number of apps I could use and maybe even pay for but that were badly executed (that’s actually being soft as most didn’t even work past the authy login). You do need to validate product market fit but you also need a minimal viable product. I think most people lost the meaning of what viable means.

KurSix 1y ago

There's definitely room in this space for building stuff just because it's interesting or fun or weird. Some of the coolest tools and communities started that way

owebmaster 1y ago

Have you stopped to think about the other possibility - that your project idea is so bad that nobody wanted to try after reading the landing page? I'm not sure it is in your best interest to think first that the problem lies with the audience.

phkahler 1y ago

IMHO you should not be marketing a product to software developers. That market is completely saturated and most of the tools are free. Today's super-simple big market idea: We got my elderly mother a flip phone and it's too hard to use. I'm going to describe what would be ideal for her now, and by all means DON'T think up additional features to "make it better". She needs a phone that when opened/activated it give a list of people (contacts) which she can scroll through and pick one to call. It should call directly, not change screen or show some other shit. Just call the highlighted name and call. Maybe it could switch to a "calling" screen with just the one name until the call is over. That's it. No other functionality so she can "get lost" or confused. Maybe this is an android app? I'm not sure if you can override the main UI to the extent this wants to be. I'll gladly get her a cheap Android phone and pay $5 for an app that turns it into this usable device for elderly people. Yes, five dollars. No adds, no user monetization, no enshitification. Can anyone deliver this? I think there's a large market for it and it should be a one weekend job. BTW, however you load/add contacts should be a sort of hard to find function maybe for someone else to do. Not something you can accidently "get into". There are a million things like this just waiting for someone to create. But talking to developers for ideas is a dead end.

skeeter2020 1y ago
>> I think there's a large market for it and it should be a one weekend job. You're essentially asking for a heavily customized phone OS, this is not like adding a bootstrap theme - and you're willing to pay FIVE DOLLARS? >> But talking to developers for ideas is a dead end. Maybe for product ideas but perhaps you should find one to critique your "weekend project" idea
- phkahler 1y ago
  >> You're essentially asking for a heavily customized phone OS No. I'm asking for a "dialer only" phone OS. It can take the form of an always-on-top dialer app over a standard OS. That's it.
somename9 1y ago
[dead]

9rx 1y ago

> But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing? 1. Comments are the internet aren't written for you, they are written for the author of the comment. 2. The assertion is sound, even if not particularly useful. Your logs exclaim that you don't have market fit, just as said. What more can be said? If finding market fit was a well defined formula, everyone would do it. This is the magic that, for better or worse, you have to figure out on your own.

riku_iki 1y ago

> I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution. in your situation, if you would have good idea which solves real problem, you would see at least some people come to your site/app and try it, but looks like your idea is not that good, or you failed to contact your audience.

LVB 1y ago

Yes, and it is very tiresome advice to see continually, especially when given to newcomers whose first instinct is to build a solid, useful app or service, and they're being steered away from that. The number of times I've read that one should put up landing pages, spend time socializing them, and only if there are enough signups to actually build something is rather depressing. These folks are obviously playing a different game than I'm used to. But in my ~30 years at it, I can confidently say that taking the time to build what I feel are good apps, well-crafted, has provided immense satisfaction (I can at least look at a collection of apps, not landing pages), and has always developed or honed my skills, which has opened many doors. The marketing-first approach just sounds painful for someone who, like me, wants to be building things.

hermitcrab 1y ago
>and only if there are enough signups to actually build something is rather depressing Yes, but it is also rather depressing to spend a lot of effort building something that nobody wants. Especially if you are trying to make a living at it.
fxtentacle 1y ago
"I can confidently say that taking the time to build what I feel are good apps, well-crafted, has provided immense satisfaction" ... but has it provided more revenue that what it would have cost for someone to hire you to build this at an acceptable hourly rate? Because if not, you're comparing your hobby against their business in the sense that you can accept less profitable results which wouldn't work for them.
satvikpendem 1y ago
You have a hobby (of making apps), not an actual business. The sibling comment is right, those are two different skills that optimize for different things. Which is fine, everyone has hobbies, but understand that the "game" they're playing is making money, which requires acquiring customers, which requires marketing.

ninetyninenine 1y ago

Then the problem here isn’t there advice but what is it you need to do to get them to try it? Or where do you need to look to get them to try it?

fxtentacle 1y ago

"But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas." I don't think many programmers need that advice ;) Looking at the open source community, there's already plenty of people that freely share their ideas and implementations ... (only to be ripped off by cloud service providers later). And, sadly, the market for cool gadgets or 3D-printable trinkets is even more brutal. There will be 10 clones in stock on Amazon before you get your first batch through customs. My advice would be that nowadays, you should start your product journey with planning what your moat is going to be and how you're going to defend it. Or if you skip that, accept that your moat is only going to last a few months, which seems to be what the article's author was going with.

