🗞 What's New: Inventing vs. improving...which is best?

Is innovation a waste of time?

• Some indie hackers argue that people and markets don't actually care about innovation. In that case, the benefits of launching a product that improves upon an existing market outweigh inventing a new one.
• Is higher pricing an indication of higher quality? Founders weigh in below on what raising prices says to potential users.
• Founder Junaid Ansari hit $180,000 in annual revenue with his productized graphic design business, Draftss. Here's how he automated his tasks in a way that allows him to work just an hour a day.

Want to share something with nearly 95,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🛠 Inventing vs. Improving

by Kaustubh Katdare

I spent almost 10 years building innovative digital products. I'd begin with a grand picture of what the markets needed, then build it. I put my heart and soul into creating the best products. I spent nights making my code scalable to 50K simultaneous users when I had none. I made important choices about databases and frameworks, and wrote top tier code. But guess what? No one cared.

Look, the market doesn't care about your innovation. You've got to be really lucky if you're able to launch something that people haven't seen before, and make it successful. Don't waste a decade of your life innovating things that markets don't care about. Stop inventing and start improving!

Improvement is key

Remember, you are a founder, not a world's top innovator. Your top goal should be to build something that markets accept. Think about making the world a better place after you've built a steady MRR. Observe the products or services that are already established and making money.

Specifically, look at growing markets where competition is low. Such markets are hard to spot, but spend two months or so finding the right market (not product or idea), then figure out what is it that you can do better. For example, can you improve the UI/UX for an existing app? Can you make it easier?

Next, build an MVP and test it out in the market. If you can find a few people willing to pay money for your product or service, you're all set. You know your path forward.

Keep in mind that the biggest innovators were not the first ones:

• Google wasn't the first internet search engine.
• Facebook wasn't the first social network.
• Tesla didn't make the world's first electric car.

Don't run after innovation. Outsource it to people with money and time. Simply find a good market and launch your product. If the market is good, you'll find buyers. If not, you'll still save a lot of time.

I'm super proud of building CrazyEngineers. Working on it gave me the clarity that I needed in life as a founder. I'm currently building Testimonial Guru. If you want to automate testimonials on your website or app, consider becoming an early adopter!

Don't forget the familiar

Bill Roth narrows this advice down even further:

My strategy after 21 years of building businesses is to innovate on the familiar.

I agree that creating a market is tedious and expensive, which is not ideal for bootstrappers. But thanks to the commoditization of code, markets are also becoming increasingly saturated.

With time at a premium, and perceived high switching costs, our solutions really have to be a "wow" right at the beginning if we hope to garner much attention, let alone traction that can be monetized.

A solution still needs striking novelty; there must be something noteworthy, unique, intriguing, fresh, or surprising.

Consumers and B2B are all thinking more like journalists: What's your angle? Why should I care? Why should I give this the time of day?

A tip for engineers

Aleksandar Grbic adds some things that could be important to other software engineers:

I've spent the past 13 years working as a senior software engineer, and the way we operate and work is a bit different. When you are trying to build a product, for most of us it often boils down to:

• Am I doing this to challenge myself by learning a new tech stack?
• Am I doing this because I actually want to build a product and a company?

If you are trying to build a product, I'd focus on answering the fundamental questions above. If the answer is the first one, then use the tools you are already the most comfortable with. If the answer is the second, you will need to approach things differently.

I'm building Programmer Network, and for the first time in my life, I'm building a side project that I actually want to release. Due to that, I went with the stack that I've spent more than 10 years with. My main goal is to release the product with the absolute best quality.

Should founders be improving, not inventing? Let's chat below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

🌊 NFTs have been stolen after OpenSea's Discord servers were hacked.

🤫 AltStore is building a haven for forbidden iPhone apps.

📉 US worker productivity has seen its biggest drop since 1947.

🎵 This AI music software claims to predict hit songs.

💉 Cosmetic procedures are widening the class divide.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🏷 Does Higher Pricing Convey Higher Quality?

by Vincent Giardina

I'm trying to determine the best pricing for my product, Data Jumbo, which creates charts for Notion. My only active competitor has already priced his product at $4 per month. I'm thinking about implementing a slightly higher price to signal a better quality product. Is this a good strategy?

A common problem

Darko sees this a lot among founders:

While reading through a bunch of interviews on Indie Hackers, I've noticed a recurring pattern of founders saying that they increased their prices and suddenly acquired more paid users as a result.

This was mostly in the B2B SaaS niche, though. It makes sense when you think about it. When you have product-market fit, and a firm finds your product to be useful, they might be confused as to why you're solving a problem that costs them $30K per year, but you're only charging $30 per month. It makes people believe that something must be off.

It's interesting because, in B2B SaaS, we have the complete opposite problem than e-commerce does. In e-commerce, you often have a commodity product so you're trying to increase the price. In B2B SaaS, you often have a unique product, and you don't realize how big of a problem it's probably solving, so you decrease the price.

