[nzach]

I just want to share my recent personal experience.

Recently I've finally decided to try creating something new that people would find useful hoping that some day I would be able to turn a profit from that. So I vibe coded a pretty bare-bones (but fully functional) version of my idea and started to talk about it in several platforms, including IndieHackers.

And the main "advice" I've got after talking with a few people was "You are putting too much effort in your product, your focus should be on finding the right market fit for your idea". And after reading the logs in my server I found out nobody bothered to actually try what I built(and no, you don't need to create an account to use), which is fine. But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing?

So, after a brief encounter with this community(people that are trying to build products) I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution.

I get that many people are in this space only to make money and that finding the "magic idea" is probably a good advice if you don't care about what you will build and you need to make money fast. But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas.

[weitendorf]

I didn't understand the indiehacker community/product mindset until I discovered the indiehacker "influencers" / lifestyle vloggers / etc. that might be the only ones actually turning a profit on all of this.

The influencers sell a lifestyle of throwing a million darts at the board with simple apps and building tiny businesses off the handful that get a lot of interest or seem to resonate with users. And the apps they build that do well are mostly small tools for other indiehackers to use to build/host/augment their apps. So they not only have the distribution and marketing aspects solved already, but they've actually created the demand for their own products by selling what they do as a viable (and easy/glamorous) path to success.

The other indiehackers are mostly in it to be like their favorite influencers, so they copy them by making small tools for other indiehackers and trying the million darts strategy. But it just gets lost in a sea of other indiehackers with no audience or distribution, all trying to sell the same kinds of products to each other. It just seems like a really bad community to sell to: very cost conscious, building competing products, familiar with all your marketing/fake-it-til-you-make it strategies. If at first you don't succeed, watch more youtube videos and throw more darts!

I don't think "market pull" is a terrible strategy and I'm sure for some it's just a fun way to write software but I worry that it's mostly a hybrid get-rich-quick scheme, parasocial thing for the small number of influencers at the top that wastes a huge amount of time. Personally I don't like the idea of baiting people with fake landing pages and think it's actively harmful for so many people to only build simple apps with immediate traction. It's just poisoning the well and making small-scale software low-trust, trying to get rich quick off other people trying to get rich quick

[andai]

That's hilarious. The post reminded me of Marc Lou, who's launched like 30 SaaS, and from what I gathered by far his most profitable one is the one that helps you launch your own SaaS...

[esskay]

The same guy who sold a Saas starter kit riddled with security flaws that allowed anyone to just have access to your product, then when it was pointed out to him, he berated the person who told him and said it was 'no big deal' and to 'build something'.

The guy's extremely sketchy and is selling a non existent pipe dream to people who are easily swayed by "how to make money online" nonsense.

[latexr]

How do you make money online? By making “how to make money online” courses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWMAOzH20mY

[jimkleiber]

Lol I love it, been hoping something like this existed, thank you

[TheDong]

If you want an overly long slightly different version of that video, you could check out the Folding Ideas video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw

[siwatanejo]

Haha brilliant. I remember my ex going to courses from guys that claimed to have become successful "entrepreneurs", and when I asked her what's their main income from? She told me: well, selling courses. (PS: So the course basically consisted of teaching them how to speak in public lolololol.)

[fxtentacle]

I find it pretty fascinating that these "asia backpacking entrepreneur" types are in general so stuck with the "fake it, perception is everything" mindset, that they build products such as:

"Create Stunning Travel Photos at Popular Destinations Without Leaving Home. Our AI model crafts your perfect travel photos."

which is the featured example client on https://codefa.st - the vibe coding course by aforementioned Marc Lou.

[warrenm]

It's the "envelope stuffing" 'business' of the 80s informercials updated

Or the "how to make a course" 'courses' of the 2010s

Or the "how to make a blog" 'blogs' of the 2000s

As they say, what's new is old again

[reactordev]

Now it’s how to earn money on TikTok by buying an AI course maker to make courses on how to earn money on TikTok.

[alchemyzach]

That guy is sooo shady. Just something really insincere and sinister about his whole shtick. Unfortunately lots of young, eager devs dont know to avoid these characters yet

[bwb]

Its the old story of who makes money in the gold rush, the person selling equipment and eggs.

[Fade_Dance]

And vices! That's what's really driving this phenomenon. The users have a deeply meaningful goal they are pursuing (achieve financial independence, realize a great idea), and end up repeatedly taking low effort dopamine hits from "building their toolset" or whatever.

Same with the self-help world. Big, life-defining subjects hijacked for quick dopamine hits.

