🧠 Startup Wisdom

When aiming for building a startup, whether you want to do it the unicorn way or the indie hacker way, validation is the thing that everybody needs to start from. It’s not optional, and if you build it, they will not come. And not because the product you built is bad or broken, but because it is not needed.

When you explore a certain customer market segment, there are certain problems that bubble up in your conversations again and again, and that’s the “idea”. It’s not your idea, it’s the problem potential customers highlight.

It is crucial not to ask leading questions such as “would you like a product that does X, Y and Z”, and instead ask open ended question to see where THEY steer the conversation: “what would be the main thing you’d like automated” or “what is your most time consuming activity?”.

And try to validate assumptions, not products. Products are tools built on validated assumptions.

🏆 Indie Highlights

• SideSpace: A browser extension that aims to provide more clarity and organization in one’s tabs. From the numbers from indiehackers.com there seems it is a pre-revenue startup, but at the same time, some posts there highlights some client and MRR achievements. It’s not clear how much they are making yet, I’ll keep an eye on it.
• One Tab Group: Another similar extension, that aids in the organization of one’s tabs in the browser. This one is making ~1.5k per month, according to the revenue tracker on indiehackers.com. So there is a market for paid browser extensions, that can leverage an already established market base. And productivity boosting tools, although a crowded market, it still has some space available for fellow indie hackers.

✈️ My Journey

• Quest of the Hero: unfortunately, in the last week, I didn’t manage to get a lot of stuff done here. I am currently adding some content, adjusting and balancing numbers and planning the final content for the demo. I still aim to release a demo on Steam by the end of the month.
• Photozilla: It started as an AI based product, with stock photos generated by AI, under the assumption that digital marketers and people doing design client work are open to a cheaper alternative to stock photography.
  But after some conversations, it looks like there is a strong anti-AI sentiment in that area, and also there are a lot of concerns regarding the uncertain copyright status of the AI generated content. That makes using this kind of content risky business-wise and to save a few bucks, it’s not worth the risk. But from some such conversations, I uncovered some other automation opportunity, in the content generation space (without AI), so I’ll keep exploring in that direction and validate a few more assumptions.

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