One of the most successful Indie hackers

This year, when I decided to become a Solopreneur and started talking to friends, I heard a couple of times the name of Peter Levels.

I looked for him, and I discovered he is one of the most successful Indie hackers 😅, which means I had to learn a lot from him, starting by reading his book: Make.

We, Indie hackers, are often looking for new ideas to build, and sometimes it is not easy. Peter Level encouraged us to start by solving our own problems, by looking at our own lives and observing what our daily challenges are.

Even if it’s not always successful, the concept of solving our own problems is a great way to find ideas that might be viable. A lot of people don’t do this. When you try to solve problems that aren’t even yours, like somebody else’s, you can do that, but you are not an expert in the problem area.

Once we find the idea to build, the first thing before starting to write one line of code is to validate our idea. The worst is to be with people who just confirm what you already think. The best is to test your ideas as quickly as possible. Even asking other people for advice is kind of bullshit. You can’t ask “will this idea work?” You need to ask the market by building it. Nobody knows until you launch.

After the idea validation, we need to start building the MVP (Minimum viable product). One concept that resonated a lot with me is to “don’t make shitty products”. With minimum viable products, there’s been a rise in people shipping products that look bad and hardly work. A first prototype should function really well. It’s fine if there are some bugs on the side, but the core functionality should be operational. It should look at least OK; otherwise, you simply turn people away. Minimum needs to be minimum good.

When building, try to build fast and minimal. Instead of learning new stuff, use the tools you already know to build your idea. Make sure your MVP actually works and is not just a landing page that doesn’t do anything. Lose your perfectionism; it’ll never be perfect anyway. Don’t outsource, build it yourself. If you can’t code, use off-the-shelf tools and connect APIs together to build it. Appreciate your constraints and limitations; they can be a giant advantage vs. people with lots of resources. Build for the web first; you can go native mobile later. Don’t build on an MVP too long; a good rule of thumb is to spend a maximum of one month on it and launch.

After building and launching, we faced the growth phase. Growth should be mostly natural and organic. Especially in the early stages (e.g. after launch) of your product. First off, it’s free; you don’t need to pay for ads or traffic. Secondly, it gives you direct feedback on whether your product is good enough or not. If you’re using non-organic ways of growth like ads, you’ll see your product’s usage grow. And you might think things are going well. But when you stop paying for those ads, those users are probably gone fast.

Tell about your own journey and maybe struggles before or during the build-up to your product. Before I had anything really successful, I had a YouTube channel for electronic music that made some money. That money made it possible for me to travel and work somewhere else than home. That experience helped me make a site for those travelers. And that process of building a bootstrapped startup gave me the information I’m sharing with you now in this book.

One way of storytelling is building in public. The last few years, one of the most effective strategies to get promotion has been to “build in public”. It means to publicly blog, vlog, or in any way communicate the entire story of building your product or startup from the start. You’re completely transparent about how things are going, even if things don’t go so well. It’s about sharing the stuff you learn from trying to build a product.

So, what’s the best “hack” ever to get people to come back and grow a product? Make a really useful and great product! That’s way more efficient than trying to get users to share stuff on social networks, emailing them, or sending them push notifications to come back to your site, or trying to get into the press all the time. If people really love your product, they’ll come back to it. It’ll be planted in their mind. They need it! So whatever you do, focus on making the product great first. Then think about growth later.

The most important message that I can give you in your future path of building products, or even the rest of your life, is to take action. Taking action is the scariest, most difficult part of life. It’s also your biggest competitive advantage. Why? Because most people don’t. There are millions of wannabe artists, entrepreneurs, and creatives who have really great ideas, but never take the action to finish something, launch it, and push it out there. The people that you know who are successful are usually not the best, but they were the ones getting over their fear and taking action.