Gentle reminder to engineers who are building
Hello everyone,
I know this post will seem harsh but so be it. I need to tell you what I have learned the hard way since I am still regularly seeing posts from people building products because they learnt JavaScript/Ruby/HTML/blah over the last year...
Customer DOES NOT give a damn about your programming language - you do.
I have been through 10+ startups over 14 years. From a C background, coding since school. PHP, JavaScript, Python (learning Rust). The last startup I worked for went on to raise EUR 2 MM and they were happy I redid their tech stack.
Sounds cool huh? You know what a customer thinks - "I give a rat's ass".
Your skills to code/build are yours alone. Unless you are solving a customers problem there is no business, it is just your hobby.
So be clear about what you want. Here is what I am trying:
- Stay focused on getting messaging of my product to hit the problem nerve of customer
- Find channels where my potential customers hang out (face to face is best)
- Ask feedback on multiple channels
- Reach out, reach out, reach out (##)
- Ask them what issues they face, read Mom Test if you are new
- Invest time into a landing page, iterate and repeat
(##) I know it sucks, I keep having conversations with others to convince myself out of this every week, but that is not how real world works. I keep on making this mistake of not reaching out. Trust me, this will kill your business if you do not do this.
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Speak for your own customers! My customers care. 😎
Sure if you are building a language, framework or a library then that is the product and it's problems are related to the language or tooling.
Check out my profile and see what my product is and you'll see another category 😂
The programming language and tools I use affect my productivity and the quality of my software so to me it matters what I decide to use.
That is a good point, but I am not asking anyone to not choose tools. I am suggesting to select if you want to be a product founder or a developer. There is a difference.
@brainless Enjoyed this post, thanks!
I've been having a good experience with this type of strategy: Earlier this year I built something over 1 weekend. It was really basic, but I published it anyway and posted about it on reddit. A lot of people (1000+) thought it was a cool idea and started using the app.
Ever since then I am just asking and getting feedback from users to know what features they want to add instead of me trying to guess. We also added a form specifically for this purpose so we can collect feedback and feature requests from users. I also respond to most of them to let people know their feedback is not going to some black hole.
Overall this is working much better than trying to do it in a vacuum or putting tons of effort into something before acquiring any feedback from real users. We also have a really high rating from users, which I think is a reflection of this process.
Wow this is like the best anti-build story that you should share with others. Do you share your updates, I would like to know the Reddit story if you wanna share. I have been playing around different things there. Some posts catch on, some do not. I guess lots of variables.
I have spent some time getting a basic demo running but I myself regret spending the 40 days in that. Now I am doing almost full time customer reach out. I'll follow you.
I share bits of the story here and there, I don't have a following so I tend to just pitch in when it seems relevant (like now). This is the reddit post that I was referring to.
Reddit is quite challenging IMO. You have to identify the correct subreddit. Then you have to be very careful when you craft the post so you don't sound fake or sound like you are about to do "post and run". But out of all channels where I post, reddit has been the most receptive when all things align.
I make a lot of small apps (because it is fast and as an indie, speed it my one asset over companies with $) but also because then I can practice how to acquire users. I am currently actively trying to learn how to do this and how to repeat it for different apps. Would be interested in exchanging notes on this topic with you for sure.
I think I need to talk to you. I am struggling a lot with toning down ideas for apps that I can hack over 24-48 hours. All my ideas inevitably seem to become monsters, I lose track of what I started to solve and lose focus.
This is a huge contrast to my job personality since I am really good at executing and building quickly. Just when I do this for myself, I somehow get lost.
I went through your Reddit post and love the approach. This is exactly what I want to do on a regular basis, build small neat little apps which are either novelty or solve a small issue. I think I need practice in shipping quickly, maybe that helps.
For my main product though, I have totally set aside development for now. I already spent like 6 weeks to build a groundwork and now focusing on customer react outs, almost full time.
Ah, I see what you mean. Let me share how I got here so perhaps it will help.
I had the same exact problem when I started indie hacking. I would come up with huge ideas, start building and then start doubting the idea a few weeks into it and never finish.
It took a few iterations of this for me to realize I was self-sabotaging. Similar to what you are describing, this was in complete contrast to my work personality because there I was able to complete large projects without issues. But the dynamic changes when it is just you.
After I had had this realization I was able to start planning for ways to mitigate the issue. My solution was to scale down so much that I could finish the project in a few days to prevent self doubt from ever setting in. I then purposely started building chrome extensions because that was the smallest piece of shippable software I could think of.
This all happened about 2-4 years ago, so I have spent a while practicing this. It is by no means easy or obvious, but after a completing some projects it made me more confident as an indie developer and now I can build bigger projects also, although I prefer smaller apps to get feedback faster.
