Most founders have tons of to-do list items each day: - **But how do you stay organized and on top of everything?** Founders weigh in with their best advice, including helpful tools and setups. Hint: Creating accountability is a game changer. - **Lau
Most founders have tons of to-do list items each day:
-
But how do you stay organized and on top of everything? Founders weigh in with their best advice, including helpful tools and setups. Hint: Creating accountability is a game changer.
-
Launching a quick, easy product can help you minimize risk and overcome procrastination. Here's a list of products that you can build quickly, and how to craft a successful launch strategy around them!
-
Founder Bruno Hiis hit $765 in monthly revenue with Featurebase, his user feedback tool. Below, he shares what worked and what didn't, and what he has in store next.
Want to share something with over 100,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
📆 Organizing Your Day as a Founder
by Pavati Dasani
I've recently made the leap from employee to startup founder, and of all the things I thought that I'd find difficult, organizing my day wasn't one of them. I've tried the usual advice: Complete the hardest task first, use the Pomodoro method, set deadlines, etc., but despite this, I'm still having a hard time.
I'm not really sure what the problem is. Does anyone have any advice?
Building structure
Miguel Lorenzo says that difficulty with organizing happens sometimes, depending on your mental and physical state at the moment:
The thing that has worked for me is building routine and structure around my duties:
- I have a backlog of tasks that I prioritize every week. I try to finish everything that I've planned in past, then move on to the next priority.
- I have days and hours for certain things, and I'm pretty strict with doing what's meant to be done in a certain window. Example: Mondays are for marketing, Tuesdays are for development, etc. The key for me is sticking to the plan.
- It's mandatory to set aside time for exercising and relaxing.
- Thinking about the long-term helps me build patience. Celebrating minor wins keeps me motivated and makes me work harder.
Lastly, I've had ups and downs, and periods where I could not even open my laptop. Just listen to your body and mind, and respond to them accordingly.
I've been following this for many years now to manage my full-time job and side projects, and it has been working so far. Hope my experience can inspire you!
Impact + effort
Donald Ng uses a measured approach:
First of all, congratulations on taking the leap of faith into the world of the unknown!
It is not just about doing the hardest thing first. Most of the time, all you need to think about is the thing that you absolutely need to get done that day. Prioritize. Most things can wait. Most things don't matter.
As founders, we have to identify which task is the most impactful, and which takes the least effort. Organization is about striking the balance between these two.
Every morning, before I start my day, I jot down one thing that I must do that day, according to the impact and effort of each task. I find that jotting them down makes it easier for me to keep track of my progress. As someone with ADHD, I have many things going on in my head at any given moment, and this is how I organize them.
Accountability
Andrew Kamphey has two suggestions:
1. Join an accountability group: I'm in two, and that works for me. As a founder, most days I am not accountable to anyone, including myself. I use those days to just explore and do whatever I want. Instead of a daily to-do list, I keep a general list of things that I want to do, ideas I have, etc. That moves from paper to dry erase board to Google Docs, depending on my mood.
But then, I have days where I am extremely accountable to a completely voluntary group of people with whom I have mutual respect and camaraderie. One group, High Signal, is run on Telegram. The other group is in person. If you can't find a group, create one. I used to host Indie Hackers Meetups in Bali at local co-working spaces. At 9 AM, everyone would introduce themselves and share what they were working on, and at 4 PM, they would demo what they had made.
This kind of accountability has been tremendously helpful. I schedule my week and my plans around that one meetup day.
2. Create spaces that help you work your best: This is probably the least talked about, but is actually the most important thing. Creating a productive physical space can help you get things done! Make sure you are optimizing your space to give yourself the best chance to work efficiently.
Tying cost to revenue helps some people. Say you travel 20-30 minutes to a cafe, restaurant, or library. Charge yourself the cost of the gas, plus your meal or coffee, and make sure that you complete enough "billable" (to yourself) hours to make up that cost.
Create different spaces within your home that are optimized to help you complete different tasks. Blast real cafe sounds from the speakers (Check out Coffeehouse for these sounds). Use binaural music in your earbuds. Your audio adds to your physical space.
A sweet setup
Davide Muzzarelli shares his setup:
- OKRs: I update my objectives and key results (OKRs) every quarter. Each objective includes a recipe to make it happen, like "Complete five sales call every Thursday" or "Exercise for at least 15 minutes every day." Tool: A dashboard on Notion.
