So since May I’ve been bootstrapping an AI calorie tracking app with a friend I met on Reddit. Overall it’s been going really well tbh. We’ve built something really cool! The app is actually interesting, educational, fun to use and most importantly useful. The marketing efforts have also been great. We have over 100k downloads in ~5 months from launch and are building out systems to scale it even further (mainly paying influencers longer term to reduce cost per video and hiring organic content creators).
Relentlessly iterate on product. Unless it’s a totally new product that is untested then there is no concept of product market fit. The product should always be improving, always should be nicer, cleaner, more delightful, more fun, more engaging to use. The product quality should reflect the number i.e. churn rate, conversions, etc. Surprisingly, I’ve never run into a scenario where product quality has gone up and numbers have gotten worse.
Marketing is purely a numbers game. You just have to sit there and reach out to 100s of influencers a day and find ones that fit your niche, will quote a reasonable price and will have a positive ROI. Same thing with organic content, just have to pump out tons of videos to find the right format, hooks, etc. Commenting on videos, building a community all just numbers game, once you have a product to move.
Build automated systems! If you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again without much thought or variation, automate it! Hire freelancers, build scripts, do anything but do that repetitive thing.
Think backwards. Think about what you want the business to look like in 1-5-10 yrs time and then take the necessary actions to get there.
Fit matters. Spend more time thinking about whether this idea fits you, your cofounder, your life situation, your moral compass and whether you are really passionate about it. The set of ideas that can fit you is actually really small. My experience with Pandish is although I use the app from time to time, I don’t track calories myself and therefore I’m not as close to the product as I would want to be. In future businesses, I’d want to use the product everyday (if possible) or at least have a huge passion about the underlying technologies of the product or the people that it helps. Ultimately, it’s about purpose. What is it that drives you? Do you actually want to help people or do you just want money and status? Think very carefully about this before starting. Right now, I’m not too personally passionate about Pandish so we’re actually looking for an exit.
It’s really hard to stay consistent, when you are not absolutely obsessed with what you do. There were periods where I couldn’t drag myself to send an email or write some small code changes.
It’s more fun with people! Humans are deeply social creatures and I think the indiehacking, one person making $3m ARR cult can be really dangerous. I would much rather make a $3m ARR split between 3 founders than $3m ARR with just me. It’s just more fun imo.