🧠 Startup Wisdom

A thought that crossed my mind recently is this: starting a successful business is actually a search problem. Think about it.

You have three variables: the clients, the problem, and a solution, and they are all somewhat intertwined. But you don’t know how and in which way, so you have to search for them, having a start position, and exploring the world until you uncover more and more information about the value of the other two.

The end goal is to find a combination of client-problem-solution so that the problem is pressing enough, the solution is good enough and the client is willing enough to pay enough to cover the development and distribution costs.

Let me explain:

1. When you start from the client, you kind of know who your public is. And you have a vague idea about what problems they have and what solutions they might need. But you are not certain. Interviewing them is the search algorithm, since you kind of know the overall direction of their problems, but you don’t have enough information to niche down and build a solution.
2. When you start from the problem, it means that probably you are building something to scratch your own itch. But you don’t know how many people are out there with the same problem and how willing to pay for it are, or if the solution you envisioned is good enough for them. So you have to search in both directions to find out these two aspects: are there enough clients? Are they willing enough to pay?
3. When you start form the solution, you are basically entering an already established and validated problem space. You either build on top of something that already exists (like a plugin) or you copy something already existent. In this case, the other people already validated the variables, but you engage in a race to the bottom in a red ocean.

🏆 Indie Highlights

• Aquire.Website: this website sells micro businesses, similar to acquire.com, but with smaller projects. If you want to grab a somewhat pre-validated and already built software project, this is the place to do so.
• SimpleForms: one simple indie business everybody can start is a form builder. Apparently there is a huge market for these, and some of the indie businesses pursuing this path can end up making tens of thousands of dollars every month. Typical use cases are companies doing surveys, or registration forms for various events.

✈️ My Journey

• Quest of the Hero: approaching the demo release! I estimate there will still be 2-3 weeks until then, but the game starts to look more polished. The main things that still need some work are polishing, adding some juice, integrating some more game graphics (next up are icons and battler fight stances), bugfixing (a lot of it related to UI) and content balancing.
• Other ideas: For Quest of the Hero, I am compiling a list of various Youtube streamers that also play indie games, together with their contact information. When the demo will be live, I will reach out to them for playtesting and visibility. It is a very manual process, and I wish there was something to automatize this (an indie startup idea for later 😉)
• Photozilla.io: for now, I paused it, because I want to focus this month on getting to the demo phase with Quest of the Hero. Focusing on less is actually getting more done, so that’s what I’m trying to do.  But the latest round of feedback wasn’t very encouraging, but I am still aiming to do a one last push for validation, by paying for some Google Ads traffic to get some people that are  actually looking for “stock photos” or related phrases. In addition, I’ll integrate a way to generate your own stock images, and probably will make all images freely available (except the high resolution ones), while moving towards a limited plan (limiting the amount of images you can generate).
• Social media presence: I started to schedule a regular posting schedule on LinkedIn, with content related to indie hacking, startups and technology. From the peak of 10.000 impressions per week I was having a while ago, since I started posting regularly, I dropped to under 1000. I want to build that up again. I will aim to have a set schedule, where on Saturdays I’ll schedule all the content for the next week in advance via Buffer, so I don’t have to squeeze my brains every day for topics. I will want access to some analytics sometimes in the next weeks, so I’ll probably get a paid plan with them to get access to that and start optimizing a thing or two regarding my own content.

Do you find this newsletter fun and/or informative? Let me know if you have suggestions at vlad@vladcalin.ro. I’ll strive to respond to every email!

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