​

​

​Podcast, YouTube, Blog​

Dear founder,

​

In case you missed it over the last 335 issues, I’m a huge nerd. I was listening to a miniature painting podcast recently where two of my favorite wargaming creators talked about the 7 Deadly Hobby Sins — and it inspired me to think of the manifestations of these challenges in the indie hacking world.

Challenges that I occasionally (read: reliably) run into myself.

​

🎧 Listen to this on my podcast.​

So let’s dive into the most common pitfalls of the software entrepreneur, how they creep up to us, and what we can do to avoid them.

In case you need a refresher on your deadly sins, they are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, sloth, and wrath.

And funny enough, it was extremely easy to find a representation of each of these in the day-to-day interactions of myself and the many indie hackers I virtually surround myself with.

Pride: Overestimating… Everything

When I first thought about how pride appears in the lives and behaviors of indie hackers, I thought about the common misperception of founders thinking they know what’s best for their customers. And it’s true: that often comes from a prideful and arrogant place, one of feeling like you know better. But then I noticed it in many other fields. Indie hackers regularly think they know what a better version of an existing product should look like, that they could build it faster and cheaper, and that it would be more successful.

It boils down to a belief that as founders, particularly when we’re technically skilled, we know better.

It’s overblown confidence in our own ideas and abilities. It’s funny: you need to be more confident than most other people —because you need to start building something they’d never build— but also not overconfident for your self-perception to dip into pride and arrogance.

The symptoms of overconfidence are always very clear in retrospect: when you don’t research your market and look for validation signals because you “know” that it will work, your pride very likely will be your downfall.

I believe that a lot of serial entrepreneurs fall prey to this one in particular. We had a few bad ideas, then a good one —one that worked— and now we think everything we do is pure gold. We can’t do any wrong.

Fortunately, reality isn’t interested in our self-deception, and we quickly get punched in the face with the understanding that every new idea is a gamble, and our belief that it would be universally appealing was just hope.

I’ve been through this several times over the last few years, most hilariously when I thought it would be a good idea to launch an NFT collection. Man, that was top pride right there. Glad the cricket sounds I received for that were immediate and very loud.

The way out is humility — something I strive for and struggle with, particularly as I build in public. I have to balance a motivational above-average confidence level with the understanding that we’re all just figuring everything out as we go.

​

And our sponsor will help you with that!

Launch your next startup idea with AI Are you an entrepreneur looking to start your next venture? Mixo is an AI platform designed to help you launch and validate your startup ideas faster than ever before. By simply entering a business description, it will generate you a tailored website in seconds, ideal for pre-launching ideas and gathering early customers. Not only does it’s no-code editor make it easy to tweak the content and design, but it provides you with tooling to capture emails and leads effortlessly. For a limited time only, in addition to giving you a 10-day trial and free custom domain, Mixo is also offering our readers 15% off all Mixo plans using the promo code thebootstrappedfounder during checkout. So with everything you need to succeed, isn’t it time you gave Mixo a try and turned your startup idea into reality? Get started for free

​

​

I have found joy in admitting that things don’t work. That makes it easier to escape the trap of believing in my own hype too much.

And hype, in general, is a problem.

Lust: Chasing the Latest Tech Trends

I am getting distracted by shiny new technologies on a daily basis. Just yesterday, James Potter, the founder behind Rephonic and RateThisPodcast, posted about a new server he set up, and shared a screenshot of the CPU and RAM of that beast of a computer. And instead of focusing on my own business, I just had to find out which tool James is using to show these stats. And within minutes, I was reading up on how to compile btop on a Mac.

And then I paused.

What purpose other than novelty would that serve? I wasn’t just curios about it, I let my desire to use the coolest tools manipulate my attention to the things that really matter.

That is lusting for tech. The feeling of posting a picture of your new MacBook Pro M6 or whatever. It’s the compulsion to rewrite your frontend in Svelte when the React app you’ve been tinkering on for years is still perfectly fine.

It’s overengineering of a devious kind: when we lust for tech, we intentionally ignore the potential technical debt any major change undoubtedly will incur. Nobody every rebuilt their app from scratch without running into fifty unexpected and equally catastrophic problems along the way. Instead of “boring and good enough”, we long for “exciting and maybe slightly better.”

