🗞 What's New: Maintaining joy while indie hacking

As an indie hacker, it's easy to become consumed by work:

• What happens when work takes over to the point that you no longer remember how to relax or nurture relationships? Founders weigh in below!
• This approach can help you go from idea to validation in 24 hours. Hint: It works best for high potential ideas with a high chance for success.
• Founder Brian Graham started his indie hacking journey with a bang: A partnership offer from a major company. But after building, he delayed launching for a whole year. Here's why.

Want to share something with over 90,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🎈 Finding Balance as a Founder

by Thisisthenexttry34

When I was younger, I would always tell people that if I had even $15K in my bank account, I would quit my job and focus on my hobbies. But once I hit that benchmark, I just moved the goalposts and kept working.

Without even realizing it, work has become my main hobby. I don't even really know what to do for fun anymore because I just feel a compulsion to be productive. I want to be able to enjoy life again. Does anybody else feel this way? Any tips to combat this?

Reflection suggestion

Justin Chu has been there, and sometimes still struggles with it:

I really encourage you to carve out time to reflect on what your true values are. It took me a long time to realize that I was chasing after success as it was defined by others, not myself.

Success is different for everyone. I've found that for me, it's all about living a life aligned with my values.

My values:

• Nurture relationships with people I enjoy and respect.
• Take good care of myself physically and mentally.
• Create and build things that I am proud of.

Ways that I achieve this:

• Individual therapy: This has helped me so much that I can't emphasize it enough. Note that it can take a few therapists to find a good fit. You don't need to settle for the first one. Think of it as dating!
• Journaling and meditation: This has helped me become a lot more aware of what I feel, think, and ultimately, want. Without this, my mind sprints around too quickly, and I often default to avoiding processing any difficult emotional thoughts or feelings.
• Opening up to supportive friends and family: It's easy to feel shame and hide our feelings from others because society makes us to hyper-aware of how we are coming across to people. But for me, hearing others share personal struggles only makes me respect them more, and also feel a lot closer to them.

Remember that indie hacking is really hard, so be kind to yourself. Don't forget to look back and be proud of how far you have already come!

Choose your lane

Seek internal happiness, Courtland Allen says:

I know a lot of rich people who don't have to work anymore. Most of them are focused on basic activities.

Nurturing good relationships, staying healthy, and having an impact on the world (start with the people in your immediate surroundings or local community!) can all help. Also, enjoying traveling, hobbies, entertainment, and food can be things to explore. And don't forget about the little things, those that everyone can do whether they have money or not.

The challenge is, these things may seem super boring when considered from the outside. There's nothing about being good at any of the above that makes you uniquely spectacular or high-status as a human being. These aren't things you do to stand out or brag about on Twitter. They're things you do for your own internal happiness.

I think it helps to pick just one or two things in life to be competitive about. Use these things as your vehicle to chase success, status, widespread approval, or whatever is important to you in an external sense. And then, let everything else be just for you.

Conscious recreation

I've dealt with a variation of this problem for much of my adult life, says Channing Allen:

On a given day, I would use all my willpower working myself to the bone. Then, by evening, willpower depleted, I would default uselessly to the lowest-hanging recreational fruit available to me, which usually consisted of scrolling social media, auto-watching YouTube, or playing video games. So, while I technically had hobbies, they were unsatisfying.

I've fixed this recently by being a lot more intentional about my recreation. In fact, I've created an actual personal project called "Conscious Recreation," through which I've carefully considered the kinds of hobbies I want to spend time on, and made plans about how to block out time for them just like I block out time for work.

Tradeoff city

Th3marine adds that you should consider the tradeoffs:

I used to go through this when I was younger. I was so driven and motivated that I didn't go on dates. I don't regret these decisions, but now that I'm in my early 30's, I'm realizing that I don't have the love part of my life figured out yet.

We all make sacrifices, but you need to consider whether you are okay with the sacrifices that you are making. If not, sacrifice something else.

People who are successful musicians often give up everything to succeed, even if that means not going to college or having a stable job. But they think it's worth it. If you don't, that's okay. Just consider the tradeoffs.

What's your best advice for maintaining joy? Share below!

Discuss this story.

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🥱 How to build healthy habits when you're struggling with exhaustion.

⏰ From Idea to Validation in 24 Hours

by Thomas Jacquesson

My goal here is to share an approach that I recommend for those looking to quickly validate demand and viability for a product. Let's dive in!

The disclaimers

Let me answer some questions first:

• Is it foolproof? No.

• What if I need more than 24 hours to do the steps? That's okay. But if you need more than a couple weeks, you may have a problem.

• Will I validate demand with this method? No. You will most likely invalidate demand. But at least you'll move on more quickly!

Seven steps to validate your idea in 24 hours

1. Forget your product idea: Zero minutes.

I'm being very serious here. Unless you came up with that idea in a smart way initially (see steps two and three), I suggest you forget about it. That's the quickest way to get rid of bad ideas and not even have to go through the validation step.

2. Define a target market: 30 minutes.

In my opinion, the best way to get a good idea is to go into hack-a-thon mode. I've participated in a couple of those, and they always start with a problem and an audience.

So, this is where I start as well. I try to find a target market that I can identify with, one that has similar traits as I do so that I'm more likely to understand them. I feel that this helps me come up with solid ideas. However, it's also fine if you'd rather address a niche that you know nothing about.

