With every new project I make, I learn to break yet another rule, yet another commonly accepted wisdom from the indie hacker playbook.
With Lifelog, I learned that there’s no amount of hard work will save a bad business. Despite what people love to harp on about the slow grind, showing up daily, and putting in the reps.
With Carrd plugins, I learned that the side projects you least expect to succeed are often the ones that do. Despite what people like to talk about focus and working on just one main project.
With Sheet2Bio, I learned that Twitter isn’t always the best channel to validate products. Despite what many successful indie hacker influencers demonstrate.
With Lists Kit, I’m learning that clean code matters. Despite what they say about how your customers don’t care about how clean your code is. Yes, it doesn’t matter, until it does. Until your product is a boilerplate, the code itself, and your customers are other creators and developers.
At this point, I feel I can safely extend from these learnings and say that for every rule in indie hacking and entrepreneurship that you can come up with, there will be someone or some product that had broken it and still won.
Every rule you hear in the Twitterverse, in startup books, tech conferences, by billionaires, millionaires and tech experts, are made by some other dude as stupid or as smart as you. Their rule might have worked for them. But you can break it and still win.
There are no rules.
I guess I have to disagree this time "There are no rules". While rules do have exceptions, I don't see your examples going against the rules.
If something doesn't pay off (even if you are passionate about it), cut your loses (or as the saying goes: if you realize you are riding a dead horse, get off)
If there is an urge or need for a product, someone taking on this need (even if it's niche) might succeed.
If users are creators it absolutely does matter how easy they can use a product.
These are all rules. The question is, which rule does apply to a specific scenario to what degree and being objective about that evaluation.