And like lust in the corporeal world, digital lust destroys the context it appears in: we overcomplicate our products, we repel most of our mainstream customers (because no one wants to buy from someone who chases trends all day long), and it ultimately blocks us from seeing things through.

My recommendation: make sure the core of your software product is built on boring and reliable technologies. I don’t mean old and rusty stuff — but tech that you can trust to work at scale and in a pinch. If you have to indulge, build a small project for fun. Just don’t risk the long-term integrity of your business for a quick adrenaline rush that you feel when you mastered yet another tool.

Gluttony: Feature Bloat

This was something that came up when I listened to my miniature podcast. Mini painters often chase the feeling of making progress, whether it’s real or not. When we buy that slightly better brush or this new set of paints‚ we feel like we’re getting better. You should see my paint collection.

I have over 400 different bottles of acrylic paints, for my airbrush, for glazing, inking, dry-brushing, and all these many things I could nerd out over for hours. But do they make me a better painter? No! I still have to spend time on handling the brush and learning how paint flows on a model.

“Time in the weeds” is the measure of progress. And this often means much more than coding up another cool feature or buying another slightly different shade of blue paint.

I love the phrase “feature bloat” because it so visually describes gluttonous behavior. We stuff our apps with cool features that nobody uses, making it slow and convoluted. We feel like we made big strides forward, when all we did was making things bigger.

Our feature gluttony leads to our users being overwhelmed. I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant part of indie hacker churn is directly related to us stuffing our apps with things out of our unending hunger for snacking small feelings of making progress.

How do we get out of this? Talking to our customers, of course!

I try to force myself into a customer information diet: for anything I want to build, I talk to a prospect or a customer I think might like or need that thing. Then, I present it to them in the form of a conversation around the job that I believe it would solve. And most of the time, what they need is not what I had in mind.

You can do this in a call or a DM. Just please do it. And if you do learn that it’s something people might like, you can jump right in and gobble it all up. Just don’t pre-feast. Make sure it’s something digestible and healthy for your business.

Envy: Copying Competitors Instead of Innovating

And I mean “your business”. Just because you’ve seen something cool in a competitor’s product doesn’t mean your app needs that too.

Obsessing over competitor features isn’t healthy. It often comes with a sizeable serving of envy, as in “I wish I would have thought of that.”

Then, we feel like we should sneakily “be inspired” by that particular feature. And when we set out to actually build it, we notice that it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The person we admire didn’t just come up with a clever feature: they suffered years of experience to be able to come up with it. And our envy doesn’t extend that far!

We want the good stuff now, without having to put in the work. We want the public recognition for being smart, capable, and knowledgeable. But we don’t want to go through the many years of struggle to get there.

When that green-eyed monster sits behind the keyboard, it starts trolling people on Twitter. Don’t let it.

Instead, focus on your unique value proposition —both for the business and for yourself! Both are brands that will take time to develop, and your capabilities will grow as you move towards your own unique style and voice. You’ll get there, and being original will make the journey much more interesting. In the long run, these things will fall into place.

Greed: Prioritizing Profit Over Value

Unfortunately, a lot of founders are incredibly opportunistic, to their own detriment. Again, like with confidence, a certain level of opportunity-spotting is required to be a good founder. But if we overcommit to making money, it becomes a battle against our customers: how much can we squeeze out of them before they run away?

It should be blindingly obvious that this kind of behavior destroys any kind of reputation a founder might have in their community. Yet, every day, I see someone trying to pull another quick one on their audience or prospective buyers.

Greed is such a dangerous mindset. It makes us play finite games —cheesy giveaways, follow-for-follow, unwanted Cold DM outreach— while we should be focusing on the infinite game of becoming a better entrepreneur every day.

Let me say this straight: a good entrepreneur knows how to make money. A greedy one weighs every decision on its money-making potential.

Can there be good and greedy entrepreneurs? Probably. But even the richest of the folks we admire and quote on a daily basis have understood that money is a consequence of a good decision, not a good decision in itself.

What’s that old and often only partially quoted saying? “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

As a founder, I’d rather build a reputation as a trustworthy pillar of my community than someone scraping the bottom of the well for a few coins.

