Indie Hacker Diaries: July 8th-12th, 2024

“You’re free when you realize that you’re willing to go to the length that’s necessary.”

— Wendell Berry

Interesting Links

• A quick Twitter thread on the importance of collecting data and measuring and how that can impact your indie product’s performance.

• Finally got a chance to play with the Cursor IDE. It’s just VSCode with an LLM integrated into it, but it definitely has potential for speeding up day-to-day dev tasks.

• I’m a big fan of Tiny, a company out of Canada applying the Berkshire Hathaway acquisition model to internet companies. They released their annual letter back in May. They’re not indie hackers, but some good ideas/wisdom to pick up inside.

• I was an early beta tester for Michael Lynch’s TinyPilot device which he recently sold. Great breakdown of an indie-hacked hardware product’s full lifecycle and financial outcome. Worth digging through Michael’s archive of posts for the gritty details (check out the “My ___ Year as a Bootstrapped Founder” posts).

Pro Tips

Turn AI Into Your Employee

Generating this color picker component with Claude completely changed my mind about LLMs this week.

Early on in the LLM craze, I was a big AI-skeptic. While I’m not convinced that AGI or anything close to it will see the light of day anytime soon, day-to-day, I’ve found it’s most helpful as a pseudo junior developer. I’ve found myself using Claude daily to help generate functions and help with grunt work like formatting/translating. As an indie hacker, tools like this are a dream come true. Don’t use them to replace having a skill set—use them to get to market faster.

Stay on top of your budget so you don’t have to take focus off your product.

I recently wrapped up my last client project for the next several months (maybe ever?) and have switched to running CheatCode out of pocket. To reduce the stress of having a reduced cash flow, I set up some budgeting tools to help me weed out expenses that I didn’t need. I landed on Copilot and highly recommend it. It helped me knock out quite a few expenses I either forgot about or didn’t know I had.

Think Backwards From the Customer Experience

If you’ve followed my work for awhile (or have been a client), it’s very likely that I’ve shared this clip of Steve Jobs 100 times. I routinely remind myself when I start getting in the weeds on an idea to reframe the problem from the customer perspective vs. my own (even when the “customer” is a developer using something like Joystick for free). This makes it very easy to cut through the noise and ship something that not only serves others well, but makes maintenance far easier (a tech-first focus tends to create Rube Goldberg style messes).

What I Worked On

• Tied up loose ends on the UX for Mod on the account side. Got all of the team member invitation stuff solid, downloads, and payment history squared away.
• Wired up the documentation pages. Decided to just do static Markdown files on the server and read them from disk instead of trying to build or repurpose a CMS. Now I just need to finish writing docs and wiring up search.
• Built a color palette designer for Mod. This will help you visually design your theme/palette for Mod and generate the necessary CSS variables to override Mod’s default theme/palette.

Final Thought

Make a point to ask “what if this goes right?” As I’ve started to tie up the loose ends on Mod and prepare it for release, I’ve been thinking about the different possible outcomes. Will people like it? Will it sell? Does anybody even care? The only way to know is to find out, but this week I shifted my thinking from “what if this doesn’t work” to “yeah, but what if it does? Then what?”

The advantage is that instead of being nervous about failure, I’m nervous about success and already thinking ahead about how I’d have to manage support requests, marketing, etc. The point being: by shifting my mindset to a positive one, I’m not thinking about chasing down rats to eat when the money runs out, I’m thinking about strategies for increasing the odds that things will go well.