1.5 years Indie Hacking Journey: 14 lessons learned!

Hey guys,

Realised I have been running ManyPixels for 18 months now! So time for an update on lessons learned.

Since we started

🤑 $1m in sales (almost) generated since beginning
📊 $45-$55k MRR, goal is to hit $83k MRR by the end of the year ($1m ARR)
👩‍💻 3 full-time employees (1 Software engineer + 2 Project managers) that work fully remotely + 3 co-founders work full-time remotely on this.
👩‍🎨 👨‍🎨 20 designers that rely solely on ManyPixels for their income
🤗 Most importantly: Profitable, fully independent business

I will divide this post in three parts:

1/ Idea
2/ Execution
3/ Growth

This is going to be a big 🧠 brain dump so take a cup of ☕, sit back and relax!

💡Getting an idea and starting

1. Finding a problem > Finding an idea. Focus on knowing as much as you can about a problem. Do not focus on the solution until you really know what problems your potential customers are facing.

Here are some practical tips / questions on how to focus on the problems:

• What solutions have you tried and what didn't you like?
• What problems are people talking on online communities?
• What problems have you experienced yourself doing X or Y?

Problems are the first source of value creation. If there is no problem, it's hard to create value (or you have to create a new behaviour)

2. Get feedback on that problem. Is that problem real or you wish it existed? Talk to a lot of people about the problem you want to fix, people who've been there (for example you can talk to me if you're willing to launch a productized service). This is so important!

3. Solution = Value proposition. Okay, so how will you solve that problem? What will you create that solve it? How does it solve that problem (Nomadlist for example: Availability of information), ManyPixels: convenience of getting design services done. Usually value proposition fits into: Getting something done faster/better/cheaper/more convenient etc. Decide where you want to be and what makes sense for your customers / the market.

4. Seek the shortest path to deliver your value proposition. For me this is my biggest advice. Do not spend time building a big product. You can do a lot of things with no code at all and even no website!

Examples: Start with an excel list (Nomadlist), Start with a subreddit (Budget Meal Planner)

💪 Execution

5. Planning. Your mood or the day cannot dictate what you will work on. Companies ship stuff. Decide on some key / high value projects you will ship in the next weeks and get some small bits done each day to keep momentum / seek you are reaching your goal. Do not focus on short hacks (except maybe at the beginning to get some customers / hustling), but focus on long term stuff with impact. An analogy you can use is "Am I building my castle with sand or bricks?" focus on solid stuff you can ship.

6. Get some habits as a founder. The problem that we have as founders is a very short attention span. It is easy to chase the next shiny thing / cool technology to work with etc. Focus on finishing stuff, not starting. Focus on compounding activities.

7. Focus on "Good enough" which is a trade off between : Good enough so that customers like it (good enough design, good enough technology) but not too good so that you over perfection it just for your own ego. Your role is to produce something good enough so that you are creating value that people pay for.

8. Motivation is your #1 priority as a founder. Motivate your team, motivate yourself, motivate your customers to buy from you. You will fail many many times, but eventually your internal KPI is "Am I making progress?" and the failures are just sign posts at the side of the road.

9. Fast decisions = Speed. So unlike many entrepreneurs that say : "You should do everything fast" I've realised that good execution is mostly making the right decisions, reasonably fast so you can focus on producing work. If a decision is easy to make, take it immediately so you can focus on the next problem to solve. To make the right decisions with speed, learn from other mistakes / get an advisor who's been there / share your learnings to others. When you have co-founders / employees, make it a goal that decisions are easy to take so everyone knows what to do at each point of time.

📈 Growth / Gaining customers

10. The question I ask myself the most is not "How can I grow more" but rather "What prevents me from growing?". There can be a few reasons 1/ No PM/fit (work on your value prop/who you talk to), 2/ Not enough marketing (no predictable marketing), 3/ Talking to the wrong customers (don't have money to buy your product, don't see a need for your product), 4/ Bad conversion rate (a reason could be no trust in your product, bad sign up onboarding, etc etc) and more

11. Build a brand / a community / a subreddit. This is valuable, people will see you as an influencer in your niche. I did that by creating the group "Productized Startups" and giving free info / learnings to the members. You can create content around you (blog posts, tweets, a newsletter, a podcast). Content is the currency of the Internet, is free to reproduce, very scalable and a great source of leverage for online entrepreneurs.

12. Build a marketing machine. Once you know who your customers are where to get them: Build that marketing machine! It can be for example a funnel to visitors to sign up, a few email sequences, and a smooth onboarding along with content that drives traffic to your website.

13. Talk to your customers. I've built many small processes at ManyPixels which are : "Cancellation feedbacks", "Reviews", "Customer interviews". Each process is documented and basically is a list of questions I run through our customers. Idea once you get 100-120 customers that really love your product is to segment those customers, identify all attributes they have, and go find more of them. You need to get into their head (by talking to them), see where they hang out, and go after them.

14. Get a pulse on your numbers. Every week I record basic numbers: Number of visitors, number of new leads, number of emails sent, number of demo's made, etc to see if we're headed in the right direction.

Hope that was useful! Let me know if you have anything else to add.