How I built a MVP with hundreds of users as a non-technical founder

Hi everyone, first-time poster.

I’m not technical at all. I’ve also found it really hard to take the usual YC advice and find a co-founder. I’m not 18 anymore and don’t meet the ambitious and hungry, only the well-compensated and well-fed. Many of my ideas are around media and not many engineers are interested in that world. All that said, I’ve launched quite a few side-projects into the real world.

My latest project is around my passion for indie creators and newsletters, particularly the Substack phenomenon. Last November, I set out to build a newsletter discovery platform to make it easier to find great writers publishing independently. In February, I launched Inbox World. I looked at my analytics recently and 200-300 people are finding it a month without without me putting in any effort. Which I’m pretty happy about!

I thought I'd share my my very, very idiosyncratic approach to getting this across the line despite not being able to code.

Adopt a maker’s mindset

When I say I'm not technical, I mean it. I’m a writer and a filmmaker. (My last film, a doc about a young boxer’s last chance to qualify for the Olympics, is out on Tubi now.) I’m also here with you guys making MVPs. What these all have in common is a drive to make something and put it out into the world. When it comes to side projects or MVPs or startups, whatever you want to call it, I think about it as making a digital product.

Anything I can’t do myself, I must find someone else to do it. For Inbox World, I had a vision of what I wanted. I wanted to create a newsletter hub. To get it done, I needed to get coders and designers to help me build it.

As a writer, I can make the raw materials and nowadays distribute solo. (Hence, my enthusiasm for Substack and newsletters.) As a filmmaker, I can do a lot alone (produce, direct, sound) but I need to build a team (actors, cinematographer, editor) to get the vision I want on screen. I think you have to apply the same logic to solo start-ups.

Think less like a a16z-backed startup founder and more like an auteur trying to execute a vision. No matter how many people you work this, this is your project and all responsibility falls on you. That is the mindset. You can actually use it to your advantage. No one can possibly care about this more than you. To get things done, you have to communicate what is important and why to other people. The goal of starting a MVP is to finish it.

One of my favorite quotes is from Mike Tyson’s trainer. “No matter what anyone says, no matter the excuse or explanation,” said Cus D’Amato, ”whatever a person does, in the end, is what he intended to do all along.”

Find talent and pay them

If you can’t hack code, hack people together.

In my case, I wanted to make a site that stored the details of newsletters and where people could submit a newsletter themselves. I wanted people to be able to vote on them. I wanted the website to have rankings of databases.

So I needed:

• A backend developer to build the database
• A designer to create the look
• A frontend developer to link these two together

You can skip the designer step but then you own the design and are responsible for communicating what it should look like. That is very hard. In my case, I am visual and I like seeing my website mocked up. It helps me to do UX and UI and all the other workflow stuff that I have to do since no-one else is going to do it. I have spent hours trawling through Behance for designers for all my sites for various ideas that have different aesthetics.

I explained the components of my database to a developer whom I found through Upwork and where I expected the inputs to come from. I set out to create a design brief and found a designer through Listings Project, a great mailing list for artists and creatives. I found a frontend developer also through Upwork. I acted as the product lead to connect the dots.

For the designer, we talk a lot and I write down a brief. Then they put their ideas in Figma and we work from there.

For the backend, I will often make long Google Docs with lengthy “If this, then that” instructions in mind-numbing detail.

For the frontend, I will sometimes inspect the code in Chrome (right click on the item on the page > Inspect) and then change simple things, like the text or font size or eliminate whole elements. Then I screenshot them and send them to the frontend person. This is also cheaper than asking the designer to do revisions. I lock in a design and then I tweak it.

Don’t understand the distinction between frontend and backend? Just ask the coders. People are always happy to explain what they do. Every decision involves a trade-off. It is my job to decide to acquire enough information to make those decisions well. You are asking people to make something specific. You need to understand what they do so that you can control the gap between a MVP and a POS.

In general, I hire people and try to pay them what they ask. Otherwise, you’re asking friends and friends of friends or (worst of all) strangers for favors or discounts. If it works out, great. If the work isn’t good, whose fault will that be?

In paying someone, I expect a certain quality of work in return, on time. I think that’s a much better way to build when you’re solo. I want to get something out the door. I need to align their incentives to mine. I’ve found models like 50% upfront and 50% at the end work well in these situations.

How much should you pay? Set a budget that means if you get no return on your investment, it doesn’t make a difference to you day-to-day. My first backend developer was terrible. Very slow, low quality of work. But he was cheap. I stuck with him and he built me a crappy v1. I could use that v1 to work on the frontend and use the knowledge I’d gained about backend during development to audition a new developer to build a v2. It could only be better, right?

If you don’t have much money at all, I’d suggest not doing the above and spending your time (which is not free but costs nothing) vetting people to find someone who is good and work with them for a small amount of time a week as your budget allows. But I was in a rush.

If I work with someone and they deliver terrible work and I have no time crunch, I thank them for their time, pay them in full, review them positively and never think of them again. The project doesn’t really matter. There will always be another project. What matters is the working relationships you build.

Some great books on product and creativity that I've enjoyed on this are:
"Build"" by Tony Faddell, the iPod and Nest guy and "Loonshots" by Safi Bahcall, which talks about the how of taking a massive leap of achievement.
I also loved "A Work in Progress: A Journal" by Noma's René Redzepi, which is a diary of a year he spent rethinking the world’s best restaurant from scratch, and "Life With Picasso" by Francoise Gilot.

"Really? Worst film you ever saw. Well, my next one will be better." - Ed Wood

After I launched, I had a site called Inbox World. I sent it to my friends and put it on Product Hunt. People were polite, but no-one really cared that much. That was demoralizing. I asked a bunch of people why. It gave me a lot of ideas of how to improve the product.

Only now I had a team - a designer, a frontend and backend developer. They were all great and we understood how to work together.

We recrafted Inbox World. We eliminated the voting and the submissions. Now, it is a curated collection of great newsletters with decent audiences. We developed a very basic algorithm to show in a more objective way what was trending on social media. (Happy to talk more about how we did that in another post.) We redid the design and UX.

We added previews so you can start reading the latest posts on Inbox World. Rather than a complicated submissions system that feeds into the backend, I put my personal email there, which people sometimes use to send me cool newsletters. We seem to get organic traffic from Google and Reddit. The fact that hundreds are finding it useful every month is very gratifying. It may not be much, but it’s nice to make something from nothing.

More importantly, the site gave me the kernel of another, much more ambitious startup in the creator economy space. I’ve been building that with the same team over the last six months. I wouldn’t have been able to build it without creating Inbox World. Small wins lead to bigger swings. If you’re interested in finding out more, I’ll be sending out invites via the mailing list soon.

I imagine there are a lot of non-technical people like me on Indie Hackers that love the site and are absorbing as much information as they can from the community. And I imagine there are some of those non-coders who want to make a product solo but don’t know where to start. This is how I do it and I hope it helps.

Thanks,