As a solo/indie dev who's currently early in building a product, I've been keeping a journal of "ideas" for content in a txt file in the codebase as I hate context switching and want to build this up before I get to it.
Here's what I've done:
- At the top of the file I've listed my audience, 3 personas
- My content has to be useful to one of those
- If I see an interesting post/take on social media I hold the link and write an idea for my own spin/take (takes 30 seconds) - log it
- If I have a problem/issue that I resolve that would be useful to my audience - log it
- If I have a key product/design/UX choice that took some time to think through - log it
- If something takes me much longer than I thought because there's more to it (iceberge effect) - log it
I've been doing this for about 6 weeks now and I've got 100 ideas for pieces of content.
One of the best pieces of advice I read is that when you're solo, many times people/community rally around you. You are the product too so you have to share what you're doing, it's interesting to many, not just your customers. They care about the advice you give, the input you have, the way you build things. You are a subject matter expert in this domain, so you should structure your content with this in mind.
"You escape competition through authenticity." - @naval
I have a paper notebook next to my keyboard entitled 'sleep deprivation induced fever-dreams'. It is an excellent collection and useful tool so I dont let my ideas runaway with my attention.
Often when I return to what I write, about 60% I look back at with the novelty gone, and reassess from a more suitable eye and cross them off the list.
I get the same whenever I get my daily walk in. Pure unbounded epiphany of ideas and experiments, surging with creativity. I'll revisit them a few days later and for 90% of them my immediate internal response is "that sounds like a really sh*t idea".
And, if you're like me, you notice sometimes that you've been rediscovering the same interesting thought over and over again, and should really give it some structure and start building on it, rather than rewriting it again and and again, years apart. That's on the list of things I think that LLMs could help with.
Of course that's also an opportunity to combine the best of all of those iterations together, and still toss out a bunch of paper (or archive a bunch of bits.)
> Often when I return to what I write, about 60% I look back at with the novelty gone, and reassess from a more suitable eye and cross them off the list.
That is a perfect name for a notebook like that. I have one in my head and it never lets me sleep. Maybe I should keep one like yours to dump mine into it. btw 60% is incredible.
> If I see an interesting post/take on social media I hold the link and write an idea for my own spin/take (takes 30 seconds) - log it
Not quite the same thing, but a perspective to be aware of...
For example, I used to be on a semi-private forum, where some people would lurk without participating, and then seemed to "arbitrage" ideas from there, to blog and social media posts, to promote their brand.
Ideas generally should be shared, and I wouldn't say that this "arbitrage" behavior is wrong, but it can sometimes seem a bit like leeching off a group without contributing.
I suppose this is more noticeable in smaller groups that are closer to "communities". Maybe no one would care if it's just more conventional social media posts where there's no community, and most people are just playing their own promotion games.
(For example, probably no one cares if someone else also forwards around the same LinkedIn inspirational leadership image post, which they themselves took from someone else. Because usually no one at all cares about those, not even the sender.)
I do this on paper, with each page dated with the date I started filling the page. The goal is to check off most of the improvements before or shortly after starting a new page.
I personally enjoy reading about the journey most solopreneurs take, and that includes the mistakes they made, their thought process etc. So definitely start sharing instead of waiting.
True. 99% won't care, but that shouldn't hold you back. You get outsized returns from even a handful of people caring - feedback, amplification, motivation, moral support etc.
>"You escape competition through authenticity." - @naval
Except none of this is authentic. Its just another form of marketing and it should be illegal to go around spamming posts advertising a product. Or the accounts should be marked as sponsored or promotion accounts so they can be filtered out accordingly.
> Its just another form of marketing and it should be illegal to go around spamming posts advertising a product
I think this is the dogma that holds a lot of devs back, the belief that sharing your work, the product, the thought process, the journey, the mistakes, the wins etc is “spammy”. Would save your rhetoric for those who actually spam - ai slop generators, bots, link farmers, paid shillers etc. Not indie devs on HN trying to build something for the world.
They create a fake story about a new feature to promote the app. And then they work out how to create fake text messages. I don't like the approach they used. Get real users to provide a real testimonials instead.
Welcome to promoting your product baby. No one cares if it's fake or not except the little voice in your head.
