Making Indie Products
Day / 365
For a Software Engineer looking for a way to get out of their boring 9–5 job, creating and selling their own product might seem like a tremendously tough task. I have been there, so I know the thoughts we have
- A product needs to be innovative to make money. Everything I can think of has already been made.
- I can’t possibly make anything decent alone. I need a big team.
- I would need to go out and raise funding, building a good product requires a lot of money.
I used to think all this. This is why even after I left my job, I kept freelancing so that I had a steady source of income.
My opinion changed when I started following people on Twitter who were building products by themselves and making lots of money doing so. I found that all the points listed above were wrong.
First of all, let's look at the numbers. Most of the products that people made were subscription-based services. For instance, a way to transfer your Twitter bookmarks to Notion, or to use Notion to write your blog. If you charge 20 dollars a month, you just need 50 customers to get a Monthy Revenue of 1000 dollars!
Now you don’t need to be extremely innovative and unique to get 50 customers. You just need to build a decent product that solves a problem, that 50 people will be willing to pay for.
Most such products don’t need a big team to build. And there are plenty of free services available to build and host them, so you do not need to worry about funding.
Once a product is stable, you will not need to spend much time on it on a daily basis. It will still keep generating revenue, and you can move on to building a new product.
This story is part of my 365-Day Project for 2023. Read about it here
Yesterday’s blog — You get what you need