3. Find a problem and imagine a solution: Two hours.

Depending on the niche you picked, this can take a variable amount of time. This is why picking a target audience that you understand, and can easily reach out to, is important.

There are plenty of places online where you can collect insights and identify a problem in just a day's work. Here's a few:

• Forums.
• Twitter.
• Help centers.
• Discord servers.
• Unsatisfied client reviews.

4. Define a success metric: 30 minutes.

People often forget about this crucial step. How will you know when you've validated demand for your product? What's the metric and the expected outcome?

Personally, if I can get one stranger to pay actual money for my product before it's even released, then that meets my metric expectation.

5. Landing page and payment form: Two hours.

Here's my go-to method to build a landing page that validates demand fast:

• Sign up for Carrd.
• Use it to build a very basic, but clear, landing page.
• Add a "Request Access" button that opens.
• Include a very long Typeform where you ask for a bunch of information.
• Add a Stripe payment link at the end of the Typeform.

This is good if your main metric for success is getting payments. But if you want to validate demand with emails or something else, feel free to not put a payment link.

6. Find some clients: Four hours.

Now, you have to find some customers! Here are a few places to check out:

• Reddit.

• Indie Hackers.

• Twitter DMs: Find your direct competitor, then reach out to people who liked their tweets.

• Google Ads: There are a bunch of $50-$75 coupons out there to lower the cost.

Have at it for four hours. Give it all you can. No, it's not embarrassing. You're a founder aiming to sell your product before it's even built! That's admirable.

7. Analyze feedback: One hour.

Once you're done with your sales efforts, go and watch the numbers.

The results

Did you reach your success metric?

If so, you may have just found an awesome product idea. Your next step is making sure that you're able to actually build it.

If not, it's not all bad. Why?

• You possibly just avoided a huge mistake, setting yourself up to work for weeks or months on a product that you're not able to sell.
• You probably learned a lot about a specific audience. Every niche has multiple problems to solve.
• You can write down the pros and cons of the experience, and what you'll do differently next time.

If your results are somewhere in the middle, that means there's one part of the market fit equation that isn't working right. Either the idea isn't that good, or your sales skills for that idea aren't adapted. There may be demand for the product, but you may need to make some adjustments or seek a cofounder.

This method works well to identify high potential ideas. These are ideas that you don't get that often, and that have a high chance of success. This method will most likely eliminate average ideas that have a chance, but require a lot of work or luck.

In any case, I hope that this can prevent even just one founder from working six months on an unsellable product!

What are your top validation methods? Let's chat in the comments!

Discuss this story.

👥 Audience Defined

from The Steal Club newsletter by Alex Llull

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Join the 1%, and you won't regret it. Trust me.

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😬 Brian Graham's Major Launch Woes

by Brian Graham

Four failed ventures, six-figure debt, a wrecked marriage, a false start, and loneliness. These are some of the words that immediately come to mind when I think of my last 10 years of indie hacking.

But I won't paint a completely gloomy picture. There were exhilarating moments, too. For example, there was a social campaign that catapulted a bootstrapped business to seven figures in just 90 days!

Today, though, I’d like to start from the beginning: My very first venture. I was able to build a product that got me a partnership with one of the biggest companies in the world. What did I learn from all that? Read on to find out!

Hello, opportunity

It was 2012, and I was working as a marketing engineer in NYC. My job was two-pronged: Managing the engineering aspects of marketing campaigns, and managing the marketing aspects of product development.

While on that job, I came across a problem. It involved a certain big company that I can’t name due to a confidentiality agreement. Let's call that company "ABC." ABC was experiencing an issue with integrating its latest product in a vast market. I had experience and client relationships in that particular market, so I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity for me to kick off my indie hacking dream.

So, I embarked upon developing a solution. After just three months of coding and testing, I had it. My plan was to sell the software to ABC’s clients independently.

Launch day

I chose a Saturday morning to launch my project. Before launch, I planned to do some final touches of the landing page and a final sweep for bugs. I recorded a video to document what was supposed to be a monumental day in my life. What happened? Well, I didn't launch.

I told myself that the weekend of tinkering with the landing page and code was needed. The offering was certainly better, so I vowed to launch it the next Saturday. Except the same sequence of events also happened the following weekend, and the one after that. As a matter of fact, this became the story of each weekend for about a year. Why? I'll quote founder James Marks in his recent Indie Hackers post:

Not good enough

Indie hacking had been my dream since I was a little boy, and this was my first real attempt at it. So failure, or even success, carried huge implications. I was terrified.

What if no one buys it? What if it is just not good enough? I couldn't bear to find out. So, I used every excuse in the book to delay launch.

Each day, I would tell myself that if I just added this new feature or made the old one better, the product would be ready. In my mind, the more I could perfect the product, the more I would decrease the chance of it failing.

What I didn't realize was that not launching is a form of failure within itself. Perhaps it's even a worse one.

Breaking through the fear

When I finally gathered the courage to launch after about a year, I wasn’t expecting what happened next. Merely three months post-launch, I got a call from the vice president of ABC, telling me that the company was interested in a partnership.

I was paid $20K upfront just for signing, and received a percentage of all the transactions that my software facilitated. In addition, ABC agreed to market the product. That was huge!

In the end, I sold the product to the company, and my indie hacking journey had officially begun. I have not looked back since then. So, yes, some dreams die at launch. But it is also at launch that dreams can become reality!

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 Thisisthenexttry34, Thomas Jacquesson, Alex Llull, and Brian Graham for contributing posts. —Channing