- One inbox: I have just one physical inbox on my desk, and one virtual inbox. Tool: Telegram is awesome as a virtual inbox because it catches notes with an automatic date and file storage, synced on all devices.
- Tasks and reference material: I store tasks and notes on specific apps. Tools: Asana for tasks with a business account. For support material, I use Notion and Google Drive.
- A single theme per weekday: Each weekday has a single theme, like bookkeeping, sales, and coding. This helps me to prepare my to-do list.
- The daily to-do list: I have a Notion page for each day of the year. This daily page contains the four key performance indicators (KPIs) that I use, the year, and the week number. The week number is for summarizing my KPIs. The content of the page is a list of the tasks of the day divided into sections: Routine, urgent, vital, important, and nice.
What are your tips for organizing your days? Let's chat below!
Discuss this story.
📰 In the News
from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
🛍 Here's how TikTok has changed the way people shop online.
🍺 Move over, work from home. Bars are now offering work from pub.
📱 BeReal has become one of the most downloaded social media apps, but people aren't using it.
🤩 Virtual influencers have very real influence.
🇸🇻 Busting myths about El Salvador's Bitcoin experiment.
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
🏃♀️ The 15 Fastest Products to Build
by James Fleischmann
Founders have two major hurdles when it comes to launching successfully:
- Finding the courage to actually start, and
- Minimizing risk.
But here's a pro tip: Launching something quick and easy can help you overcome both of these hurdles. It diversifies your revenue streams, and allows you to knock out that easy product to get you into the habit of shipping. Read on for more!
A quick word of advice
Indie Hackers caught up with founder Ayush Chaturvedi, who is working on launching 25 products in 25 weeks. One such product is the Indie Masterminds group. Here's his advice on launching quickly:
Most of [my products] are infoproducts or curation-based, because I have to keep the scope very narrow and actually ship the product in a week. A SaaS would take at least a month, even if I built it with no-code.
Remember that not every product needs to be a SaaS. There are other options, and they exist for a reason!
Products that can be launched in a week
- E-books or guides: These don't need to be overly long. I've read a few good ones that were only 10 pages or so.
- Guides: Give people a succinct, actionable guide on how to do something that you've done successfully, or something that you know a lot about.
- Newsletter: I'm personally building one right now. Keep in mind that newsletters can also bring in other opportunities, like being invited onto the platforms of others, or hopping onboard as a cofounder for an existing product.
- Blog: If you go the blog route, you can monetize with ads, sponsors, or paywalling. Or, you can use it to build your brand and improve SEO.
- Podcasts: Podcasts can run the gamut when it comes to subject matter. To start one, all you have to do is talk. Growing it might not be so easy, though. Monetize through ads, sponsors, premium content, promoting your other products, or selling episodes as bundles.
- Productized services: A productized service is just a service that is packaged and sold like a product. Making this work is all about putting systematization and processes in place so that you don't have to work as much as you would to provide a normal service.
- Swipe files: This is essentially a collection of examples that can be used for inspiration. The collection could be marketing techniques, sales emails, good copy, etc.
- Toolkits: This is a list of tools to be used in a certain situation. Try to niche down with these.
- Design assets: Provide things like icons, fonts, and avatars as products.
- Courses: If you've got some expertise, condense your knowledge into a course and put it up on Udemy, Coursera, Gumroad, etc.
- Webinar: This tends to require a following, but a webinar is a quick way to ship something. You don't even need to be the expert; you can give a cut to guests for sharing their experiences. That will have the added impact of bringing their audiences to you. Side note: If you don't have an audience, but you do have expertise, you can be the guest.
- Masterminds: The beautiful thing is that, since this is a group of your peers, you'll get just as much out of it as the participants do. All you need to do is get a group together, set the agenda, and moderate.
- Digital templates: This includes web banners, emails, and documents.
- Website themes: This is pretty similar to templates, but it's a good one for designers. Just design a beautiful landing page, then sell it on a website builder or CMS.
- E-commerce: You can launch a Shopify store within a day.
- MVP: Finally, if you're ready to get right into a piece of software, you can winnow down your features and launch a very limited version of your product. An MVP is an excellent way to get validation and start acquiring users. An MVP should take no longer than 30 days to build.
What's next?
