“Just a feeling”? Do you think life is a SES song?!
Bad reference I know. Sorry. It’s a reference only old school KPOP fans of 1st generation girl groups know. So ma bad. Mabad.
I suck at doing non-technical stuff. But to be able to be an “indiehacker” means you have to be able to be good at Sales and Marketing too.
Thankfully I’m not the only person trying to start online businesses. So IndieHacker was key in this, but also in Reddit’s related subreddits I was able to find this person with a unique, developer’s mindset in doing customer/product research. His name is Mike Rubini and this guy is a Jazz musician and also a 5-SaaS-product-running beast (https://rubini.solutions/). He cranks out 4~5 products a year.
His competitor research is called “microdata” analysis, and can be found here: https://blog.rubini.solutions/microdata/
So with that information I tried to research many parts of the web that has communities, forums, app reviews that has the competitors of what I am trying to build.
What am I building? Something delivery management software for some people. I don’t know who to sell exactly or what kind of angle I need to market.
That’s why I feared doing research. What if I realize I’m way off? Can I live with re-working an idea?
When I get super stressed about these things - I often stress a lot about non-technical stuff - I do what I always do to gain energy.
I take a nice long weekend nap. Get away from the computer, and just nap. Brain was already tired from the dreaded thought of going to different forums and checking out the posts - most of which are not in ordered fashion. This hurts my software developer mind.
After a long nap and dinner I was able to reset my brainpower, and went head on to a subreddit that deals with restaurant ownership. Not much there that I don’t know.. people really don’t like the delivery platforms because they charge a lot. That’s not an angle I can sell. Commoditize the product? Lower the cost? I mean I will lower the cost but that can’t be all of the selling point.
I started writing all that I find - in no particular order - into a Google Doc. Eck, I really don’t like just writing in a Doc file. It’s not tabulated data! What am I going to do with this dump of copy/pasted text? READ all of them?
.. I realized I got a ways to go to mold my brain to be okay with unstructured research and workflow.
But I’m excited with what I found - forums are full of nice-to-have features with people agreeing them. Things like slotted delivery times. And personally I hate it when menus don’t have any pictures. Like Chinese restaurant paper menus I understand because they have a ton of menus. However in a web - I can clearly see that the product is made by a developer-centric mindset. I don’t know how a food looks like unless I’ve been there or tried it. Adding a picture is simple enough (however I also didn’t implement it yet hehe).
My key focus in my product was to make it as fast as possible. Real time fulfillment status. I chose Elixir as my language because I am mainly sick of creating yet another React + Node/Go/Python stack, but also because of its robust support on real-time data processing.
Since I’m learning Elixir / Phoenix most of what I wrote is crap but is getting there.
My bet I’m placing is I really want to have an ugly ass level product done with complete target minimal features. Stuff without the pretty UI and fancy UX flow. And then I can tinker around to make it a MLP (Minimum Loveable Product)
Lastly this is one of the many future progress reports. I feel like this way I can keep going in otherwise a pretty lonely trail of building out a product.