🗞 What's New: Can the average founder get in on the AI hype?

With AI opening up new opportunities, we are starting to see some interesting developments:

• Pieter Levels made $10,000 in a day with his new AI generative project. Is this outcome feasible for the average founder? How accessible are major wins in a new space? Founders weigh in below.
• Want a huge advantage as a new founder? Start and run a mastermind group! This can lead to increased revenue, productivity, and focus. Here's how you can launch and run your own mastermind!
• Founder Craig Campbell quit his job prematurely to go all-in on his business, and...failed. Below, he shares why first creator advantage can be self-sabotaging, and how he's taking care of his mental health after failure.

Want to share something with over 100,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🛠 Can Any Founder Join the AI Hype?

by Anthony Castrio

It's been really cool to watch Danny Postma and Pieter Levels race to build and launch their profile photo generators, both built on Dreambooth.

Pieter launched, and hit $10K in the first day. Danny is at $2K+ in 12 hours.

These are the first, but they won't be the last.

Going back to the basics

First, a quick note on new opportunities being ushered in by AI. I think it's important to note that, as cool as AI is, the rules of building a good business remain the same.

To dig a deep moat:

• Obsess over customer needs.
• Iterate faster than the competition.
• Capitalize on network effects.
• Develop a strong, unique brand.

With that said, the hype wave is huge. Now is the time to ride it! The technology behind these projects is called Dreambooth, and it's darn easy to run.

Research projects are basically consumer-ready apps that can be run in a browser. Slap a nice UX on that puppy, and you're off to the races. Here's a great tutorial that I found.

A few ideas for your next $10K per day business:

• Virtual clothes try-on.
• Preview hairstyles.
• Insert yourself, or friends, into memes.
• Next generation school portraits or pet photography.

Technically, it's not audience or product. It's the perfect storm of hype wave + natural virality + pre-existing audience.

The same project launched a month from now, or without the pre-existing audience, would not have the same results.

If you've got the ability to execute quickly, right now is the time to do it, but you're probably going to have to find some other way to kickstart the viral mechanism, like cold outreach, content marketing, or paid ads.

Audience is possible for all

Courtland Allen says that indie hacking is not supposed to be some sort of fair competition with equal starting lines:

In fact, it's not any kind of competition at all. It's the lawless Wild West. You shouldn't be comparing your resources with someone else's. Instead, you should be using every resource at your disposal to find success, because the rules of the game are that there are no rules. Anything goes. If you have a rich uncle who can fund you, go for it, even though most people don't have that. If you were born in a first world country with a first world education, leverage that, even though many people don't have that. If you were born with above average intelligence, use it, even though 50% of people cannot.

When you think in terms of what's "fair," you handicap yourself. You limit yourself to the "standard" channels. But it's better to get creative and ambitious, and break free of these shackles. When I launched Indie Hackers itself, I had zero audience. But I was able to leverage Pieter's huge audience by interviewing him, which led him to tweet about Indie Hackers several times. Just because somebody else has something you don't doesn't mean there's no way for you to make use of it.

Secondly, the idea that you can't do that because you don't have Pieter's audience is missing the entire point. It's not like he was just handed his audience. He built it! He didn't make $10K in one day, because this didn't happen in one day. It took years of hard work.

The reality is that you can do this, because you absolutely can build up your own name and audience the way he has. You just have to put in the same time and effort that he has. It's simple, but not easy.

Too misleading?

Ric Arthur recommends a "true test:"

Not knocking it in any way, but the true test of the product(s) would be if a first-time founder, unknown to most, launched it. If it didn't have Pieter Levels' name attached to it, would it have made $10K in the first day?

Sure, the product may be sellable. But the main denominator that caused it sell $10K in the first day is not just that it involves AI. It's because Pieter is selling it, and the audience that he's built up with great businesses and projects in the past, plus the blind faith that goes hand-in-hand with that, helps.

Hudsn agrees:

It's not a one day success, and shouldn't be branded as one. He has no doubt worked hard for years to be able to do this.

The pushback here is because the claim is that anyone can get in on the hype, but uses two prominent examples (one reasonably famous, one with a previous seven figure exit in the niche) as case studies.

These inherent advantages should absolutely be embraced by those who have them, but they should also be pointed out in these success stories to balance out the survivorship bias. Pushback on these headlines, as inspirational as they are, is healthy. Otherwise, people start to think they, too, can hit a few thousand MRR on day one as an unknown. Then, they launch, hear crickets, and give up too early because their expectations were out of whack.

What are your thoughts on the AI hype? Share in the comments below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

📱 Twitter users are slamming Elon Musk over a new verification fee.

📖 Collins Dictionary has chosen "permacrisis" as its word of the year.

💥 Italy's new government is criminalizing raves.

🏠 Rent-to-own startups have promise, but need greater transparency.

🍕 Pizza for Thanksgiving has emerged as the latest inflation hack.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🧠 Running an Effective Mastermind Group

by Ayush Chaturvedi

Over the last four months, I've refined the process of running an effective mastermind program through my platform, Indie Masterminds.

I think anyone can do it; you just have to follow the processes. Read on for more!

