Unpopular opinions from successful indie hackers

Learning what everyone's doing to build their businesses is great and all, but the real "aha" moments come from the unpopular opinions.

I caught up with successful indie hackers to figure out what they're doing that goes against conventional startup wisdom. 👇

Products can market themselves

👤 Alexander Isora of Unicorn Platform:

I've always believed that a product can market itself.

It is a very unpopular opinion. Every startup book will tell you that the product does not matter. It just has to be okay. It has to do the job. The important thing is marketing.

But I was able to grow a SaaS in the red ocean of website builders from $0 a $15K MRR with minimal marketing effort. My focus has been on the product. I was just building a great tool and people were using it and spreading the word. As simple as that.

People go crazy when you ship a feature they ask you for within hours. Try it and see how huge the marketing effect you can get by just working on your product.

You don't need to scale

👤 JT of No Code Founders:

Growth is a lie. You don't need to grow your business infinitely. Instead, hit your revenue goals, then optimize your time.

This has led me to now only working 25 hours a week while maintaining revenue.

👤 Tony Dinh of TypingMind:

You don't need an office. You don't need a lot of full-time employees. You don't need to scale up. You don't need to sacrifice your lifestyle to run a business.

To me, about $10K MRR is enough for one person. When I have kids, maybe $20K MRR will be more comfortable. Any higher than that is just my "backup plan", in case anything goes wrong.

It's okay to have a lifestyle business and make a living from it.

You shouldn't seek VC funding

👤 Iron Brands of Simple Analytics:

You don't need funding, a pitch deck, a revenue projection, or a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) to build a sustainable business that provides you with a great living and a lot of freedom.

I used to be very pro-funding. But funding has become a goal in itself. A signal to the outside world that you are working on something cool. Your parents will tell their friends about your startup. Techcrunch will write about you.

Founders spend too much time crafting pitch decks in which they project their revenue for the next five years, together with their total addressable market, and that kind of fluff.

It's like reading startup books instead of building something.

And VC-funded startups (or those looking for funding) tend to always want to conquer the world with an overly ambitious idea that's not even a product. Everyone wants to be the next Elon.

It would be better if fewer people go this route.

Perceived value > actual value

👤 Jay Tan of Zylvie:

Focus on perceived value, not actual value. Products that appear or feel valuable will make money, even if they actually aren't valuable or useful. Hell, something can even have negative value, and customers will still buy in droves.

The sad truth is that actual value that isn't perceivable will not generate revenue. This is the great paradox of buyer psychology. We'd like to think that customers are all rational actors who act based on logic and make purchase decisions based on observable objective data. But the truth is far simpler: We buy with emotion, and we justify our purchase using logic after the fact.

So how do you augment perceived value, you might ask? Well, the most obvious way is to get people talking about your product, so you can create social proof for your product. A well-incentivized affiliate program might do the trick in the beginning stages. Customers don't really have independent judgment; their judgment is highly influenced by what other people say about your product. If a group of people rave endlessly about your product, other bystanders will even start questioning themselves and change their opinion to fit the vocal majority. Customers are people, and people feel safety in numbers.

Another way to create perceived value is to make your app more sticky. When I was building Zlappo, I added a feature called "Unfollowers," basically a list of people who unfollowed you on Twitter that's updated daily. It made my app sticky as hell, as my users would routinely check who "backstabbed" them. Even though there's no real value in doing that. The more time my users spend on my app, the more useful my app will "feel" to them. And the more useful my app feels, the more they'll tell their friends/family about my app.

You don't need a grand vision

👤 Kyle Nolan ofProjectionLab:

Businesses don’t always need to start with a grand vision/ambition. Sometimes they can evolve from personal needs or pet projects.

Even if it's modest in scope, if you can target a real problem that you understand fully and are passionate about solving, that's going to boost your actual chance of success a lot higher than a fancy pitch deck for a pie-in-the-sky idea.

You don't need a new idea

👤 Marie Martens of Tally:

Launching a startup doesn’t mean you need to invent something new.

People often ask us why we chose to build yet another form builder in an already competitive market. In my opinion, it is a lot easier as a bootstrapped company to claim a small part of an existing market with validated demand, than it is to conquer a completely new industry or invent a new product or technology.

We didn’t reinvent the wheel; we focus on differentiation in pricing and UX. And this is why our users love Tally.

We emphasize our USPs in our marketing, as we position ourselves as the Simplest way to create forms for free.

👤 Tim Bennetto of Pallyy:

You don't need to come up with a unique idea to build a successful business.

Just find an existing niche you have even a tiny interest in and join it. Then build something that works really well and is affordable. And provide great support.

