This week’s edition comes with a day delay, I hope it’s not an issue.

🧠 Startup Wisdom

• The market is huge! There are billions and billions of dollars flowing in the global market hour by hour, day by day. So the chances that there is a market for your idea are pretty good. The biggest challenge isn’t really to figure out IF there is a market, but HOW do you get to it? Bigger markets are easier to get into, and smaller markets are harder and more expensive to find. In other words, distribution costs are different, and that’s where you should iterate and test the waters. Finding that reliable distribution channel to get to the people that make the market for your product.
• You don’t need a huge market to be happy. Most people get drawn into the startup world by the fantasy of “hitting it big” with the next Google or Apple, but that life isn’t for everyone. Instead, you could try indie hacking first, which means starting a small tech business (usually B2B SaaS), with huge profit margins, aiming for profitability from day one, being scrappy and growing it enough to give you a reliable stream of income. And then you can decide if you want to conquer the world, or stay small and prioritize work-life balance.

🏆 Indie Highlights

• Angel Match - drawing in ~10k USD per month, it is basically just a glorified spreadsheet of Angel Investors. Just so you see how you can build value around a simple concept and a simple implementation. You don’t need AI, blockchain, VC investments, huge development teams and other shiny things to start the ball rolling. You need to identify a need, deliver on it and find the distribution channel that offers you the best bang for the buck.
• TestingBot - was drawing 5k USD a while ago, but didn’t update their numbers of IndieHackers in a while. But the idea is simple, it isn’t original or unique, and definitely it’s not the next Google. But they found a real need that was already served by the market, squeezed in and grabbed a little piece of the pie for themselves. That’s one approach to indie hacking, that allows you to skip the validation phase altogether and speed up delivery: target a market big enough with no clear contender (aka no monopoly), get in and start drawing some attention. At 20 USD / month, you need 500 paying users to get in 10,000 USD of MRR.

✈️ My Journey

• With Vuuh, we are having constant dialogues with potential new clients. Being in the B2B space bordering very closely on the B2E space, our selling cycles are pretty long, but the results and dialogues we’re having are very encouraging. Also, we are seeing a big increase in automated usage due to integrating with one of the world’s biggest e-commerce platform, and so far our systems are keeping up with the load pretty well, thanks to Kubernetes and the way we structured our services architecture.

• With Quest of the Hero, I didn’t start yet integrating the new graphics, but I expect to do that in the following 1-2 weeks. Until then, I am still fixing some core mechanics issues, such as combining the real-time regeneration system with the turn based progression systems, where players complained that you could just break the game by not playing it. In other words, because there was no time limit between encounter picks, you could just wait between them to regenerate to full health and mana, and never die. Now, a “ghost” will appear and limit your idle time, and if you wait to much you will be automatically thrown into a battle where you will lose more than you gained by waiting those 10 seconds or so.
  An update will come in the following days, with some new items and updated game systems.
  In the meantime, here are the stats so far. I didn’t spend time at all last week promoting it into gaming communities, so last week I only managed to draw in 3 page views, compared to ~60 the week before. It’s almost like the results are proportional to the effort :D

  

• With The Tech Bubble, I am still sitting at 20 subscribers (if you are reading this from your email client, you are one of them, so thank you!), with an open rate of ~45% (which is huge compared to other newsletters, from what I’ve read), and ~700 views on my posts in the last 30 days. Not huge results, but it’s a thing I’m enjoy doing. The best traffic sources are from email (from the big open rate) and LinkedIn. I’ll keep exploring more ways to gather attention and hopefully subscribers. If you have some suggestions on what I should try, send them my way through vlad@vladcalin.ro

  

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