Much like learning how to complete the dev cycle, learning how reach audiences is (I hope!) a skill that can be learned. I have seen the strategy of "throwing money at it" at my former work place and that did not work, so there has to be more to it. Let me know what you are doing in that area and how are you reaching out to customers, I am curious to know more.
Also what idea are you working on now/next? Maybe I can help you to scale down.
I feel that the practice is the only way to go. I have experience in reaching out, and I am usually good with starting conversations. For my product, my audience is founders who have products where they need to create admin software. My product is a generic admin software.
I spent about 40 days getting basic groundwork laid out. This is a domain where I have years of experience but I should have focused on customer reach out much earlier already. I can not undo that, so now I am super focused on reach out.
When I see a founder where I think their product is decent size and perhaps they are building admin panel, I reach out to them.
Also I just started looking for jobs where the profile mentions Django/Laravel/Rails/etc admin. I am testing a pitch for them where I give my product + consultancy to achieve their goals at better time/cost.
The part where I need small apps to launch is to showcase good use of my product. Since it is a generic data/content admin product, I can show off lots of small (web) apps on it and build the needed stuff for that product. So I have a demo and my product gets matured.
But when I saw your keyboard app, I also thought it would be cool if I could just build small apps over a couple days time to gain a tech audience. That is super beneficial in the long term.
You can surely learn the reaching out side. I am weak on the sales pitch part though, still working on it. Reach out I am OK with.
Yep, the programming language you use and coding brilliance are of no interest to end customers. What matters to them is if your product/service delivers something they need or want, and deliver it well.
I agree Sumit, it does matter to the business though. Depending on the job skills market of where you are going to find talent, if you are in an area with very little Python talent, you probably don't want to choose Django as your go to web framework, so talent pool matters. Also, depends on the type of business, some businesses require certain compliance and licensing which are not available in open source, so they may not choose open source for that case, and in this case the customer does care a lot about that, like in the Medical and Financial industry. There are also other pluses and minuses to think about when it comes to tech stacks and tooling.
If you are that deep into your thinking process about licenses and compliance unless you have spoken to like 500 customers, nothing can help you.
The most recent highlighted post in IH this week was some founder with success who kept hammering how incredibly hard it was for them to get customers.
My tip: throw everything else you think is important out of the door.
Totally agree with this Sumit. However, even though the customers don't care, you as an engineer do have to care and be careful about what language you pick. Not because you may end up choosing the wrong language or something that's not popular etc..but just so that you don't end up choosing something that you may regret. I think people get caught up in the hype and always want to try out the cutting edge framework or library and not think about what impact that'll have or how much maintenance nightmare that can create down the line.
I like to stick to something that's been battle tested. I like to pick something that I am comfortable with. Not because it's the latest thing people are talking about. I think this is SO important. While I do agree that certain languages are good at certain stuff, I do think that over the long term, sticking to something that YOU yourself feel comfortable with will pay off. Not to mention you'll actually enjoy using it :)
Having said all that, picking a language/stack for your product is only one piece of the puzzle. As you mentioned, customers don't care what you're using as long as they see a value in the end product. That's what we focus on. Does my product provide value (either in terms of saving money or saving time)? That's the question that's always on my mind while I'm working on a product.
You are right about selecting the right tools. But I mean more like do not even think of the tools before you start talking to people. Get in the habit of reaching out to at least 1 genuine potential (not friends and family) each week. See how they see the issue itself, not even the solution you propose.
Yep. Agree 100% In fact, that's exactly what we did. We built a community around our beta testers even before we built the product. This came in handy so much because what we had thought about the product was completely different than what the users thought of it and that knowledge came in very handy in the initial stage and helped us develop the product in the right direction. It has clearly paid off for us.
I definitely agree with "sell BEFORE you build". Of course, you do need something to sell. So what we had was high fidelity mockups which gave our users a VERY CLEAR idea about what we were planning on developing.
Wow this could be good advice, have you shared your experience here or elsewhere?
Could you please share the link?
Thanks :) I'm planning to write about this. It's just been very hectic with all the demos we're planning with potential customers. We're taking their feedback very seriously and prioritizing them accordingly keeping in mind the long term vision of the project of course.
It's a very niche web app that applies to VERY SPECIFIC group of people at the moment. It's a B2B app where we're targeting those dentists who are so busy running the dental part of their business that they have no time to manage the business side of their practice as well as managing employees. You can check it out at www.teamio.app
I plan to write a very detailed write up about how we got started and how we reached where we are today. Be sure to follow :)
Hey! Yes I have already started following. I think this is interesting since I am so far from the domain on Dentists. So very curious to know how to reach out, how you pitch, what you learn, etc. Will wait for your posts!