Marc Köhlbrugge
PRO
@marc
The time spent on one product is time I cannot spend on another. So the question becomes: is this the right product to spend my limited time on?
The answer to that question depends on a number of factors, including:
- How far will my investment take me? Not all products are created equal. Some products require a shitload of work resulting in little growth whereas others seem to almost grow by themselves. Momentum is crucial.
- If I stop or pause investing more time, what will happen to the product? Will it die immediately, or can it live on its own for a while?
- Do I enjoy working on this? Does it make me happy?
- Are there any other benefits I'm getting from working on this product? For example learning a new technology or expanding my network.
Answering this question becomes easier as you get more experience. It gives you experiences to compare to. If you're just starting out though, I'd focus on acquiring more experience as quickly as possible. As long as you feel like you're getting relevant experience, than keep going. Even if you feel stuck, try to push through. I've seen many new makers make the mistake of hitting a wall, starting over with a new product, and then hitting that same wall again. Over and over again. (Usually quickly after launch when they can't seem to grow their customer base.)
Thanks for the response. I feel like I have a lot of experience building things, but most of the ideas I come up with are very content (lots of work, little growth up front but growth accelerates over time) vs service based. It feels hard to gauge success of a project like #financialtoolbelt right now because I haven't monetized yet and traffic while decent, is still pretty low. Any thoughts specific to more content heavy businesses or does the same framework apply?
I think the same framework applies. Instead of adoption you'd be looking at consumption, how much the content is shared, conversion rates to newsletters, etc.
If you find it hard to decide whether to invest more time, ask yourself what date you'd need in order to make that decision either. For example, if you don't know yet how passionate people are about the content add something to gauge this. (newsletter signup, etc)
@marckohlbrugge has answered this much than I. I have the same problem. My take - creating good content every day or week is really difficult. So a project that requires fewer content updates seems better to me, but with some really good content for marketing and SEO.
Related material:
- Joel Spolsky says you should never rewrite software from scratch.
- DHH disagrees. (video)
DHH actually did follow Spolsky for 7 years and only after running out of ideas and constantly hitting brick walls they started investigating a rewrite to rejuvenate the product based on new ideas that weren't around when they first built it. I guess, the answer is, rebuild only if you can't build your new ideas anymore and you can't attract new customers. (He calls it becoming japan in the talk.)
It's hard to say how it will affect us in practice, but in theory it makes it more difficult to get a new product up-and-running while complying with these regulations. So competitively it seems like a disadvantage versus businesses with larger teams and bigger budgets.
On the other hand, with more consumers becoming concerned about privacy there might be a market for privacy-oriented alternatives to existing products. As indie makers we can move quicker than established companies.
I build my own using Neat and Bourbon.
I like the flexibility they provide, but it might take more time to get set up than using something like Bootstrap. It depends on your needs. If you build a ton of little projects than Bootstrap might be better. If you build something for more long-term than rolling your own solution is probably better.
For WIP I took the approach of building my custom CSS components and reusing the hell out of them even though that meant the design was pretty bland. Over time I iterated the design so not every single element looked the same anymore. That worked really well for me.
Congrats on getting your first revenue! What's next?
Thank you! This month I'm planning to work on generating some traction to my app and finding the best channels to advertise it to podcasters. This is the biggest issue right now because even though the app ranks well in the app store, nobody searches for this specific solution there, so the number of downloads is really low in general.
People probably have problems that can be solved using a Telegram bot. The question is hard to answer though, because we might not consider we need a Telegram bot to solve those. Generally it's more productive to start with the problem, and choose the solution/technology based on that.
What makes you ask this question?
Yes, I do think there are security implications as email clients aren't designed with this in mind.
For example, when you have push notifications enabled on your phone someone could potentially get your secret link.
That's an example that could be easily mitigated (include the link further down in the email so it will never show up in the notification preview), but it goes to show there are non-obvious concerns.
Having said that, Slack uses this approach. So it might not be that bad when implemented correctly. (e.g. make them one-time use, expire them after a few minutes, etc)
Edit:
I just realised password reset emails are quite similar in nature 🤔. So if you were planning on having password reset emails, then you might as well use the magic link approach instead.
Marc, are there types of applications you think this might not be suitable for? i.e those dealing with financial information