[csallen]

I think all of this advice is spot on. It's what I've experienced myself working on Taskforce and Indie Hackers, and it's backed up by what I've learned from interviewing ~40 founders of profitable businesses in the past few months.

Picking a good market might be the biggest thing. If you pick a market you don't understand, it's way harder to build a good product that solves an important problem well. You end up guessing a lot. It's also way harder to get the word out, because you don't know your customers well enough to know where they hang out. If you go to https://IndieHackers.com, sort by revenue, and pick the companies making the least, the most common phrase is some variation of, "I haven't really done much marketing yet," and it's often because they're in a market they don't understand well.

I'm also a big believer in automation. I haven't done nearly enough of it, but I just got into using Buffer for Twitter, and it's a tremendous time saver (I can do all my tweeting for a week in a single 2 hour block of time). I have a ton of other marketing tasks that I could automate as well. Also, Mike Carson of park.io is making like $1.5M/yr as a solo founder/employee, and he claims it's mostly due to automation, so that's kind of hard to ignore :)

[alexjv89]

Thanks for the comment. Two things - 1) Finding Indiehackers.com interesting .. digging deep into it. 2) ""I haven't really done much marketing yet," - and it's often because they're in a market they don't understand well. - makes sense..

[conorgil145]

Thanks for sharing park.io, I'd never heard of it. Do you have any links to related reading? I'd love to hear about how it was built, how profitable it is, etc, etc.

[csallen]

No problem, you can read about it here: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/park-io