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Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

marclou.beehiiv.com

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Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#51

Post by marclou »

w10-1 wrote: post #35

Great stuff: - Brief. Respect people's time, and take a stand. - Tailored, to solopreneur. It's tempting to be drawn into building beautiful tech, chasing resume skills, or building domain experience in crap work. Putting yourself on the hook of your own decision-making builds character. - Refined: it's easy to go from bad to good (just smooth out the pain points). It's very hard to go from good (happy but free custo…

Correct. Although my definition of success is: 1. no partner/employee — total freedom 2. building apps all day 3. that have a purpose/use case Somehow, I'm already there and have no intent to do much more

Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#52

Post by marclou »

chpmrc wrote: post #38

I've been following you (among other indie hackers) for a couple of years. I respect and admire the heck out of what you're doing. But I have a huge problem with the fact that you keep referring to the income brought in by ShipFa.st (again, heck of a product!) as "51K/m" (as of today this is what your X's bio shows), when pricing is obviously not recurring. What would be a lot more indicative of the financial success…

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Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#53

Post by marclou »

smcin wrote: post #46

Which service were you referring to with "I killed a startup by swapping one-time payments for recurring ones"? Was it something that the average user would expect was priced with one-time payment, or subscription? What was the ratio of the one-time payment to subscription price? How did those pricings compare to competitors? As a user of indie apps, I think in general people expect the basic version for a reasonable…

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Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#54

Post by marclou »

Uptrenda wrote: post #22

When you build these type of projects is there an actual consistent method to getting people to look at your work? Because from my experience it seems like any amount of feedback I've had came from freak lottery type events like getting covered in a magazine or something like that. How would someone who is really clueless and horrible at promotion learn those kind of skills?

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Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#56

Post by purple-leafy »

chrisdbanks wrote: post #49
purple-leafy wrote: post #36

I’m in the same boat as the OP, I’ve launched 3 projects in 2023. I spent 10 months on the first project. It was a very clever project, complicated to explain, hard to build, and ultimately did crap. It scratched my own itch - or so I thought, I don’t even use it myself at all. No emotions, pure logic marketing. 1000+ users only. $0 made. My second project I built in 1 day, and launched in 1 week. It was basic, but p…

Sounds like you're building products in lieu of doing user research and product discovery. You can often prove or disprove something is a good idea with some market research and some mock-ups. Even just building the landing page as a fake door can work. Spend more time on product discovery and less time building and you'll save time overall.

Yeah you are right, my current project I’m building the landing page first with a minimal demo to collect emails before a full build

Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#58

Post by jwr »

marclou wrote: post #57
jwr wrote: post #55

Solo bootstrapper here (8 years now). All good advice, to which I would add: don't build B2C, only B2B. And any subscription plan should be above $50/month.

Noted. Do you share your learnings/stories anywhere?

No, except in random comments on HN sometimes. Perhaps indeed I should write it all up.

Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#59

Post by Rastonbury »

marclou wrote: post #51
w10-1 wrote: post #35

Great stuff: - Brief. Respect people's time, and take a stand. - Tailored, to solopreneur. It's tempting to be drawn into building beautiful tech, chasing resume skills, or building domain experience in crap work. Putting yourself on the hook of your own decision-making builds character. - Refined: it's easy to go from bad to good (just smooth out the pain points). It's very hard to go from good (happy but free custo…

Correct. Although my definition of success is: 1. no partner/employee — total freedom 2. building apps all day 3. that have a purpose/use case Somehow, I'm already there and have no intent to do much more

I'd love if you made a post on the one time payment to subscription killing thing. A bit too brief, a couple of sentences explaning the details and how you came to those conclusions would be helpful! Also about first impressions, did you tweak landing page headline until it clicked? What were the results etc. Maybe worthy of a full post, seems a bit listicle-y (not saying it's bad advice)

Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#60

Post by Rastonbury »

j4yav wrote: post #50
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no paperwork.

How are you making startups with no documentation, legal or otherwise?

To answer your original question, it's hard to brand and market, look at his products they quite varied and have obvious sounding names. Regarding legal he's a solopreneur, they likely operate from the same legal entity behind the scenes
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