80/20 of my products

All this talk about the Pareto Principle got me thinking about what’s the 20% of the work that bring 80% of the results when it comes to my products and for indie hacking?

For my Carrd plugins, it’s definitely free tools and active contribution/help in Carrd communities. I’ve tried everything for my plugins – free tools, actively contributing and helping others in communities, having social media presence in every platform, sponsorships, ads, guest posts, affiliates, promos. But the best results come from free plugins. I get referral revenue from it, and also good word of mouth. Contributing to community generates goodwill for me to share my free plugins.

For Lifelog’s existing users, it’s building features that help show back their writings to them. This helps with retention. For new users, my gut sense is that it’s features that help them stick to the new daily habit – that’s a real hard problem to solve, something I have yet to pin down.

For Twitter, it’s about sharing real and raw stories. Anytime I try to be clever, try to write ‘content’, it falls flat. Being honest and genuine brings 80% of the results. It also feels great!

For my consulting business, it’s definitely doing a damn good job for every client I work with. Because when I go over and above, people appreciate it, enjoy working with me, and want to recommend it to others. I’ve sustained a decade long business almost entirely on word of mouth marketing alone. It took a planet level crisis like the COVID pandemic to break that momentum. Lately, an addition to the 80% results seems to be coming from posting and engaging on LinkedIn.

Thinking through all these is a great reminder to double triple down on the 20% of the work! Sometimes it’s easy to get distracted by new experiments and new shiny tech/apps, or guru advice on social media.

So what’s the 20% of effort you do for your products that gets you 80% of the results?