Ayush always pre-launches to his Twitter following (~4.5K) with nothing more than a landing page. This is how he validates and gets pre-sales:
When I launch, I give away the first seats for free by asking people to reply to my tweet with an emoji to get the link to the product. Then, I DM them the link using a Twitter scheduler. This brings in hundreds of replies, which causes the algorithm to push the launch tweet to more people.
I used to think that I needed a huge Twitter audience or a large email list before I could start selling my products. But waiting too long before promoting your products can train your audience to expect free stuff, so they'll never actually buy from you in the end. If your goal is to eventually monetize, you should start testing products from the beginning.
How to grow your product
Want to turn a profit in a week? Here's how Ayush does it:
I launch between Tuesday and Thursday because that's when Twitter has the most traffic. I plan the product, make a table of contents, decide on the bonuses that people will get, and set the product up on Gumroad with the pricing details and the copy. I schedule the launch tweet to go out later in the day.
As the product gets initial sales, I increase the price of the product. This helps me to decide on pricing, which I set after 2-3 updates. The next day, I start working on the product. Assuming I have some validation, I start creating it. By the weekend, I have a fair idea of what the product will look like in its final form.
I use Monday and Tuesday to do the final edits, and add more sections or bonuses that I may have missed. I also promote the product in my newsletter, and talk about it on Twitter throughout the week.
Finally, by Tuesday or Wednesday, I send a launch email to everyone who bought the product, thank them, and officially release it on Gumroad.
Final notes
There are a million ways to grow a product. Check out Growth Bites for more ways to do it!
Are you having trouble coming up with ideas? I wrote about some ways to do this. Also, check out Courtland Allen's post on this, which is the most popular Indie Hackers post to date!
What's your experience with shipping quickly? Share in the comments!
Discuss this story.
🚀 The Spector Report
by Josh Spector
I'm sharing growth tips for creative founders! Here's this week's:
Clarity is king.
If people can’t immediately understand what you create, who it’s for, and how it can help them, your creations will fail.
Confusion is your biggest enemy.
Subscribe to Josh's For The Interested newsletter or I Want To Know podcast for more.
💰 Bruno Hiis Hit $765 MRR With Featurebase
by Bruno Hiis
Hi, indie hackers! I'm Bruno Hiis, founder of Featurebase, a user feedback tool. A few days ago, we reached 25 active subscriptions and $765 MRR! Here's how.
Some stats
- 600+ organizations have created accounts. We used to have a free plan.
- ~5% churn.
- ~6-7% new organization conversion rate, based on the past three months.
- ~18 daily active dashboard users.
Here's how we got this far
- AlternativeTo: This has proven to be one of our best marketing channels yet. We have gained over 10 customers by adding our product to AlternativeTo.
- "Powered by" marketing: Our tool allows you to create public feedback boards to capture feedback. Each board has a small "Powered by Featurebase" button, and that brings us many customers each month.
- Referrals: Build a great product. Many of our customers love using our tool, and have suggested it to others.
- Product Hunt and BetaList: Although it's becoming harder to stand out on these platforms, they still work. Keep in mind that already having an audience will help you rank higher.
- Alternative pages: We created landing pages that compare our product to our competitors' products. These pages are already getting some free SEO traffic that converts.
Here's what hasn't worked
- Cold emailing: Maybe we just suck at it, but we have tried it over five times now...no positive results.
- Niching down: We have tried to niche down and market our tool to smaller industries, but that has not worked for various reasons.
- Blogging and Twitter: We struggle to stay consistent with posting content, and hate competing for popular keywords with blog posts that basically say the same thing.
- Google Ads: We have experimented with this, but the results haven't been great. We are currently working on improving this.
We're starting to grow faster and more organically, but I still feel that we haven't landed on a marketing strategy that is totally the right fit for us.
What's next?
We are on track to hit our end-of-the-year goal of $1K MRR. We removed our free plan because many large companies (20+ employees) were using it, and getting good value from it, without paying anything. Most people who use your free plan never plan to upgrade.
It's becoming clearer to me that you are playing the game in difficult mode if you aren't actively building an audience comprised of your target market. So, we're going to double down on content marketing next, and focus on building our audience!
Discuss this story.
🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick
by Tweetmaster Flex
I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:
🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?
Forward it to a friend, and let them know they can subscribe here.
Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.
Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Pavati Dasani, Priyanka Vazirani, James Fleischmann, Josh Spector, and Bruno Hiis for contributing posts. —Channing