[baxtr]

“During a gold rush, sell shovels”

[amelius]

Modern take: during a gold rush, review the shovels.

[baxtr]

Build a shovel app?!

[comprev]

Shovel-as-a-Service*

[*] Also known as "tool hire" and has been around since the dawn of mankind

[narrator]

Well Pieter Levels has a negative customer acquisition cost because he gets most of his business off of X and he gets so many impressions that he gets paid to post there. That's a pretty incredible marketing hack if you ask me. I invest in startups and the ones who do really well hack marketing. They have tech in their stack that is specifically devoted to automating and scaling their marketing.

[antupis]

But if you listen to Levels' interviews, especially before his Twitter stardom, you will see that he always promotes the find your audience and build to them approach.

[ndr]

Amusingly enough the product that makes him the most is PhotoAI and that doesn't seem to target his audience at all.

[actionfromafar]

But there's no guarantee your audience will buy what you can sell.

[skeeter2020]

your audience is supposed to guide what you're selling. The fundamental belief is getting the audience is harder than building something they want. This part is probably true, while the rest of the ecosystem is garbage and scams

[andreygrehov]

> They have tech in their stack that is specifically devoted to automating and scaling their marketing.

Interesting, what are some examples?

[jacob_rezi]

https://www.rezi.ai/enterprise

We've built a white-labeled version of our resume software to tackle specific keywords, communities, and now general organisations

This would be an exact example

[jacquesm]

Something very similar applies to VC investing. Sure, some founders get rich. But founder returns averaged across all founders are horrible. The VCs however... they are like those influencers. They'll tell you exactly how you should maximize for their return, just in case you strike it big. They're not going to tell you how to minimize your risks, unless that happens to align with their increased returns.

[spacemadness]

Kind of like all the investment and finance influencers. If they’re so good at it why do they need to spend all that time trying to be an influencer? They should be rich already. They even beg for likes and subscribes so they’re obviously not doing it as a hobby. It’s simply because they’re trying to get rich selling advice to gullible people.

[weitendorf]

Personally I find indiehackers unique amongst get rich quick schemes because it's very transparently a community of people trying to get rich quick by building small apps for other people trying to get rich quick building small apps. It's not necessarily that the influencers are deceiving anybody (I think some do), they really do build apps like that too, some of which are genuinely successful. They're not selling advice.

So it's like, on one hand it's not like "I'm a genius trader, buy my course for $3k and you will be too" because the people at the top actually, (mostly) demonstrably do the thing they claim is possible. And it's not like an MLM because there is not really any pyramid scheme dynamics involved. But on the other hand it's a market that only exists on the buyside because enough people believe it exists on the sellside to build for it, thus generating demand on the buyside.

[spacemadness]

Most influencers also don’t sell courses, although some definitely do. They try to ramp up eyeball time any way they can. It’s more about starting a mini-community in their favor which is where I see the parallel. You’re right though, it’s more fragmented it seems in the indiehackers community and a bit more ponzi.

[kelvinjps10]

The current templates business most of them have feels like the buy my course for 3k

[bluecalm]

There is a similar "community" of real estate investors. I've met one of them through a friend and asked a lot of questions about his business. He was "pivoting" to seminars and courses as well. I asked him why and he said he can "easily scale" with seminars/courses while investing, even pure flips takes time and you can only do so many with a limited budget, maybe one/two transactions a year.

I am very skeptical as well and I think there is a lot of truth to "those who can do, those who can't teach" adage. It's one thing if you are in "who can't" group because you are older/retired/done with it after many years. It's another if it's a guy in his 20's or 30's selling courses. Those in my experience are almost always just snake oil salesmen.

[KurSix]

The sad part is, there are people building genuinely useful tools or creative projects, but their stuff gets buried under the avalanche of low-effort trend-chasing

[haag_codes]

We need a community away from this low effort AI slop for people genuinely building good products.

[wingerlang]

> might be the only ones actually turning a profit on all of this

I don't think this is true at all. How many such influencers are there, really, a dozen? I'd guess there are a million people making everything from absolute bank, down to pocket money. Most of them are probably not even aware that these influencers exists.

[svnt]

The thing about MLM schemes (or I guess MLH schemes in this case) is that the pyramid at the bottom is flat and small, and this example illustrates that intuitively more immediately than Avon. Are you interested in being a follower of a follower of an indiehacker? No? Then as a follower of an indiehacker you have no market.

[benjaminwootton]

Yeah, I spent some time researching this crowd and most of the ones I found have the playbook of selling to indie hackers and talking about how successful they are with fake MRR screenshots.

