4 startups, 12 months
Why
I was inspired by levels and yongfook to make a 12 startups in 12 months project, starting from around July 2023 to July 2024.
However I want to put my own spin on it and make it 4 startups in 12 months so I can have a longer time frame (~90 days) to build each app.
The reasons to do this, is as levels says
Problem one: finishing
We creatives have one common problem: finishing things.
Problem two: launching
fear of failure
S1: bookkss
The first startup is bookkss (July 2023 - September 2023)
It's challenging to get a good value proposition for a B2C app like bookkss (as an indie founder, 1 man orchestra) 1
For example, if we examine https://goodreads.com (a competitor), it is not easy to say how the website generates revenue (ads, partnerships, payments)2. Amazon bought this website for $150 million in 2013 3.
Imo, Amazon is buying sites like goodreads and IMDB in order to have a beach-head on where data and interest is flowing in literature and film media (respectively).
What went well was
- the relatively fast iteration speed using vite (next time we'll use next)
- it was fun to build :D
What I learned from this startup is to
- use a styling library for faster development like Material UI
- to target B2B niches (AI, etc.) for indie hackers, see source 1
- manage feature creep (lock down features of MVP) 4 - build that out, and get feedback from users
- switching from next to vite to then back to next (this was my bad as I enabled the beta App router and had really slow site speeds for some reason, I wasn't able to diagnose it so I switched to Vite which solved the slow speeds, but I lost SSR (for SEO) which I wanted so I'm in the process of switching back to Next. This is due to each review being kind of like a blog post so we need web crawlers like Google to show these information pieces up on SERPs.
- practice marketing i.e. any kind of activity aligned to growth, that does not involve building features 5
On to the next one! Which will be a B2B startup - https://helloremote.dev
S2 is https://helloremote.dev