Sloth: Neglecting Marketing and Sales

Yet, funny enough, the flip side of chasing money is completely ignoring the need for money in running a business.

I have this T-Shirt that has a “Harry Potter”-related quote on it. It says “My Patronus is a Sloth.” If I need to explain this to you, you’ll probably never find it funny. So I won’t. But I do want to talk about suffering entrepreneurial failure by omission. By not spending time on things that matter.

Greedy founders spend too much time trying to make money. Slothful founders lose themselves in product work — which can be very high-intensity and have very little to do with being lazy. And still, it slowly kills the business effort by suffocating the potential to do marketing and sales.

Yes, I said it. Mostly for myself, but also for you: if we don’t do sales and marketing, we’re lazy, and no amount of 10x ninja dev work will balance that out.

Time-boxing is my approach to overcoming my hesitation with doing things that I don’t feel perfectly comfortable doing. If there’s a calendar entry with a start and end time, I know that I will get things done without losing track of time.

And while we’re at it: building in silence is a poor way to reward yourself for the amazing things you’re doing. And I get it, I’m a developer, too. We do our best work in our computer dungeon. But it’s only part of the work! If you want to do coding stuff full-time, get a job as a developer. If you want to be an indie hacker, you have to share what you’re doing.

Because “they” won’t come just because you’re building. They might come when you start talking about it. And they will come when they trust you to have built something exciting and useful. Trust is being built in wide-open spaces. Enrolment comes from feeling involved and invested in someone’s journey.

And that journey has to be visible. So put yourself out there and share yours.

Wrath: Reacting Poorly to Criticism

And then, one day, a hater will come along. They’ll tell you your product isn’t original. Hey, they might even tell you to do more marketing and sales, maybe on a podcast you listen to.

You hate it. You hate every part of it.

Unsolicited feedback often strikes hard at us, because when we share our work in public, we’re vulnerable. We’re exposing ourselves to criticism when we could just have hidden in our dungeon and built stuff, away from the dangerous world that is other people.

And yet, the wrath we feel when someone just doesn’t get what we’re about won’t serve us. Just like chasing short-term monetary gains, getting revenge for a Twitter post is not serving us — in the long run. It probably feels good for a second to show people what you think of them, armchair founders, dragging other people’s projects through the mud.

But maybe that’s not what people do.

Maybe it’s what we think they do: when you look through a visor, every other person is an enemy knight. Yet they often are just concerned — for themselves, for their view of the world, and sometimes even for you.

Concern drives behavior. And instead of letting their concern enrage you, use it to engage them. Kindly.

Negative feedback is still just feedback, and it probably is the best kind you can get. Criticism is a consequence of friction. And friction exists whether it’s communicated or not. So instead of bashing back, consider that where one person is loud, a few dozen are silent — yet they think and feel just the same.

Detach yourself from your product. Be the wrangler, not the wrangled. When you meet criticism, find the underlying source of friction and work on smoothing that process. Is a need going unmet? Is an expectation misaligned with what you communicate?

All opportunities to make better and improve.

Which is what the infinite game of entrepreneurship is all about. So, with all these deadly sins, what should we focus on? What keeps us aligned with who we want to be and what we want to create to serve those we chose to empower?

The virtues of successful indie hacking are humility, focusing on value over hype, employing pragmatism and originality, keeping things simple, and developing receptiveness towards the thoughts of others and the tasks you might not yet be very good at.

And more than anything, I am talking to myself here. I could improve in every single department, and I appreciate being held accountable by you, my fellow indie hacker and founder.

It’s not easy to avoid all of these pitfalls. But at the very least, it’s worth reflecting on just how much they are influencing our path towards financial independence.

​

I'll share a few updates about my SaaS on the pod, and if you want to track your brand mentions on podcasts, please check out podscan.fm — and tell your friends!

​

​

Thank you for reading this week’s essay edition of The Bootstrapped Founder. Did you enjoy it? If so, please spread the word and ​share this issue on Twitter.​

If you want to reach tens of thousands of creators, makers, and dreamers, you can ​apply to sponsor ​an episode of this newsletter. Or just reply to this email!

​