[hermitcrab]

It is also noticeable that IndieHackers talks a lot about revenue and very little about profit. Easy hack for revenue: sell $1 notes for $0.50.

[9cb14c1ec0]

> influencers sell a lifestyle

Oh, you mean that thing called the internet?

[BoumTAC]

you should not ask indie hackers for advice and you should not hang out with them.

If you build a product for marketers, you should hang out with them and ask them for advices, not indie hackers who know nothing about marketing.

If you build a product for bakers, you should hang out with them to understand what they need, not with indie hackers who have never baked anything in their lives.

That sounds logical, but for certain types of products, it is not.

There is no point in talking with indie hackers. It's only useful if you need knowledge about coding skills, which is rarely the case (especially now with AI).

[satvikpendem]

> You are putting too much effort in your product, your focus should be on finding the right market fit for your idea

How is this not excellent advice? There are lots of stories of founders building first (sometimes for years, even), then finding out that there is no market for it (as it seems you have done). The people evaluating your product might have even just read your post and concluded that there's no market, a tarpit idea [0], from their own experiences.

I am assuming this [1] is your product, from looking at your profile and searching the name on IH. The comments are exactly as I've stated, and they apparently have visited your website too, so maybe your logs are not accurate, or they have an adblocker on.

> Hey, I checked out your website—looks great! Just wanted to share some honest feedback. I think you should hold off on going too deep into development right now. Instead, treat this as your MVP and focus first on getting real customers.

> This is a common trap many founders (myself included) fall into—building out the full product before validating if there's a real market fit. Get users, collect feedback, and then iterate. That’s the fastest and most efficient path forward.

If all you are doing is making apps, you have a hobby, but it is not guaranteed that you will have a business from it, so understand what it is you are optimizing for as the two require different actions to succeed.

[0] https://mikekarnj.com/posts/tarpit-ideas

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-build-this-iCFJ3kI9WLa...

[nzach]

> How is this not excellent advice?

I do understand that in order to create something popular you need to create something good but you also need to properly communicate what you do. And proper communication is as hard as creating something good. So, I do know you need to "find an audience", and that is why I've posted it in a few places.

Having said all that, reading these comments made me feel somewhat demoralized because the advice wasn't really actionable. As a noob in this space I went in expecting to get some advice along the lines of: "your idea is bad", "the website design needs to improve", "your app keeps crashing", "there is no way to make money from this", etc... But all I've got was this generic "find users" advice.

"Find users" isn't intrinsically bad advice, but the way it was delivered felt really bad. How do I find users? Should I post about it in some platform? Maybe I should write a blog post about it? Running ads is a viable approach? Given what I have, what communities should I try to engage?

> so understand what it is you are optimizing for as the two require different actions to succeed

But I don't want to create a business right now. I just want to create something that people find interesting. I already know how to build things for myself, now I want a different challenge. But right now I feel stuck because I've built something, nobody seems to care and I don't really know how to improve my situation.

[satvikpendem]

When you built your app, whom did you build it for? Presumably you built it for a specific customer segment in mind, so did you try searching for them on Google or elsewhere?

Or did you build it for no one? That is why you're struggling to get users, because if you actually had built it for a specific persona, then you'd know exactly where to find them. You're not actually doing anything different to the author of the OP, just building something and hoping people will come [0], which is one of the worst lies founders tell themselves.

> But I don't want to create a business right now

That's fine, you don't have to make money from your products, but my point fundamentally doesn't change, either you're building for yourself, in which case it's a hobby, or you're building for someone else, in which case you need to know who these people are before you build. Sounds like you fell into the exact same trap the person on IH warned you about, so if you don't want to feel demoralized in the future, you need to change your mindset, from building to understanding users' issues.

[0] https://samuelmullen.com/articles/startup-fallacies-if-you-b...

[gexla]

The thing I'm working on right now with a partner is an idea we got with yet someone else who was working with us. He was working in the sort of role that nobody would think of. I would have never known the area even existed. We're working on finishing the MVP this week and we have multiple people per target industries that are asking to check it out.

The trouble with influencers, is that they have ready-made consumer audiences.

Everyone else should be looking at things that create inarguable value. If I'm charging $XX per hour and this thing saves me multiple hours per X time period, then it sells itself. Even if the thing isn't saving me money (costs as much as the time saved) - it still may be worth it because maybe faster delivery and less drudgery is worth the outlay. And it would probably cost more to hire someone to do that anyway.

