Slow indie hacking
Building a product 1 small commit at a time, with SaaS Starters directory
F.I.N.A.L.L.Y.
I finally hit the 100th item in my Lists Kit SaaS Starters directory. All manually curated and added.
I launched the SaaS Starters directory as a free tool marketing thing for Lists Kit on 11 January 2024 this year. And started on adding 1 new item a day, to the directory since 9 March. Well mostly per day, as some other days I added to my other directories.
You can see how in April and May, most of the days are just from that one commit for my directories, as I was so busy from consulting.
I wasn’t necessarily aiming for 100 in the beginning. Just started putting one a day because 25 felt too little. Then as it grew I wondered if I should stop at some point because it could potentially keep going forever. But I didn’t know how many there are in the boilerplate universe, so I added one a day, and observed. As I got closer to 100, it became harder to find good ones, ones that had social proof, had been serving customers, and had good track record. It got clearer that 100 was the right amount of not too much, not too many, for a directory of SaaS boilerplates.
Tbh I still don’t know how Lists Kit will look like as a business. Right now it’s just random, occasional purchases from mostly strangers, or Twitter followers. I sell maybe 1 every 1-2 months. I have yet to find a positive ROI distribution channel, or a conversion funnel that works. When I launched Lists Kit early this year on Twitter, it flopped. It was obvious Twitter isn’t that channel I’m looking for. But there’s still many other ways I have yet to find and to unlock, but I didn’t know which. And I felt discouraged then, so I just bided my time, adding one new boilerplate a day, while I figure this out slowly.
Maybe sometimes, we don’t need to rush.
Perhaps sometimes, we pave the road to profitability one tile at a time.
Cue something something about consistency being a superpower. The power of 1% compounding. If I published a book on productivity, the working title will be “How to be deadly consistent” LOL.
Jokes aside, if you’re not in hurry, building and figuring out a profitable business from a product can be a really fun and engaging puzzle to solve. It’s involves all the senses and areas of the brain. It calls for you to tap on all the skills and talents you have… and do not have.
Sometimes, a slow, sous vide simmering can be a path too.
Slow indie hacking.
♨️🥚♨️