BoumTAC 1y ago

you should not ask indie hackers for advice and you should not hang out with them. If you build a product for marketers, you should hang out with them and ask them for advices, not indie hackers who know nothing about marketing. If you build a product for bakers, you should hang out with them to understand what they need, not with indie hackers who have never baked anything in their lives. That sounds logical, but for certain types of products, it is not. There is no point in talking with indie hackers. It's only useful if you need knowledge about coding skills, which is rarely the case (especially now with AI).

p0nce 1y ago

Well that meant your users do not hang in IndieHackers

slightwinder 1y ago

> But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing? Is there a website, documentation, any kind of presentation of your product? In that case, depending on your idea, this might be already enough for people to evaluate it. Certain categories are so overpopulated, people don't need to see the actual product any more; some description, maybe a screenshot, that's enough. The other side is, people are also so feed up with seeing the same stuff for the gazillions time again and again, they simply can't even bother with it any more. > I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution. The idea drives your marketing, which brings you customers. The execution is what holds them and animates them to give you money. But if your marketing sucks, you won't get customers easily, so it's important to have a good balance, unless you plan to polish your product for a decade, until serious money shows up.

nzach 1y ago
> Is there a website, documentation, any kind of presentation of your product? I do have a fully functional MVP available on the internet (https://leetprompt.io https://leetprompt.io) > The other side is, people are also so feed up with seeing the same stuff for the gazillions time again and again, they simply can't even bother with it any more. That is a fair point, but if you can't even bother why would you give any advice then? > it's important to have a good balance That's why I went out of my way to try my hand at marketing something for the first time, but the only kind of advice I've got is a little bit depressing.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

weitendorf 1y ago

I didn't understand the indiehacker community/product mindset until I discovered the indiehacker "influencers" / lifestyle vloggers / etc. that might be the only ones actually turning a profit on all of this. The influencers sell a lifestyle of throwing a million darts at the board with simple apps and building tiny businesses off the handful that get a lot of interest or seem to resonate with users. And the apps they build that do well are mostly small tools for other indiehackers to use to build/host/augment their apps. So they not only have the distribution and marketing aspects solved already, but they've actually created the demand for their own products by selling what they do as a viable (and easy/glamorous) path to success. The other indiehackers are mostly in it to be like their favorite influencers, so they copy them by making small tools for other indiehackers and trying the million darts strategy. But it just gets lost in a sea of other indiehackers with no audience or distribution, all trying to sell the same kinds of products to each other. It just seems like a really bad community to sell to: very cost conscious, building competing products, familiar with all your marketing/fake-it-til-you-make it strategies. If at first you don't succeed, watch more youtube videos and throw more darts! I don't think "market pull" is a terrible strategy and I'm sure for some it's just a fun way to write software but I worry that it's mostly a hybrid get-rich-quick scheme, parasocial thing for the small number of influencers at the top that wastes a huge amount of time. Personally I don't like the idea of baiting people with fake landing pages and think it's actively harmful for so many people to only build simple apps with immediate traction. It's just poisoning the well and making small-scale software low-trust, trying to get rich quick off other people trying to get rich quick

benjaminwootton 1y ago
Yeah, I spent some time researching this crowd and most of the ones I found have the playbook of selling to indie hackers and talking about how successful they are with fake MRR screenshots.
- hermitcrab 1y ago
  It is also noticeable that IndieHackers talks a lot about revenue and very little about profit. Easy hack for revenue: sell $1 notes for $0.50.

TrevorFSmith 1y ago

I don't know why people gave you that advice but it's pretty easy to tell when a designer hasn't spent enough (or any!) time defining their target market and then spending time with those people to listen instead of force fitting a technology. Without that up front work we're all just rolling the dice. That said, building stuff is fun by itself so it doesn't always need to be about money and growth. Just know it's a hobby.

satvikpendem 1y ago

> You are putting too much effort in your product, your focus should be on finding the right market fit for your idea How is this not excellent advice? There are lots of stories of founders building first (sometimes for years, even), then finding out that there is no market for it (as it seems you have done). The people evaluating your product might have even just read your post and concluded that there's no market, a tarpit idea [0], from their own experiences. I am assuming this [1] is your product, from looking at your profile and searching the name on IH. The comments are exactly as I've stated, and they apparently have visited your website too, so maybe your logs are not accurate, or they have an adblocker on. > Hey, I checked out your website—looks great! Just wanted to share some honest feedback. I think you should hold off on going too deep into development right now. Instead, treat this as your MVP and focus first on getting real customers. > This is a common trap many founders (myself included) fall into—building out the full product before validating if there's a real market fit. Get users, collect feedback, and then iterate. That’s the fastest and most efficient path forward. If all you are doing is making apps, you have a hobby, but it is not guaranteed that you will have a business from it, so understand what it is you are optimizing for as the two require different actions to succeed. [0] https://mikekarnj.com/posts/tarpit-ideas https://mikekarnj.com/posts/tarpit-ideas [1] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-build-this-iCFJ3kI9WLaqSw3g3uOQ https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-build-this-iCFJ3kI9WLa...

nzach 1y ago
> How is this not excellent advice? I do understand that in order to create something popular you need to create something good but you also need to properly communicate what you do. And proper communication is as hard as creating something good. So, I do know you need to "find an audience", and that is why I've posted it in a few places. Having said all that, reading these comments made me feel somewhat demoralized because the advice wasn't really actionable. As a noob in this space I went in expecting to get some advice along the lines of: "your idea is bad", "the website design needs to improve", "your app keeps crashing", "there is no way to make money from this", etc... But all I've got was this generic "find users" advice. "Find users" isn't intrinsically bad advice, but the way it was delivered felt really bad. How do I find users? Should I post about it in some platform? Maybe I should write a blog post about it? Running ads is a viable approach? Given what I have, what communities should I try to engage? > so understand what it is you are optimizing for as the two require different actions to succeed But I don't want to create a business right now. I just want to create something that people find interesting. I already know how to build things for myself, now I want a different challenge. But right now I feel stuck because I've built something, nobody seems to care and I don't really know how to improve my situation.

smrtinsert 1y ago

When i started my career a while ago I really appreciated the spirit of people I met. All tinkerers and curious types. They dreamt about doing interesting things. These days it only seems about the money. I don't see that spirit anymore.

netdevphoenix 1y ago

> I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas. That would be more of a indie engineers kind of community to be honest. The money focus on indie hackers is fairly implicit. And the fact that they are sponsored (or acquired) by Stripe tells you everything you need to know