Indie remixes of big tech products

A new playbook for indie hackers - don’t create unique products, but instead create an indie remix of a popular tech startup product or big tech product.

Like what @dagorenouf is saying:

A trend I’m seeing is to build an indie-friendly and cheaper version of a popular SaaS.

Crisp for Intercom
Tallyforms for Typeform
Savvycal for Calendly
Senja for testimonials(.to)

Which other popular startup needs an indie version?

Pros and cons of this approach:

• Validated product and demand, but it’s a more saturated market with more competitors
• As a solo indie hacker, you don’t need a huge slice of the market to win, but going up against a VC-funded competitor(s)
• You don’t need an audience to validate a product – it already is! Just slow and steady SEO and marketing to rise up in the page ranks. But if your product requires paid marketing like ads, you might not be able to outdo your funded peers.
• You don’t even need to convince people there’s a need for your product. Your customers are educated already by your predecessors. You just need to offer a 10% unique spin, a cheaper price, or a feature that the incumbents are sorely lacking in.
• You don’t need to innovate too much. People like refreshing familiar. In fact, you can go as low as just updating it by 3%, “because human desire two competing things: familiarity and novelty.” – @TrungTPhan. Downside of just 3% edit is being called a copycat, But because you’re ‘punching up’ instead of competing with another indie, nobody will say you are copycatting.
• You’re providing more options for customers to choose from. Sometimes customers feel locked in to the vendor because there’s no other cheaper option. You’re doing common good by offering more options. But of course, downside is sunk costs bias. Getting teams to switch tools is haaard.

So what other opportunities are there for indie remixes? Listing some:

• Dropbox. Box
• Gmail + GDrive
• Salesforce, Hubspot, or CRM for <niche> industry
• Vercel/Netlify
• Heroku, Digital Ocean
• Adobe CS, Figma, Miro
• Shopify, Gumroad
• Intercom, Zendesk
• Surveymonkey, Typeform
• Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Trello
• Zoom, Microsoft Teams
• Grammarly
• Google Sheets, Airtable, any spreadsheet app
• Discord, Slack, or any chat app
• Ahrefs, SEMrush
• Tableau or data analysis app
• Workday
• Xero
• Twilio
• Coursera, Udemy
• Duolingo

I think there’s so much more and we’re just scratching the surface here!