Indie Lurker Compass

No-B.S. resources to help you take action & start shipping 🚢

A living swipe file for indie hackers, indie lurkers , & founders who get stuck with indecision, perfectionism, or impostor syndrome. Examples and resources to help you put one foot in front of the other and get your experiments out the door 🚪.

This is not a roadmap through the jungle 🗺️. I have not built a successful startup, so I won’t pretend I know the path to get there.

Think of this as a compass 🧭. I can’t tell you what destination is correct, but I can give you resources to push past the common sticking points for aspiring founders.

Now quit adding a dark theme 🌒 and get shipping!

🔑 Validation 🔗︎

Critical Questions 🔗︎

These are the questions I wish I would have been asked before wasting hour after hour on projects which never launched ❌🚀 or were a Solution Looking for a Problem. Use them to cut the crap and see your project from an observer’s perspective.

Critical Questions

🪨🛠️ Build simpler than you think 🔗︎

⭐ If it’s useful people will use it even if it looks funky or is missing features. ⭐

You don’t need it to be as pretty or as feature-filled as the perfect version in your head. Make small bets and just put it out into the world.

• Nomad List started as a Google sheet .

• Remote OK is a single 8,000+ line index.php file making > $100k/month .

• Product Hunt began as a simple list that got emailed out to people .

• Levels.fyi was a Google sheet until 2021 .

• LMArena was just a Gradio app until they raised $100 million.

• Headlime started as a JSON file in the frontend with no DB - sold for $60k a week later .

  • Before that, it was an eBook with formulas for generating headlines selling on Gumroad.
  • Follows the validation -> content product -> SaaS model.

• Crave Cookies was making $200k a month on a SQlite DB, which started as a JSON file .

  Everything is on one server in production, and there’s SQLite database, meaning it’s not a separate database. It’s not a separate server. It’s a file in that same database. When I started it, I was writing to a JSON file, the whole database. That was it. I was reading and writing from that file. As we started to get too many orders, it was too slow to read and write, so I moved it to SQLite, and I’ve never changed it.

• Starter Story began with just 3 articles on it .

  Instead of staying quiet and waiting until I had 10 interviews, I decided to just launch with 3 interviews.

• Plenty of Fish in the early days was getting 1 billion page views on 5 servers .

• “I was running www.Photopea.com with 10M page views a month for $40 a year. Now, I upgraded to $60 a month. I never used any CDN.” HN Comment

• List of how popular startups (AirBnb, etc.) got their first users - many in scrappy ways.

• Key Values started as a static website on Heroku.

🥷Fake it ‘till you build it 🔗︎

Can apply to the core of your product, or to supporting features. Do you really need an automated account deletion flow on day 1? Just manually edit the database. See if Product Validation Playbooks has something you could try.

• https://www.indiehackers.com/post/fake-it-till-you-build-it-4179a9e39a .
• Dropbox & Buffer used the Fake Door MVP to see if the idea was worth exploring.
• Tuple had $8k in revenue before even having a product.
• Have seen numerous mentions where companies finally added features multiple years in and it didn’t kill them to wait that long to add.
  • “After 2 years of indie hacking, it’s time to add an editable account details page . Only 3-4 ppl/m needed it for @MagicPattern & @BrandBirdApp and I edited them manually.”

🧑‍💼You don’t need a big team 🔗︎

• Trends #0027 — Million-Dollar, One-Person Businesses
• AJ from Carrd - millions of websites built on simple site builder
• Wapplyzer - Chrome extension for website data, run by tiny team
• Microfounders - https://microfounder.com/
• Indie Hackers product list with 1-9 founders
• Supporting your journey Indie Hackers Community

❓You don’t need the perfect name 🔗︎

You can always change it later - don’t let it take up more than a couple hours. Switching won’t necessarily kill your momentum. justin.tv became Twitch later on.

🥊Competition 🔗︎

Competition isn’t bad. Do not rule out ideas that there are already solutions for .

• See Go where demand is - sell ice-cream on a crowded beach, even if there are multiple ice-cream trucks

👥 Brands that entered crowded markets and still did well 🔗︎

• Hydroflask - literally just fancy water bottles.
• Notion - lots of tools already out there for note taking or docs.
• Bubly - how many types of sparkling water can exist?
• Convertkit - went up against Mailchimp and others.
• Typedream, Simple.ink, Super.so - there are a bajillion no code website builders, they made it easier to manage for without code rather than creating an interface that is visual coding.

📖 Open-source companies based on existing tools 🔗︎

With the right situations in place, it might make sense for you to build an open-source version of an existing application. BUT as the founder of Cal.com points out, you shouldn’t just willy nilly pick a service and open-source for no good reason .

• Ghost blogging platform - alternative to WordPress, Square, Wix, etc.
• WordPress - alternative to Square, Wix, etc.
• Supabase - alternative to Firebase.
• Papercups.io -alternative to Intercom.
• Bitwarden - alternative to Lastpass, 1Password, etc.
• Plausible, Fathom - alternative to Google Analytics.
• Cal.com - alternative to Calendly.
• Httpie - alternative to Postman.
• Medusa - alternative to Shopify.
• NextDNS - ?
• Mattermost - alternative to Slack.

💡 Ideas 🔗︎

The best things often aren’t original, but either a remix of what’s come before, a better version than currently exists, or serving some niche the competition hasn’t touched. Screw it, you can build the same thing if you really want, you don’t need anyone’s permission!

🌀 Remix existing ideas 🔗︎

Does an existing idea not cover a specific niche? Especially good if they are unlikely to bother moving into it. Example from a book is ‘Coke for Dogs’, Coke is unlikely to enter that market because it might hurt their brand among humans.

• Buy Me a Coffee → Buy Me a Crypto Coffee

💡Your idea doesn’t have to be complicated 🔗︎

Successful companies with a simple concept at core, even if it’s layered with extra features at this point.

• Framed Tweets , Laser Tweets - exactly like it says.
• Linktree - static web page with a few links on it.
• Bitly - HTTP 301 redirects at scale .
• TickTick, Todoist, etc. - TODO list.
• Postman, Httpie - Fancy frontend for curl .
• Peloton - put an Ipad on a stationary bike.
• Carrd - 1 page site builder.
• TweetDeleter - Save reputations with an API call.
• Concierge porch pumpkin delivery - with optional design & layout - charging $500-$1500 per porch. Inspired various copycats for other chunks of the country, like these guys for Alabama .

🤔 I have no ideas 🔗︎

Markets & Places for Ideas

🫂🐦People to follow on Twitter 🔗︎

These people usually provide no-BS advice and inspiration to build and ship.

• Pieter Levels - Nomad List, Remote OK, and more
• Jon Yongfook - Bannerbear
• Lynne Tye - Key Values
• Justin Jackson - Transistor.fm
• Andrew Gazdecki - MicroAcquire

Uncategorized 🔗︎

Things I’ve found useful, but haven’t found a home yet on this site, YMMV.

A Minimum Viable Product Is Not a Product, It’s a Process: Building Product, Experimentation, MVP | Y Combinator

• Success Through Actionable Feedback - Roast or Toast
• Product Validation Playbooks
• Marketing Examples - Harry Dry
• How I’d Grow X Case Studies - Andrea Bosoni
• Building a startup in public: from first line of code to frontpage of Reddit
• https://www.failory.com/
• https://publicly.io/
• http://startupstory.com
• Go Fucking Do it
• Zero to Users
• Pieter Level’s MAKE book

Reminder to keep you grounded 🔗︎

Indie Lurker Compass