If you can post fake messages today that promote your product and will start getting you users, why wait for real users to provide real testimonials that align with what you want to communicate to do the same thing 3 months from now?
Of course you want to seek out real testimonials from satisfied customers and share those as much as you can; you don't want to lock yourself in a bubble where you post how amazing your app is while emails of dissatisfied users pile up in your inbox; but it's not an OR situation, it's an AND situation.
You might also be surprised to hear that the family laughing together while drinking Coca Cola in those video ads isn't a real family, they're not really having fun, and they're not really enjoying Coca Cola for the sake of it - they're on a filming set in front of a green screen paid by the hour.
For me it’s just that I just don’t want to lie to make money.
Commercials are on their face a work of fiction unless stated otherwise — for customer testimonials in commercials that are fake (in the US anyway) there has to be text saying as much. Because otherwise they’d be lying…
I’m surprised the owner of Lagree didn’t sue you for the name of the app, he’s notorious for that. I also recommend hiring smaller creators, they can be amazing if it’s the right person
I have been doing something similar for years. My website helps immigrants settle in Berlin. Recently, I've been writing a lot about health insurance.
For the last few months, I've been monitoring all health insurance topics in some communities, and actively answering questions. It gave me a much better sense of what confuses people, down to tiny details like "I was given two documents by my insurer, and there is only one upload field in the visa application system". Another couldn't buy the insurance I recommended them because the options in a dropdown did not match his situation 1:1. No one addresses these blockers; they only cover things at a high level.
Every time I couldn't answer a question with a link to my insurance guide, I updated the guide. I rewrote some guides 2-3 times this year.
On the other end, I was in constant contact with the health insurance broker who answers questions from my readers. That's 5-6 questions per day. Again, I tried to learn from each of those.
I think you have to stay close to your users. You might notice tiny details that make a bigger difference than the superfeature you're thinking of building.
I think the hidden lesson in Field of Dreams is that “they will come” happens because of word of mouth. Shoeless Joe Jackson tells the other dead baseball players to come hang out. The townsfolk tell about baseball field to save the farm.
But really “build it and they will come” in product development is pitched as if “they will come” because they are searching for it. Which is not really true if people don’t know your thing exists.
or they will come if they search for it, but u need to be in the place they land on after they search for it (whether it's google search results or chatGPT)
I recently made a small game for iOS/macOS and basically every non-development part of the process between setting up the App Store stuff and trying to promote it have been a lot more work than I expected. Not even including the game design, which is really separate from the actual game development.
Have you noticed the different roles that make up successful small businesses? You must anticipate and learn to wear several hats in turn if you're doing it alone
It's one of those things where I intuitively understand the roles when it comes to my normal job, but in doing this as a side project I foolishly thought it'd be more straightforward.
This post and the discussion is great!!! Brings me back to 2 different projects/products that I developed that never made it to market (2009 and 2014). I also kept a log of ideas most of which withered in the light of day but a few persisted. And for each project I went off to live in a cave and code for a year (not recommended). Looking back I absolutely should have shared what I was working on and found support from a community (highly recommended). All of these ideas are excellent. Thank you for sharing them.
Right now we're totally bootstrapped so it's a combination of:
- Davinci Resolve (free)
- Epidemic Sound (for music and sound)
- ClearAudio.ai for VO processing
I then give myself the whole week to produce the video and honestly that has increased the quality by 10x. I'm not rushing it and can properly spend 2 days putting the video clips together, and another day on just the voice over alone.
Readit News
Here's what I've done:
- At the top of the file I've listed my audience, 3 personas
- My content has to be useful to one of those
- If I see an interesting post/take on social media I hold the link and write an idea for my own spin/take (takes 30 seconds) - log it
- If I have a problem/issue that I resolve that would be useful to my audience - log it
- If I have a key product/design/UX choice that took some time to think through - log it
- If something takes me much longer than I thought because there's more to it (iceberge effect) - log it
I've been doing this for about 6 weeks now and I've got 100 ideas for pieces of content.
One of the best pieces of advice I read is that when you're solo, many times people/community rally around you. You are the product too so you have to share what you're doing, it's interesting to many, not just your customers. They care about the advice you give, the input you have, the way you build things. You are a subject matter expert in this domain, so you should structure your content with this in mind.