Entrepreneurship doesn't need to be a grind

👤 Dustin Stout of Magai:

You can have work-life balance. I very much work my business (mostly) like a 9-5 job. When I'm done for the day, I'm done for the day. Apart from the occasional crisis, I don't work after dinner time and I don't work on Sundays. I try to maintain healthy work hours that doesn't sacrifice my family time.

Cloud computing is overrated

👤 Tim Schumacher of Saas.Group:

There are more cases than you think where cloud computing is overrated and just filling Amazon’s pockets.

In 2020, we bought a business called Prerender.io. A brilliant business, run by a brilliant engineer, just with one little problem: it spent 50% of its revenues on AWS. So, after we acquired the service, we started questioning the value of AWS, and how we could cut costs there. The goal was to reduce costs while maintaining the same speed of rendering and quality of service.

You can always reduce AWS costs a bit, like 20-30% by some tweaks and re-negotiation, but we soon found ourselves asking the bigger question "why are we using AWS in the first place?"... and soon, we found ourselves designing a migration plan to move to bare-metal hosted servers. It turned out to be easier than we thought, and we reduced our annual server costs by a whopping 80% — from $1M to $200k — by moving away from AWS!

Today, we look at the hosting costs of every business with a fresh pair of eyes!

You don't need an audience

👤 Tim Bennetto of Pallyy:

It helps if you do have an audience, but it's absolutely not required to get started. Probably the majority of successful companies start without an audience.

Be transparent about your numbers

👤 Guillaume Moubeche of Lempire:

Be transparent. I have been open about our numbers from day 1.

I think the more you share your metrics, such as MRR, Churn, LTV, etc., with the world, the more you will feel the need to do better the next time you share something.

This is important to me because it allows me to reflect on everything we've already accomplished and have a clear vision of what's next to come!

On top of that, most people never share real actionable tips or costs. I will never forget the first time I read a transparent article about a startup story.

I got so inspired that day! It felt like I was part of their journey and I wanted to make people feel the same way.

The other reason is that obviously, the more you share honest stuff, the more people will relate to what you say and share your journey, hence more visibility for your company. 🚀

Don't build in public

👤 Ayush Chaturvedi of Indie Masterminds:

People starting out often unnecessarily romanticize BIP. The people who do it the best and have been doing it successfully for a long time treat BIP as one marketing strategy in their larger business. If you want to do it to build your network, you can build more genuine connections in DMs or private communities. You don't need to BIP for that.

Small teams > big teams

👤 Sarah Hum of Canny:

Small teams > big teams. Too many cooks in the kitchen is bad for a product.

👤 Marie Martens of Tally:

Hiring does not equal growth.

9/10 startups [don't have to] fail

👤 Iron Brands of Simple Analytics:

I hate the quote “9 out of 10 startups fail”. Even if it's true, it doesn't have to be.

I believe there are a few things that will reasonably increase your chances of success in the first place. This is what I use if I'm thinking about a new business idea:

• Is it B2B?
• Is there a competitor in the space that is doing well?
• Can you find an angle to outdo this competitor?
• Does it have significant SEO opportunities?

4x = LFG

This is not how you build the new AirBnB or Uber, but is that the goal? For the 99% of us, it shouldn’t.

Your business should serve you (not the other way around)

👤 Jay Tan of Zylvie:

Your business is supposed to serve you; you're not supposed to serve your business. Your product will be fine, your business will be fine, your customers will be fine. Take a break and smell the roses, travel a bit, and indulge in your hobbies. Most indie hackers kill themselves over their business and end up miserable with no work-life balance whatsoever. In my opinion, they're completely missing the point of entrepreneurship.

The reason that "lifestyle business" is a dirty word is not because lifestyle businesses are bad. It's because it's a shaming term popularized by VCs, angels, and the entire startup ecosystem/machinery to dissuade indie hackers from bootstrapping and encourage them to take on funding (while giving up sizable equity so these parasites can get on board and participate in your growth).

This is what I like about lifestyle businesses. It's not investor-centered, it's not customer-centered, it's founder-centered. It serves you first and foremost, not anyone else. If you're a founder who knows what's good for himself and what's important in life, you better think of your business as a thriving lifestyle business. Your business should never be optimized for growth over your own quality of life. Life is way too short to do that.

Enjoyment > skill

👤 Mac Martine of The SaaS Bootstrapper:

I think a lot of people overvalue technical and business skills.

Those things can help, but they aren't the most important things, and they are best learned as you go anyhow.

I think the most valuable things, especially early on, are finding ways to stay inspired and to enjoy what you do. Because if you enjoy what you do, you'll be productive and keep going. Most people don't succeed simply because they quit too soon; they expect results sooner than they are likely to see them.

I love what I do so much (solving problems!) that I'm almost always motivated and inspired, and I do whatever I need to do to make time to get done what I want to get done. It's not a grind for me. It's a joy.

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