Things I’ve Learned from Reading IndieHackers

As one of those folks featured on IndieHackers (https://www.submithub.com), I can say that I didn't read a single interview, advice blog or anything of the sort. I just focused on rolling out an MVP that streamlined the problem I was trying to solve. I confess that to this day, I haven't read any of the other interviews on IndieHackers :-D. Oops, hope you're not seeing this Courtland <3

Of course you can potentially make more than that - if that business is successful. There are no guarantees. It's a lot harder and takes a lot longer than most people think to create a £24K a year business. Just drumming up enough customers is a pain. Remember I get £24k in 3 months and the work is not especially hard.

Sure, if you can hit on a business idea that works, and is stress free, and doesn't take much time and effort to set up, then good luck to you!

I want to emphasize something though - for me the money is not the important thing, as long as I have enough. For me the work-life balance is the priority. Had too much stress in the past to want to go back to that lifestyle again!

I believe this list is missing what I consider to be the most important factor for success, an underlying strength that the most successful business I read on IndieHackers (and elsewhere) have that is systematically underestimated as a reason for success: previously acquired audience.

I believe audience is the most important currency in today's world, especially for digital products. Audience may be followers on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, etc. Audience may be an email list. Audience may be traditional networking (as if you are in a B2B niche business). If you do not have audience, you can buy one with ads (even so it is easier said than done); or you can borrow the audience from someone else, an influencer (I know there are ways to pay for influencer's audiences, but I do not believe it is very effective, to get some influencer to legitimately love your product and act as your referrer seems to me to be more effective, if harder). Or you can borrow the audience from something else, like HN, Reddit, PH.

All of the steps of launching and building a business, especially the very first ones are enormously easier if you have an audience. And enormously - some times impossibly - harder if you do not have one. This is derived from the adage that your first idea is always wrong. You have to learn everything by shipping early and talking to customers, but if you ship early to 20 eyeballs and talks to luckily one or two potential users, this feedback loop just doesn't count. But if you launch to thousands to eyeballs, even if you are making the mistake of no shipping early or not focused on talking to customers, you will receive unsolicited feedback from some of them.

And a previously built audience of people who trust you at a basic level will be much more responsive and engaged in rationalizing and vocalizing their opinions about your product. They will be "early adopters" type (hard to get that when you buy an audience). And they also will (likely) be people that are your target audience (hard to get that when you borrow an audience from HN and similar).

Some of the most impressive successful business in IndieHackers (according to my own criteria) are the ones who had years of building an audience. Through foruns, email lists, blogs.

A genuine audience is hard to plan ahead. Does not seem plausible to have the vision, the will, and the diligence to think about the industry/niche where I want to launch a business years ahead. So it is good to launch a business where you have genuine passion, somehow you will have the network (even so, not necessarily a large audience).

If you are in that position of having a large audience, seriously consider launching a business because you have a very big unfair advantage (and follow all the advice on this list). If you are not, pay a lot of attention on how to reach your target audience. It is a very tough problem to crack.

Actually I should rephrase thatand say, the way I make money, my profession, takes up 3 hours of my day, counting commute time. I can live off that money. The rest of the time I just do what I want, which is what I generally consider to be 'the work.'

Haha, I've read 4 books on writing by famous authors but have written 0 books.

I think I enjoy reading about writing more than actual writing.