That’s a pretty bold title, you might be thinking.
Sure, yeah. It’s bold. This is probably the best advice I could give someone just starting their Indiehacker journey.
What if I told you that you could guarantee sales and revenue without having a massive audience?
What if I told you that this is the secret to making a product that users come back to time and time again, and they rave about it to their friends?
Okay, now that’s even more bold than the title. I’ll be upfront and honest - you don’t have to follow this advice. It’s not true for everything, and it’s not something that’s applicable to all products. It’s just something that works for me.
This is the one thing that I did with my product that I didn’t even realize was the reason it was successful out of the gate. It was an accident. But I’m so glad it worked out that way.
Here’s my two rules for making a product that sells itself:
Save your users time. Make your users more money.
That’s it. Pick a niche, solve a pain-point that is causing users to spend more time on something than they should, and then have that solution inevitably make them more money.
At the end of the day, people care about how they spend their time. It’s a fact of life. As our world grows more and more into technology, the aspect of how time is spent is on the forefront of our minds.
My product saves people several hours per day. I’m talking like 4+ hours. These are mom’s with kids, busy students in school, people working two jobs. They don’t have the time to be spending on the pain-point my app resolves.
Not only that, but as an added bonus, say hello to $XXX more money in the bank every month.
Now, here’s my one and only sales pitch. This is why it sells itself.
Save several hours of time everyday, for $1 a day.
👆 This is how you earn $30/month from a user.
Is several hours of your time worth $1 to you? Of course it is. That’s a no brainer.
Every customer I talk to that uses my product speaks very highly about it. Sure, it’s a solid app that doesn’t have any bugs.
But at the end of the day it solves a major problem for my customer, and they are grateful because the value they get from my product is way better than what they pay with their wallet.
So, if you’re just getting started and you’re trying to come up with a product/service to make, keep this lesson in mind.
It’s is possible to have a product that doesn’t follow these rules. But, the success of it typically requires some external driving force. Since it’s not a need for the end-user, they forget about it.
It either needs to be used by all of their friends, be heavily marketed, or introduced to a large and specific audience.
If you want to do that, that’s fine. As for me, I will be making products that follow at least one of these rules. That way, I know the product will be successful and it will sell itself.