My Twitter mastermind

So I shared about the dismal $6200 I earned from my indie products last year on Twitter and it went viral. Beyond the fancy engagement stats, the real gold was in the replies. I felt supported, encouraged, and above all, given new perspectives, questions to ask, and possible answers ahead.

Now this is why I’m on Twitter. This kind of support and peer learning on this depth and breadth is not found anywhere else in my life or work. It’s like a mastermind group with thousands of peers and experts.

Summing up to do justice to the great points there:

Affirmations

• “It took me 10 years before finding the right thing. Picked the wrong market. Bet on the wrong horse. Worked on shitty products no one needed. Worked on things with no product / founder fit but didn’t realize. I think this is what most people must endure, unless lucky / outlier.” I don’t feel like I’m betting it right yet too with my products. The past years were definitely to endure those hard lessons, for sure.
• “Took us over three years to start making proper money too.” I suspect my chart is still in the no-to-low traction phase too, as James shared:

New questions to ask

• Why has it been this slow?
• What needs to change to accelerate things?
• What beliefs do you have that are holding you back from progressing?
• What do you need to reach that 5k MRR milestone faster? What needs to be done? Visualise yourself in 3-5 years. Then work backward.
• Where do you want to be and what do you think are the barriers to you reaching your goal?
• Think about the market you’re in
• Think about your way of marketing products
• Think about how to spend more time on revenue-generating activities

New point of views

• Somewhere in the back of my mind, the thought of “3 years is too slow” has some association with the successful outliers I follow on Twitter. Definitely a non-zero influence. Why should I compare my journey to others? I have to run my own race.
• Not harshly labelling myself and giving some emotional distance by saying something like “My products didn’t earn enough.” instead of “I didn’t earn enough.”
• Maybe I should see $6.2k profit not as an absolute measure of my progress but as a signal that I can do it and should keep going. I must.
• “If progress were linear, nobody would quit.” I’m still in the phase where there’s nothing huge happening even though there’s enough incremental progress to keep me motivated and going.
• “The “total” lens is a harsh one. Since building indie products is a compounding process, it much kinder to look at the trajectory of your revenue than at the total. I bet the graph is (ever so slightly) exponential. The best way to think of compounding for me is “gradually and then suddenly”. And the things that compound aren’t just code, users and marketing exposure, it’s also your skills and experience, which are even harder to account for.” Perhaps assuming progress in 3 years to be incremental and linear is unhelpful, because often nothing happens and then something happens.
• “I am calling it The Reverse Tuition Fee - think of it as being paid to learn how to be an indie builder.” Reverse tuition fee is a great way to put it. I do feel like a lot of why it felt slow for the past years were due to learning and unlearning, and only recently started to feel like I’m getting more of the hang of it.
• Eli lays out the journey in an insightful way here. I think I’m still somewhere in between #2 and #3:

Here are four stages of progress:

1. You’re doing nothing and just dreaming
2. You’re doing but not enough
3. You’re doing enough but the universe hasn’t caught on yet
4. The universe has caught on

What you’re supposed to do at each stage is pretty obvious:

1. Do something
2. Do more / different
3. Wait for universe to catch up
4. Celebrate

Possible answers

• “Launch 10x more things, try 10x more markets, etc. (my strategy, not the only strategy)” Despite the diversity in my portfolio, I feel I’m still not trying enough bets. There’s something to Pieter’s advice here that points to what that phrase I often hear: To get good ideas, you need to generate many, many ideas. I need to go for volume, to arrive at the good bets.
• Likely barriers for past years, and therefore what to remove or get better at:
  • Didn’t know how to do marketing/reach my customers when started
  • Unlearning unhelpful narratives/ideas about startups
  • Lots of false starts and time wasted in the past years
  • Market for my products are niche/narrow
  • Not enough time because got a kid, but kid is also my motivation to go indie
  • Spend more time on revenue-generating activities and less time on non revenue-generating activities, like spending too much time on Twitter
• “Sometimes half the battle is stopping this belief that you have to earn your way up to your goal. You gotta ask for your goal right away. find someone who will pay $5k/mo for something you can build, and then go build it. Rather than earning your way up, you get immediate feedback on what people will or won’t pay for, and just having to get 1-2 customers is 1000x easier than tens or hundreds of customers. And then if you want to double your revenue, you just add one more customer.” B2B is definitely something worth considering. But the main point is in breaking down the belief of small, incremental steps. It can be big steps because my target revenue is a finite, achieveable number!
• “It’s also about solving problems that are just big enough to go with your goal.” My products’ had been pretty niche. Perhaps the market’s pretty small, and so the revenue might have a natural cap. I do feel I need to continue building new ones to find that problem big enough for my goal.