Production value vs. benefit

Faptebune tackles it from another angle:

This comes down to the battle between production value (the cost to build and maintain), and benefit (money saved by using the product).

We should think about the same when dealing with commerce in general. I read an article a long time ago that said to put your money where your time is, or something like that. The author was trying to explain that you should invest more money into buying a better bed, (where you spend 8-10 hours daily), desk, and chair (6-10 hours), and spend less money on things that you use rarely. He was explaining that most people think the opposite: They spend more money on things that they rarely use, while spending less money on things that they use many hours a day, like a bed, mattress, and desk.

Applying this principle means that the things saving the most time, or the thing that's the most valuable, is something that we should spend more on. By pricing your product higher, you are showing its value.

Put it all into context

Daniel de Mello recommends viewing pricing in context:

Pricing is a signal of quality, but things should be taken in context. People use pricing, along with other things, to assess if something is trustworthy and high quality. Pricing is just one part of the equation.

Putting a higher price together with testimonials, pretty product demos and pictures, a beautifully designed website, and careful copywriting constructs an environment that leads people to see things as cohesive and believe that the pricing is worth it.

Indication, not guarantee

Carolyn notes that lower pricing is not necessarily a guarantee of lower quality:

I think that "guarantee" is a bit of a stretch, but higher pricing could be an indication of better quality. You'd need to ensure that it actually is better quality, or at least, not worse quality than your competitor. Otherwise, success might not last long. You'd likely struggle to retain customers, and if word got out, potentially struggle to attract new ones.

Have you raised your pricing recently? Share your experience below!

Discuss this story.

🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week

🤔 What's your favorite backend for building an MVP? Posted by Cao Wang.

💻 Hate comments drove me to build my first indie product. Posted by Vukradic.

😎 The less you do, the better you do it. Posted by Denis Shatalin.

👀 Heroku alternatives for bootstrapped founders? Posted by Darko.

🚀 Side tools that you can build to drive growth to your startup. Posted by Anita Kirkovska.

🧐 How are you deploying your app? Posted by Hbracy.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

🛣 Junaid Ansari's Path to Automation

by Junaid Ansari

Hi indie hackers! I'm Junaid Ansari, and at the start of 2021, I decided to completely automate my productized graphic design and code service, Draftss. The experiment was a success, and we increased our revenue by 80% in 2021, going from $100K ARR to $180K ARR. We achieved all of this by working just one hour a day.

Here's how!

The recipe

Automating a business doesn’t always mean removing people from your team and replacing them with technologies (or other people). It's more about producing meaningful work by using all of the technologies and resources available to make the process work smoothly.

In order to achieve this meaningful work with automation, you need a perfect blend of the team, software, and standard operating procedures (SOPs). You also need to be able to delegate crucial people for tasks based on urgency and priority.

The team

The stepping stone of automation for any productized service is hiring a team that understands everything that goes through them. The team should be able to follow everything that is assigned to them at the required pace. The hiring process should be fast, but the firing process should be faster. Every employee that produces unsatisfactory work will cost you a fortune in the long run. If a single area of your business is weak, complete automation cannot be achieved. Develop a great working environment within your teams to increase their efficiency.

One of the most difficult tasks for productized service businesses is that you can't always afford to hire highly experienced people for every designation in your business. In order to save money, hire people with 1-3 years of experience so you can train them over time. Establish a learning culture where the senior employees can assist junior employees from the start. A business cannot be automated without hierarchy.

You should assign one manager to a team of 4-7 members so that the teams remain constant in their work, and the manager is not overloaded.

If the team member fulfills their duties well, then in the future, they can form their own team. This helps you in the expansion of your business.

Delegation

Delegation is one of the most essential elements of automating your productized business. It always feels like a big risk to let someone else work on certain tasks that you think nobody can accomplish better than you. Delegation is an art that only true leaders possess, as it takes a lot of courage to implement. Doing it might look like compromising the quality of work, but you can always train your reliable employees to get the best results.

Founders are usually stuck handling things that end up consuming the growth of their business. If you want to successfully implement automation in your business, you need to entrust some of your tasks to other people.

The epilogue

Developing automation within your business can be the best decision, as you can get more returns. The initial stage is the most difficult part of automation, but you can make it through if you plan it thoroughly. For each step that needs automation, figure out if it is a recurring issue, then create a standard process for the resolution.

Streamline all of the processes by efficiently using SOPs throughout your entire system. The best part about streamlining is that your quality of work improves, and it sets standards within your team to achieve great work. Despite detailed planning, some situations might occur that can lead to the failure of your plan. However, these mistakes will define your business, so do not stop there! Instead, learn from them in order to avoid them in the future.

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Kaustubh Katdare, Priyanka Vazirani, Vincent Giardina, and Junaid Ansari for contributing posts. —Channing