So, I agree with the dude who told you to find users first. But maybe the advice should have been "find pain points that you can solve." Say you figure out a service that could save lawyers loads of time. Then rather than say "try out my app" you could say something like "let me join on as a free contributor for a while so that I can work with you to improve X process." Once you have proven it works and you get the buy-in, then sales should come easier. But I don't see how you can discover / develop these things without being embedded in X field.

[tsimionescu]

I think you have a big disconnect with the Indie Hacker community. It sounds like you posted there hoping to get them as an audience and potential users of your project. But they assumed you are posting as a fellow founder trying to get feedback on your business. So they gave you advice about your business (which you didn't want) and didn't much care to check out the actual project (which they assumed is secondary).

You should probably try to clarify this, address them more directly and make it clear that you're trying to gain them as users of your project - if you want to pursue this path at all, of course.

Also, remember that no one owes you to try out your project. It's perfectly fine for many people to just not care about the problem you're trying to solve, even if to you it seems like a very important idea. Personally, I'm not vibe coding or using Ai much at all, so I would have no interest in trying out your product, even though it is free. This is not me being rude in any way: I'm just not your target audience. Perhaps the people on Indie Hackers are also not, though likely for other reasons. Or perhaps your pitch just wasn't attractive or clear enough.

[owebmaster]

> But all I've got was this generic "find users" advice.

That is a polite way to say that your idea or your execution (so far) is bad.

[fxtentacle]

"But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas."

I don't think many programmers need that advice ;) Looking at the open source community, there's already plenty of people that freely share their ideas and implementations ... (only to be ripped off by cloud service providers later).

And, sadly, the market for cool gadgets or 3D-printable trinkets is even more brutal. There will be 10 clones in stock on Amazon before you get your first batch through customs. My advice would be that nowadays, you should start your product journey with planning what your moat is going to be and how you're going to defend it. Or if you skip that, accept that your moat is only going to last a few months, which seems to be what the article's author was going with.

[9rx]

> But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing?

1. Comments are the internet aren't written for you, they are written for the author of the comment.

2. The assertion is sound, even if not particularly useful. Your logs exclaim that you don't have market fit, just as said. What more can be said? If finding market fit was a well defined formula, everyone would do it. This is the magic that, for better or worse, you have to figure out on your own.

[bruce511]

>> But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas.

I agree. As long as you make it explicit in your encouragement that they should do this as a hobby with no expectation of income.

If their goal is to work on an interesting problem then discussing marketing is irrelevant.

If however their goal is to get paid, then the nature of the code is irrelevant. If you want to get paid then marketing (finding a customer base, discussing their pain, solving that need at a price they can afford etc) is more important.

Unfortunately in a lot of postings this context is not made clear. So the replier has to assume one or other context. Equally Unfortunately they often don't post which context they assumed.

Incidentally marketing might be the most important part of commercial success, but it is not the only important part. It is the most difficult part though so it makes sense to start there. Execution still matters, good execution makes sales easier. But the best execution ever does not mean anything if marketing is missing.

[raincole]

> But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing?

Honestly most communities on the internet feel like that. That's one of the reasons why people migrated to discord servers.

(This very comment of mine is generic af too and has as little insight as an LLM predicting how a random HN users would comment here.)

Anyway, unless you made a tool for other devs (an IDE etc.), there is very little reason to ask what other devs think about your product. They're not your target audience. In the best case they're random people, in the worse case they're your competitors.

[slightwinder]

> But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing?

Is there a website, documentation, any kind of presentation of your product? In that case, depending on your idea, this might be already enough for people to evaluate it. Certain categories are so overpopulated, people don't need to see the actual product any more; some description, maybe a screenshot, that's enough. The other side is, people are also so feed up with seeing the same stuff for the gazillions time again and again, they simply can't even bother with it any more.

> I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution.

The idea drives your marketing, which brings you customers. The execution is what holds them and animates them to give you money. But if your marketing sucks, you won't get customers easily, so it's important to have a good balance, unless you plan to polish your product for a decade, until serious money shows up.

[nzach]

> Is there a website, documentation, any kind of presentation of your product?

I do have a fully functional MVP available on the internet (https://leetprompt.io)

> The other side is, people are also so feed up with seeing the same stuff for the gazillions time again and again, they simply can't even bother with it any more.

That is a fair point, but if you can't even bother why would you give any advice then?

> it's important to have a good balance

That's why I went out of my way to try my hand at marketing something for the first time, but the only kind of advice I've got is a little bit depressing.

[csomar]

I have lost track of the number of apps I could use and maybe even pay for but that were badly executed (that’s actually being soft as most didn’t even work past the authy login).

