I've launched 37 products in 5 years and not doing that again

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

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).

>> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-build-this-iCFJ3kI9WLa...

> 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.

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

Hm not sure if you are a legit commenter or if this is just rage marketing ;)

It's crazy how AI folks are re-inventing literal Internet spam

same, that behavior's an insta-block.

I also dislike the product. But I find it refreshing to see that selling LLM slop for marketing is, apparently, not a viable business.

I've looked at several and they're mostly aimed at helping to market software. It feels kind of meta. Perhaps this is a particularly tough niche?

Gross. I would be ashamed to make such software.

Are YOU reply guy?

Wow, they're actually proud of a marketing spam post that convinced a depressed person struggling with debt that they're being listened to and understood, while possibly convincing them to try some predatory lending service (I assume, since that "debt freedom now" site is telling me how much debt "Americans in București" are erasing right now!).

Having this as a success story you brag about is sociopathic.

Slow and consistent. I truly believe this is the key to growth. Unfortunately, I also suck at it. If I don't see interesting growth after a few weeks ,I'm inclined to give up too quickly.

If you look directly under that you will see that replyguy was his biggest win at a 6 figure sale.

The problem is that feedback is difficult to get without customers. Plus in many cases, the feedback of what people intend to do is not really helpful at predicting what they will do.

I'll go with an example from my past: We built a SaaS for freelance photographers to organize and distribute their images. People loved it. We listened for feedback and people loved the new features. But churn was always a bit too high to make this a truly great business. We asked for feedback and got various reasons, none of which turned out to be correct. Most of our churn was photographers getting frustrated with the freelancer life and either signing up for an agency or changing jobs. That's how I learned the hard way that you cannot succeed in a bad market. But from the outside, it wasn't obvious that this market segment would be bad. You need to "test drive" the market with a product to learn if it can sustain a business or not. And that's what many of those indie builders are trying to do: feel out an acceptable market.

$33k per year, so $165k for 5 years is good enough salary e.g. in Poland where I live, not achieved by 80% of people in country. Why I chose $33k? It's enough to have decent life with some good holidays and local trips along the years. Having $450k income, even if half will be taken by expenses - you still can live a very decent life in many places around the world.

It seems that all these products are 100% online. Therefore it's a very viable income source for people who live in, well, the majority part of the world.

Most likely, they booked some advertisements to push revenue but didn't honestly account for the ad expenses. I've seen that way too many times with Indie products that they brag about large revenue numbers and "forget" to mention that profit margins are negative. I remember once hearing about a start-up that resold baby diapers at a loss. Obviously, they were easily able to scale up customers and revenue ...

Might only take months for traffic/attention/fad to completely die off, or a rival to supplant it.

Revenue isn't profit.

I think such small businesses are really hard to sell. It may be the purchaser just wanted the domain.

I worked for a company where I designed hardware products at that rate, although not for as long. Someone in management discovered that each time you release a new product you get a huge sales bump from distributors filling inventory. We already had a crowded and confusing product line, so the distributors eventually started sending the old unsold products back and asking for a refund, and that stopped that release cadence.

It did limit the complexity of products, which could be good or bad, but the products were pipelined, so having one employee designing them in ~300 man-hours per design, spread out over six months or so, was totally doable. This included the whole gambit, from conceiving the design to component selection, schematic, layout, design for manufacturing, test fixtures and procedures to documentation and ad copy.

I do feel like it's quicker with hardware than software, because hardware follows something like the theoretical "waterfall" method that software has never used, so everything is clearly documented. For example, I pulled up the cheapest transistor from a common supplier, and it has five pages of documentation plus an index: https://www.formosams.com/upload/product/Mosfets/FMSBSS138-Q...

Everything is always easy to look up, with consistent formatting from every supplier, and you're never dealing with APIs that don't do what you'd expect them to do. You also don't need to continuously fix older releases, because they worked when you shipped them. On top of that, if a component is commonly used, it'll stick around for a lifetime, even as newer products come out, so you don't need to update your product unless it's worth the cost savings.

A lot of people want to replicate Pieter Levels success

https://x.com/levelsio

https://x.com/levelsio/status/1457315274466594817

I guess it's go wide or go deep