"You escape competition through authenticity." - @naval
Often when I return to what I write, about 60% I look back at with the novelty gone, and reassess from a more suitable eye and cross them off the list.
Of course that's also an opportunity to combine the best of all of those iterations together, and still toss out a bunch of paper (or archive a bunch of bits.)
Related: "Write drunk, edit sober."
Not quite the same thing, but a perspective to be aware of...
For example, I used to be on a semi-private forum, where some people would lurk without participating, and then seemed to "arbitrage" ideas from there, to blog and social media posts, to promote their brand.
Ideas generally should be shared, and I wouldn't say that this "arbitrage" behavior is wrong, but it can sometimes seem a bit like leeching off a group without contributing.
I suppose this is more noticeable in smaller groups that are closer to "communities". Maybe no one would care if it's just more conventional social media posts where there's no community, and most people are just playing their own promotion games.
(For example, probably no one cares if someone else also forwards around the same LinkedIn inspirational leadership image post, which they themselves took from someone else. Because usually no one at all cares about those, not even the sender.)
But most of the times not a single person cares about you or your product.
I think this is the dogma that holds a lot of devs back, the belief that sharing your work, the product, the thought process, the journey, the mistakes, the wins etc is “spammy”. Would save your rhetoric for those who actually spam - ai slop generators, bots, link farmers, paid shillers etc. Not indie devs on HN trying to build something for the world.
If you can post fake messages today that promote your product and will start getting you users, why wait for real users to provide real testimonials that align with what you want to communicate to do the same thing 3 months from now?
Of course you want to seek out real testimonials from satisfied customers and share those as much as you can; you don't want to lock yourself in a bubble where you post how amazing your app is while emails of dissatisfied users pile up in your inbox; but it's not an OR situation, it's an AND situation.
You might also be surprised to hear that the family laughing together while drinking Coca Cola in those video ads isn't a real family, they're not really having fun, and they're not really enjoying Coca Cola for the sake of it - they're on a filming set in front of a green screen paid by the hour.
Commercials are on their face a work of fiction unless stated otherwise — for customer testimonials in commercials that are fake (in the US anyway) there has to be text saying as much. Because otherwise they’d be lying…
For the last few months, I've been monitoring all health insurance topics in some communities, and actively answering questions. It gave me a much better sense of what confuses people, down to tiny details like "I was given two documents by my insurer, and there is only one upload field in the visa application system". Another couldn't buy the insurance I recommended them because the options in a dropdown did not match his situation 1:1. No one addresses these blockers; they only cover things at a high level.
Every time I couldn't answer a question with a link to my insurance guide, I updated the guide. I rewrote some guides 2-3 times this year.
On the other end, I was in constant contact with the health insurance broker who answers questions from my readers. That's 5-6 questions per day. Again, I tried to learn from each of those.
I think you have to stay close to your users. You might notice tiny details that make a bigger difference than the superfeature you're thinking of building.
> Build it and they will come is a fallacy. You have to tell people about the damn thing.
Great lesson for engineering types
But really “build it and they will come” in product development is pitched as if “they will come” because they are searching for it. Which is not really true if people don’t know your thing exists.
Dead Comment
However, recently I decided to try something I'm calling the SaaS Schedule Sandwich.
Each month is split into four weeks:
- Week 1: Build
- Week 2: Market
- Week 3: Build
- Week 4: Video Journal
And so far it's kept me honest and not made me go live in a cave and code for a year.
I actually released the first video journal last week for our new product:
https://youtu.be/cSY-C8oiUU8
- managing your database
- creating beautiful dashboards quickly
- writing, running and sharing queries (think postman but for db)
- visually building workflows to export and manipulate your database (so underrated)
- eventually building apps directly on to your database (think retool but a desktop app)
It's an all in one, modern way to interact with your database. Desktop app.
- Davinci Resolve (free)
- Epidemic Sound (for music and sound)
- ClearAudio.ai for VO processing
I then give myself the whole week to produce the video and honestly that has increased the quality by 10x. I'm not rushing it and can properly spend 2 days putting the video clips together, and another day on just the voice over alone.