You do need to validate product market fit but you also need a minimal viable product. I think most people lost the meaning of what viable means.

[TrevorFSmith]

I don't know why people gave you that advice but it's pretty easy to tell when a designer hasn't spent enough (or any!) time defining their target market and then spending time with those people to listen instead of force fitting a technology. Without that up front work we're all just rolling the dice. That said, building stuff is fun by itself so it doesn't always need to be about money and growth. Just know it's a hobby.

[owebmaster]

Have you stopped to think about the other possibility - that your project idea is so bad that nobody wanted to try after reading the landing page? I'm not sure it is in your best interest to think first that the problem lies with the audience.

[riku_iki]

> I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution.

in your situation, if you would have good idea which solves real problem, you would see at least some people come to your site/app and try it, but looks like your idea is not that good, or you failed to contact your audience.

[p0nce]

Well that meant your users do not hang in IndieHackers

[netdevphoenix]

> I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas.

That would be more of a indie engineers kind of community to be honest. The money focus on indie hackers is fairly implicit. And the fact that they are sponsored (or acquired) by Stripe tells you everything you need to know

[smrtinsert]

When i started my career a while ago I really appreciated the spirit of people I met. All tinkerers and curious types. They dreamt about doing interesting things. These days it only seems about the money. I don't see that spirit anymore.

[ninetyninenine]

Then the problem here isn’t there advice but what is it you need to do to get them to try it? Or where do you need to look to get them to try it?

[LVB]

Yes, and it is very tiresome advice to see continually, especially when given to newcomers whose first instinct is to build a solid, useful app or service, and they're being steered away from that. The number of times I've read that one should put up landing pages, spend time socializing them, and only if there are enough signups to actually build something is rather depressing.

These folks are obviously playing a different game than I'm used to. But in my ~30 years at it, I can confidently say that taking the time to build what I feel are good apps, well-crafted, has provided immense satisfaction (I can at least look at a collection of apps, not landing pages), and has always developed or honed my skills, which has opened many doors. The marketing-first approach just sounds painful for someone who, like me, wants to be building things.

[satvikpendem]

You have a hobby (of making apps), not an actual business. The sibling comment is right, those are two different skills that optimize for different things. Which is fine, everyone has hobbies, but understand that the "game" they're playing is making money, which requires acquiring customers, which requires marketing.

[hermitcrab]

>and only if there are enough signups to actually build something is rather depressing

Yes, but it is also rather depressing to spend a lot of effort building something that nobody wants. Especially if you are trying to make a living at it.

[fxtentacle]

"I can confidently say that taking the time to build what I feel are good apps, well-crafted, has provided immense satisfaction"

... but has it provided more revenue that what it would have cost for someone to hire you to build this at an acceptable hourly rate? Because if not, you're comparing your hobby against their business in the sense that you can accept less profitable results which wouldn't work for them.

[phkahler]

IMHO you should not be marketing a product to software developers. That market is completely saturated and most of the tools are free.

Today's super-simple big market idea: We got my elderly mother a flip phone and it's too hard to use. I'm going to describe what would be ideal for her now, and by all means DON'T think up additional features to "make it better". She needs a phone that when opened/activated it give a list of people (contacts) which she can scroll through and pick one to call. It should call directly, not change screen or show some other shit. Just call the highlighted name and call. Maybe it could switch to a "calling" screen with just the one name until the call is over. That's it. No other functionality so she can "get lost" or confused.

Maybe this is an android app? I'm not sure if you can override the main UI to the extent this wants to be. I'll gladly get her a cheap Android phone and pay $5 for an app that turns it into this usable device for elderly people. Yes, five dollars. No adds, no user monetization, no enshitification.

Can anyone deliver this? I think there's a large market for it and it should be a one weekend job.

BTW, however you load/add contacts should be a sort of hard to find function maybe for someone else to do. Not something you can accidently "get into".

There are a million things like this just waiting for someone to create. But talking to developers for ideas is a dead end.

[skeeter2020]

>> I think there's a large market for it and it should be a one weekend job.

You're essentially asking for a heavily customized phone OS, this is not like adding a bootstrap theme - and you're willing to pay FIVE DOLLARS?

>> But talking to developers for ideas is a dead end.

Maybe for product ideas but perhaps you should find one to critique your "weekend project" idea

[phkahler]

>> You're essentially asking for a heavily customized phone OS

No. I'm asking for a "dialer only" phone OS. It can take the form of an always-on-top dialer app over a standard OS. That's it.

[KurSix]

There's definitely room in this space for building stuff just because it's interesting or fun or weird. Some of the coolest tools and communities started that way