Indie Hacker Diaries #22: Trimming the Fat

Earlier this week, I saved myself from a really boneheaded mistake.

In last week’s letter, I talked about Push—the deployment service I’m building for Joystick apps—and hinted at how I built it to require multiple services.

What I didn’t share was that in addition to building multiple services, the earlier versions of Push required your deployment to be at least 1 app instance and 1 load balancer instance.

While this made sense at the time, over the last year, I realized just how little power you need to run an app. I’ve since learned that, in most cases, a single instance deployment is all you need.

Up until this week, all of the apps and websites I was running were built using that earlier version of Push. That meant that sites that didn’t even need a load balancer—like the single pager for the license I wrote for Joystick, SAUCR–had one, which meant my monthly hosting bill was hundreds of dollars more than it needed to be.

When I built all of that, I rationalized it away. I said “well, if it takes off the cost will be small relative to revenue from the app.”

That would have been true had I launched it. But, because I sat on it for more than a year, I burned up cash on compute that never really got used.

Fortunately, now, with the new version of Push defaulting to a single-instance (standalone) deployment, I was able to re-provision all of those apps and sites and cut my monthly bill down by ~$870. Annually that’s a little over $10,000 in savings—nothing to sneeze at.

Yep. Dumbass.

That got me thinking about how the types of decisions you make where you assume the “happy path.” The ones where your idea just starts to work, makes the money you need to cover costs, and you ride off into the sunset.

I realized I’ve made similar business-side mistakes in the past—though, to a much smaller degree—and realized the runway I burned up by not thinking far enough ahead. Ignoring the “what if you’re wrong” side of the equation.

As an entrepreneur/indie hacker type, this is surprisingly hard to do.

Technically it’s easy, but in practice, it takes a lot of humility to admit up front that your brilliant idea could be a total flop or that your timing is off-target. Not just to others, but to yourself.

It’s also hard to predict what will happen between now and when your idea will actually find its footing. From experience, I’d argue that’s an even harder problem to solve.

Over the years, I’ve gone from pie-in-the-sky estimates of an idea hitting profitability within the first month to a more conservative 24+ months. As part of that timeline, I’ve also factored in the time to iterate the idea to product market fit (or, at least, enough to cover the bills) and the time to build up things like marketing.

I’ve also started to include a buffer for “shit hitting the fan.”

What that term entails is up to you, but it could be anything:

• A job or client project falling through that you’ve relied on as a steady source of income to finance your work.
• Running into a technical problem that took far longer than you expected to solve.
• Personal, non-business “life stuff” delaying your ability to work on an idea (like yours truly tearing a hamstring cutting down trees while clearing land for my house).

Beyond getting better at estimating time to ship and scale to profitability, I’ve also started to reel in my expectations about what success will look like on the technical side.

Instead of wasting a ton of time up front figuring out how to duct tape together a too-big-for-your-britches Kubernetes cluster, just start with a single server.

Instead of paying for services like email—even if it means a better experience for you—sweat it out with a freebie service that works well enough.

Wherever and whenever you can, instead of erring on the side of hubris and convincing yourself you’ll need to orchestrate a massive operation from day one; chill out.

Assume that your launch day will mostly be crickets.

Assume that you won’t find profitability very quickly.

Assume that it will be far more difficult than you think, but, will require far less on all fronts than you think.

Not to discourage yourself, but to save yourself a tremendous amount of time and money. The two things you absolutely cannot waste when you’re trying to get a business off the ground.

Train yourself to have a death grip on those two things.

Seeing that savings of $10K over the next year inspired me to be an absolute supervillain about this.

If you have found—or currently find—yourself in a similar situation: take note.

Figure out how to move in the direction of simplicity and cut out all of the crap you think you need or might one day well into the future. I’ll admit first hand: it wasn’t easy to unwind all of that junk and cost. But the high I got from doing it was well worth it.

Something, something...a penny saved is a penny earned.