No-B.S. resources to help you take action & start shipping 
A living swipe file for indie hackers, indie lurkers, & founders who get stuck with indecision, perfectionism, or impostor syndrome. Examples and resources to help you put one foot in front of the other and get your experiments out the door .
.This is not a roadmap through the jungle . I have not built a successful startup, so I won’t pretend I know the path to get there.
. I have not built a successful startup, so I won’t pretend I know the path to get there. Think of this as a compass . I can’t tell you what destination is correct, but I can give you resources to push past the common sticking points for aspiring founders.
. I can’t tell you what destination is correct, but I can give you resources to push past the common sticking points for aspiring founders.Now quit adding a dark theme and get shipping!
and get shipping! ValidationWhy are you building without any real validation?
STOP
if you don’t have any real indicators of people spending their $$ or significant time on the problem, STOP. Reevaluate.
1st-time founders can have trouble allocating resources 😅 pic.twitter.com/5g6k0Gclw3
— Dagobert Renouf (@dagorenouf) January 20, 2022
Critical Questions
These are the questions I wish I would have been asked before wasting hour after hour on projects which never launched or were a Solution Looking for a Problem. Use them to cut the crap and see your project from an observer’s perspective.
or were a Solution Looking for a Problem. Use them to cut the crap and see your project from an observer’s perspective. Build simpler than you think If it’s useful people will use it even if it looks funky or is missing features.
You don’t need it to be as pretty or as feature-filled as the perfect version in your head. Make small bets and just put it out into the world.
Nomad List started as a Google sheet.
Product Hunt began as a simple list that got emailed out to people.
Headlime started as a JSON file in the frontend with no DB - sold for $60k a week later.
Before that, it was an eBook with formulas for generating headlines selling on Gumroad.
Follows the validation -> content product -> saas.
Crave Cookies was making $200k a month on a SQlite DB, which started as a JSON file.
Everything is on one server in production, and there’s SQLite database,
meaning it’s not a separate database. It’s not a separate server. It’s a
file in that same database.
When I started it, I was writing to a JSON file, the whole database.
That was it. I was reading and writing from that file. As we started to
get too many orders, it was too slow to read and write, so I moved it to
SQLite, and I've never changed it.
Instead of staying quiet and waiting until I had 10 interviews, I decided to just launch with 3 interviews.
“I was running www.Photopea.com with 10M page views a month for $40 a year. Now, I upgraded to $60 a month. I never used any CDN.” HN Comment
List of how popular startups (AirBnb, etc.) got their first users - many in scrappy ways.
Key Values started as a static website on Heroku.
Fake it ‘till you build itCan apply to the core of your product, or to supporting features. Do you really need an automated account deletion flow on day 1? Just manually edit the database. See if Product Validation Playbooks has something you could try.
Dropbox & Buffer used the Fake Door MVP to see if the idea was worth exploring.
Tuple had $8k in revenue before even having a product.
Have seen numerous mentions where companies finally added features multiple years in and it didn’t kill them to wait that long to add.
“After 2 years of indie hacking, it's time to add an editable account details page. Only 3-4 ppl/m needed it for @MagicPattern & @BrandBirdApp and I edited them manually.”
You don’t need a big teamAJ from Carrd - millions of websites built on simple site builder
Wapplyzer - Chrome extension for website data, run by tiny team
Microfounders - https://microfounder.com/
Supporting your journey Indie Hackers Community
You don’t need the perfect nameYou can always change it later - don’t let it take up more than a couple hours. Switching won’t necessarily kill your momentum. justin.tv became Twitch later on.
CompetitionCompetition isn’t bad. Do not rule out ideas that there are already solutions for.
Water bottles and notebooks have thousands of competitors, yet people make them every day. In other industries, we don't have this idea that you have to be the only water bottle. We don't have this idea that, someone's already invented the water bottle, there can't be another one, but in software, we very often have this idea, of well, there's already a social media software.
- paraphrased from Laura Roeder
Brands that entered crowded markets and still did wellHydroflask - literally just fancy water bottles.
Notion - lots of tools already out there for note taking or docs.
Bubly - how many types of sparkling water can exist?
Convertkit - went up against Mailchimp and others.
Typedream, Simple.ink, Super.so - there are a bajillion no code website builders, they made it easier to manage for without code rather than creating an interface that is visual coding.
Open-source companies based on existing toolsYou can also just build an open-source version of your favorite famous tool. Not everyone’s cup of tea.
Ghost blogging platform - alternative to WordPress, Square, Wix, etc.
WordPress - alternative to Square, Wix, etc.
Supabase - alternative to Firebase.
Papercups.io -alternative to Intercom.
Bitwarden - alternative to Lastpass, 1Password, etc.
Plausible, Fathom - alternative to Google Analytics.
Cal.com - alternative to Calendly.
Httpie - alternative to Postman.
Medusa - alternative to Shopify.
NextDNS -
IdeasThe best things often aren’t original, but either a remix of what’s come before, a better version than currently exists, or serving some niche the competition hasn’t touched. Screw it, you can build the same thing if you really want, you don’t need anyone’s permission!
Remix existing ideasDoes an existing idea not cover a specific niche? Especially good if they are unlikely to bother moving into it. Example from a book is ‘Coke for Dogs’, Coke is unlikely to enter that market because it might hurt their brand among humans.
Buy Me a Coffee → Buy Me a Crypto Coffee
Your idea doesn’t have to be complicatedSuccessful companies with a simple concept at core, even if it’s layered with extra features at this point.
Framed Tweets , Laser Tweets - exactly like it says.
Linktree - static web page with a few links on it.
Bitly - HTTP 301 redirects at scale.
TickTick, Todoist, etc. - TODO list.
Postman, Httpie - Fancy frontend for curl.
Peloton - put an Ipad on a stationary bike.
Carrd - 1 page site builder.
TweetDeleter - Save reputations with an API call.
I have no ideasPeople to follow on TwitterThese people usually provide no-BS advice and inspiration to build and ship.
Pieter Levels - Nomad List, Remote OK, and more
Jon Yongfook - Bannerbear
Lynne Tye - Key Values
Justin Jackson - Transistor.fm
Andrew Gazdecki - MicroAcquire
Uncategorized
Things I’ve found useful, but haven’t found a home yet on this site, YMMV.
Terms and Trends
Build in Public -
Reminder to keep you grounded
While you spend years trying to find the perfect, world-changing startup idea, there are dozens of sellers making $$$ selling spells on Etsy. pic.twitter.com/AjbkIJbwy1
— Jakob Greenfeld (@jakobgreenfeld) January 14, 2022
Indie Lurker Compass
A living swipe file for indie hackers, indie lurkers, & founders with the examples needed to start simple and start shipping.
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