4 Startup Lessons I have learned from Indie Hackers

Around June or July 2023, Mai Quang Tu?n , my partner, and I learned about the practice of Indie Hacking and the active community of Indie Hackers on X. They blew our mind.

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We got to know about Indie Hacking thanks to TypingMind. It is one of the earliest, if not the first, “better UI for ChatGPT” kind of app. TypingMind was pretty popular during that time on Product Hunt (a platform for launching tech products we often hang out at) and with a little research, we got to know about its maker Tony Dinh (also from Vietnam like us!), who is, as described in his bio, an “indie hacker.”

If you haven’t heard about Indie Hackers before, here’s a quick definition I could provide based on my observations of and exposure to the community. Indie Hackers are people who build and launch (often more than one) products independently, often by bootstrapping (little to no external funding), and often on their own or in a super small team (1-2 people), and are usually developers. Some of the Indie Hackers I’ve got to know about and get inspired by, besides Tony Dinh, are levelsio (aka the maker of PhotoAI, InteriorAI, NomadList, etc.), tibo_maker (aka the maker of Taplio and TweetHunter), Timb03 (aka the maker of Pallyy), marc_louvion (aka the maker of ShipFast).

During our first 5 months of building MindPal , Tuan and I were a lot like Indie Hackers. After we got VC funding, our path diverged a little bit from that of the Indie Hacking community, as most Indie Hackers are often comfortable with a certain level of growth ($10k/month is usually the benchmark, though many Indie Hackers got really big) while we aim for exponential growth. They are just different choices. In fact, Indie Hackers often consider themselves the opposite to “VC-backed startup founders”. I don’t necessarily think so. Even after the funding, Tuan and I still keep and hold on to many values we’ve learned from Indie Hackers. We believe these values hold true whether we are bootstrapped or VC-backed founders. This post is a rundown of these values.

1 — Don’t seek anyone’s permission to build a startup

We don’t need a perfect startup idea to get started.

We don’t need anyone, especially if they’re not the willing to pay for what we make, to compliment or approve of our startup idea to get started.

We don’t need to convince an investor to invest in us to get started.

We don’t need to convince many other people to join the team to get started.

If we want to build a startup, just go build it.

This is the spirit of Indie Hackers, and I love it.

Because it is liberating.

Today, a lot of founders, especially young or first-time ones like us before, thought that they need these kinds of external validation/approval/permission to build a startup. I’ve seen people endlessly waited to get the “feedback” from a so-called “advisor” just to do about anything. I’ve seen people gave up on their thought of building something just because some judges at a random startup competition didn’t think their idea was good. I’ve seen people kept chasing after “investors” without even caring to do anything to move their startup forward. Of course, there may be exceptions, but at least in my case of building a software product, these things are not must-haves.

If you’re new to building a startup and you’re affected by this thinking, here’s some facts to relieve you:

• You never need a perfect startup idea to get started. Don’t be scared by other people telling you your startup idea has to has the perfect TAM - SAM - SOM, needs to be at the right timing, or needs to be unique, or anything like that. In startups, ideas are cheap. You can change these ideas all the time, or “pivot” as startup people often say.
• Don’t ask for advice from anyone and don’t listen to anyone trying to advise you if they never had experience in the field you’re working on or if they’re not your target or existing customers, especially when you’re starting out. Most of the time it’s their opinion, not facts. No one, including investors or so-called advisors, knows it all. The only one who has the answer is the market — your customers.
• Unless what you’re building is capital-intensive (like hardware), which is not very common, building a product is pretty cheap. Building a software product nowadays costs almost 0 to get started. All you need is a personal computer with Internet, and you’re good to go. You’ll find out that most tools you need for building a software product has a free plan or has some sort of a startup program where you can ask for free credits. At MindPal , we never paid for anything in our tech stack during our first 6 months. So most of the time, you won’t need investors to give you money to get started.

If you want to build something, just go build it. Don’t quit and don’t die, and you’ll be fine.

2 — Stay lean

It’s possible to grow big while staying lean. The Indie Hackers I talk about above are the living proof. All of them either have built products whose MRR is at least $50k or make at least $50k a month, all while going solo or just working with a couple of other people at most. This number may not be as big in comparison with startups and companies, but it is on an individual level, and I’m sure many of you agree with me that this level of income is the dream of many people.

This fact is liberating too. Before that, I always thought I would need to big team to do something big. I thought I would need an engineering team, a sales team, a marketing team, etc. One of the ridiculous Tuan and I made while working on our first startup was hiring 20 people right from the start. Knowing that these Indie Hackers are able to pull of a successful company while remaining small empowered us to start working on MindPal as a 2-person team throughout our first 8 months. Even until now, we’ve just started hiring one more member. We are super careful with hiring, and won’t hire anyone else anytime soon.

3 — Stay close to customers

Indie Hackers often optimize for profitability, and consequently, care deeply about the customers. In the end, the customers are the ones who pay for the products.

That’s why they don’t give a shit about superficial or unimportant things, like trying to raise funds while they don’t need money or trying to impress someone else. Just build and sell. As simple as that.

Today, there are so many distractions, which are meaningless at best and detrimental to startup’s growth at worst, making the ability to determine what is important and stay focused on it one of the most critical traits to have for a founder. Tuan and I make the most progress for our startups when we focus on talking to customers to learn to build a better product for them and better sell it to people like them, not when we are distracted with meaningless events, competitions, or conferences.

4 — Ship fast

All Indie Hackers build products fast, super fast.

I once heard a startup in Vietnam bragged about their engineering team being able to make a product in 6 months. They’ll be surprised to learn that the same product, if given to a typical Indie Hacker, would take just DAYS to finish.

That is to give you a better sense of how fast people ship in the Indie Hacking community. There’s even a popular “movement” within the community called “Build in public” that encourages people to show up every day and share what they’ve built that day online.

Build fast, fail fast, learn fast. That has always been our motto since the earliest days of doing startups. Fast iterations of the product means we will get more shots to try something and maneuver the product into something of increasingly greater value. That’s why we were super painful that we spent 6 months on building an MVP that nobody used in our first startup even when we had 4 engineers. That’s why I decided to start learning to code to be able to build products on my own faster. That’s why now Tuan and I have a ridiculously high bar for product development speed. We measure the time spent in days, hours, and minutes. Not weeks. Not months.

Of course, besides the good learnings, there are also things that I were affected either directly or indirectly by the Indie Hacking community that I’m not very happy with. For example, I often fall into the trap of continuously building something new inside the product, but the truth is more features doesn’t mean more revenue. The profit-oriented approach of Indie Hackers also means that I tend to optimize for short-term value, sometimes too much. Moreover, Indie Hackers are not the best source to learn about embracing money and people as business leverage, which I’ve been learning to do.

Anyway, it’s undeniable that the Indie Hacking community has left a significant impact on my startup journey. Although I no longer identify myself as an Indie Hacker, I forever cherish the time I immersed myself in the community and learned so much from it. These are the lessons I would take with me going forward, and I’m really grateful.

This post is the dedication to the Indie Hacking community I deeply respect, and I hope someone who reads this post may take something of value away as well.

Th?m

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