Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

I admire your work ethic and perseverance. One thing I personally learned from trying to build a startup this way, is that the problems you’re building a solution for become very narrow as your main source of inspiration becomes startup culture and digital SaaS products.<p>I made the decision to first get real work experience in a relevant industry, learn the problems there and only then start building a product. This opens up the door to building software for industries like the AEC industry, defense or healthcare, where you could have far greater impact, instead of getting stuck on building todo apps, online communities or platforms.

Great stuff:<p>- Brief. Respect people&#x27;s time, and take a stand.<p>- Tailored, to solopreneur. It&#x27;s tempting to be drawn into building beautiful tech, chasing resume skills, or building domain experience in crap work. Putting yourself on the hook of your own decision-making builds character.<p>- Refined: it&#x27;s easy to go from bad to good (just smooth out the pain points). It&#x27;s very hard to go from good (happy but free customers) to better (paying customers), because you&#x27;re trading lots of pain for benefits.<p>- Timely: those are the virtues of 2023, of contraction (outside AI-mania), where you control your destiny as a solopreneur. If it starts raining money again, it might not be the right approach.<p>However, the most common measure of leadership is a success pattern in ... leadership. People can take solopreneur experience as fitting for product management and not much else.<p>To show leadership, you have to demonstrate decision-making under stress, where you identified the key factors and how to change them. That&#x27;s a different post, one that shows how you sift through noise, excitement, and gaps to find the difference that makes a difference, and prosecute that.<p>It&#x27;s possible solopreneurs can get rich, but more often success means finding partners, get attention or getting bought, or just proving yourself - to yourself and perhaps others.<p>Or, if you&#x27;re really lucky, you can make a difference.

OP here. I call my products startups because I need to believe each will make $ at some point, otherwise, I wouldn&#x27;t have been able to grind for 6 years.<p>Some are actual startups with decent userbase and recurring revenue, and some are just free logo makers.

Why go through all the trouble of creating nine startups when you could have made one startup with nine products and saved yourself an ungodly amount of paperwork?

While helpful, it is at the same time a content marketing piece, going a bit meta.<p>It might not be as objective; the author benefits from people who take this advice and decide to try one of the advertised products.

I&#x27;ve been following you (among other indie hackers) for a couple of years. I respect and admire the heck out of what you&#x27;re doing. But I have a huge problem with the fact that you keep referring to the income brought in by ShipFa.st (again, heck of a product!) as &quot;51K&#x2F;m&quot; (as of today this is what your X&#x27;s bio shows), when pricing is obviously not recurring.<p>What would be a lot more indicative of the financial success of the project (and less misleading) would be something like &quot;trailing 3 months&quot;. But I get it: telling the world you&#x27;re making $X&#x2F;mo is a blast. And it definitely helps with exposure! But IMO it gives off guru vibes, especially when paired with the fact that you seem to be veering towards paid educational content (nothing bad with that obviously).<p>I wouldn&#x27;t even bother writing this if it wasn&#x27;t for the fact that you literally open with the line &quot;my income jumped from $1,500 in January, to $65,000 in November&quot;, of which $50k is definitely not recurring.<p>(Again, not a hater, quite the opposite so I hope you take this as constructive feedback!)

I&#x27;m curious if the author has ever been in therapy. I would never say food + sleep + exercise is a substitute for professional medical advice.

I’m in the same boat as the OP, I’ve launched 3 projects in 2023.<p>I spent 10 months on the first project. It was a very clever project, complicated to explain, hard to build, and ultimately did crap. It scratched my own itch - or so I thought, I don’t even use it myself at all. No emotions, pure logic marketing. 1000+ users only. $0 made.<p>My second project I built in 1 day, and launched in 1 week. It was basic, but people wanted this functionality. It was an emotion based marketing, people empowerment tool, and I wanted it and I use it myself. It immediately went viral and I managed to sell it for a decent bump to my income. 5 figures.<p>My third project I built in 3 days, it was the top post of the month on the subreddit for the niche, and gained about 1500 users in 1 day. Again, an emotional marketing spin and this time worker empowerment. I’m planning on selling it this year for 4 figures.<p>I’m now working on a roughly 2-3 month project from start to launch. It’s something I need. It will be my first non-freemium project.<p>Lessons learned? Build FAST, and market an mvp as soon as you can. Be clever, but not too clever because you only alienate a potential audience. I really agree with the OP regarding impressions and emotions. I will only pursue ideas I can build and fully launch in a 3 month window.<p>How can I improve? Get the landing page up earlier, don’t be too clever with ideas, and try paid advertisements

When you build these type of projects is there an actual consistent method to getting people to look at your work? Because from my experience it seems like any amount of feedback I&#x27;ve had came from freak lottery type events like getting covered in a magazine or something like that.<p>How would someone who is really clueless and horrible at promotion learn those kind of skills?

Which service were you referring to with &quot;I killed a startup by swapping one-time payments for recurring ones&quot;? Was it something that the average user would expect was priced with one-time payment, or subscription? What was the ratio of the one-time payment to subscription price? How did those pricings compare to competitors?<p>As a user of indie apps, I think in general people expect the basic version for a reasonable one-time payment, you never know if the developer&#x27;s going to go become inactive, stop actively maintaining it or get hampered by OS&#x2F;API changes. The developer can always later on release major upgrades at higher prices (one-time or subscription). I think users are deeply wary of monetization schemes and rug-pulls - a few bad incidents got the whole proposition a bad rep.<p>I&#x27;m also much more likely to recommend to people I know an app that&#x27;s sold by modest one-time payment (or freemium) than subscription.

This is definitely cool. I think hackers who hate mixing people and climbing the ladder should look at 2.5 million dollars as the magic number. That gives you around 10,000 dollars a month which should be a secure base for almost any place in the world. After that you never have to work for money ever again.

Solo bootstrapper here (8 years now). All good advice, to which I would add: don&#x27;t build B2C, only B2B. And any subscription plan should be above $50&#x2F;month.