The principle

I believe the mastermind principle is the best way to fast track your growth as a founder. You need results, and a mastermind can get you there!

I've run 11 groups so far, and had 40+ hours of invaluable conversations around building indie businesses. Being in a mastermind can increase revenue, productivity, and focus for your long-term goals.

I highly recommend getting together with your friends and running a mastermind yourself. Here's exactly what you need to do.

The steps

Gather a group of 3-4 founders around these guidelines:

• Every week, the group meets for an hour via Zoom.
• One founder is in the hot seat each week to share their challenges, pain points, and new ideas.
• The rest of the group brainstorms solutions to that founder's problems during the call.
• This repeats every week for four weeks.

In the last week, run a personalized strategy session with each member.

The goal

The goal of these sessions is to chart out a custom plan that founders can implement over the next 6-12 weeks.

So, we have two things here:

• Hot seat sessions for brainstorming.
• Strategy sessions for narrowing things down and bringing them together in an action plan.

Within a month, all members will know exactly what they need to do next, and the subsequent months will be about how they implement the strategy. Go broad, then narrow down.

A few tips:

• Have a Slack or Discord group for asynchronous feedback and scheduling.
• Set small, actionable goals every week, and track them in a sheet.
• Share wins, losses, and highlights with each other on every call.
• Make sure to show up on the call every week. That's half the battle!

A mastermind group creates an advantage for every founder, especially early in the journey, since starting out can be so overwhelming.

This is a great way to build a strong network of friends while also making progress towards your goal.

Give it a shot!

Would you create a mastermind group? Let's chat 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:

Self-promotion isn’t a selfish act...it’s a generous one.

If you create something that truly provides value to people, you’re helping them by telling them about it.

If you hate self-promotion, it’s because you don’t believe that what you created actually provides value.

Subscribe to Josh's For The Interested newsletter or I Want To Know podcast for more.

🏀 Craig Campbell is Bouncing Back

by James Fleischmann

Craig Campbell, founder of Eurotripr, a trip planning platform, added feature after feature instead of launching. He eventually went back to full-time employment.

We often hear that first creator advantage is a top priority. If you don't launch now, someone else will launch first, right? But for Craig, this philosophy ended up being self-sabotaging, causing him to quit his job a little prematurely.

Indie Hackers caught up with him to find out more about his experience!

Slow down

I kept thinking that, with the COVID-19 lockdowns coming to an end, and the summer 2022 travel season coming up, March 2022 was the optimal time to launch Eurotripr. Everything hinged on that. I was so anxious, and when March came and went, I felt I had missed the boat. I was really disappointed in myself.

We all get the idea that we have to launch right away, or we've missed our opportunity. While this could be true for some very niche things, for most projects, it is just another lie we tell ourselves. In my case, people travel to Europe every year, and will probably continue to do so. So really, I didn't miss anything.

Launch whenever you are ready. The market will likely still be there. Depending on where your product is right now, that might mean hanging onto your day job for just a little longer!

You don't have to quit your job to rush to build your product. The key is being disciplined with your time. If you can do this, you will cross the finish line.

Get validated

I think we can all agree that MVPs are the way to go. You don't need to stress yourself to launch, but you also don't want to build a bloated, over-engineered product.

Looking back, I bit off way more than I could chew in such a short period of time. I kept adding more features because I thought that visitors wouldn't stay if I didn't have user accounts. I thought that travelers would like to meet others on the road. I thought they would want to create meetups. And on and on.

All of these features sounded great as I was building, but not one of them was asked for by users. Why? Because I didn't yet have any users! I spent all my time building for non-existent users.

Help one person with one feature, then build from there. In other words, start with the tiniest MVP, and see if anyone even cares. If they do, ask them what to build next. Anything else is procrastination or fear. In retrospect, I can definitely say that I was afraid of putting something out there, in case it bombed. But by not putting something out there, I simply failed quietly.

Take care of your mental health

After a couple of months of coding, lots of doubts and negative self-talk started to creep in, and I didn't really have anyone supporting me through it. No one wants to hear the guy that just left a good job talk about his doubts.

It felt really lonely. I shared some moments on Indie Hackers, which was helpful. I also tried building in public, and that was exciting at first, but it soon felt like adding more stress and work to an already difficult project.

The worst part was the stress of watching my savings being depleted, and not knowing when (or if) I was going to launch and earn money. Then, there was the fear that I would look and feel like a complete failure.

Admitting to myself that I was not good enough to create the thing I'd been dreaming about for years, yet watching so many other people do it every day, was soul-crushing. Going back to work was a hard decision. I'm not sure I've even recovered from this feeling, even six months after going back to work. I still feel very low due to my failure to finish. As a man, husband, and father, I had this image of what I should be able to do.

But now, I see it as just a low point in the journey. It wasn't meant to be at that time, but I still firmly believe that Eurotripr can be a useful product.

Try to create a support system of loved ones, friends, other indie hackers, you name it. If you don't have a support group, it can be very difficult to see it through to the other side. Here's an article on the topic of mental health among indie hackers, in case it's helpful!

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 Anthony Castrio, Priyanka Vazirani, Ayush Chaturvedi, Josh Spector, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing