Q&A

66 microstartup founders making collectively $574k per month share 253 learnings about how to build a profitable internet startup as a solo developer. Latest answer 1 year ago.

How did you come up with the microstartup idea?

I was working in e-commerce company and wondered why content from our Instagram account not used on website.

I previously worked at Netflix, Meta & startups as a lead & founding designer, so design was an obvious choice for me.

I struggle with organizing and reading tweets I bookmarked a lot. There were lots of gems regarding development tips, business tweets, and lessons from indie hackers. But they were almost buried and I can't connect to my daily learnings. When I tr...

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How did you find your first customers?

Through blogging and SEO primarily. I had a coding blog that I had started about a year before I published the first course on Boot.dev. I simply added some CTAs to the blog and started to get a small trickle of traffic.

Healthchecks initially had no paid plans. The free users came from social media mentions, word of mouth. I posted on Twitter, Reddit, HN. I started a development blog on Medium. Botched a Product Hunt launch. Answered some StackOverflow and Quora que...

We found our first customers within our beta testers, which were friends and people from Twitter.

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How are you finding your customers today?

Did you lauch free and pro version on the same time?

Unfortunately I haven't had time to focus on marketing since the launch, but I'm planning on picking it back up soon.

I mainly record my own videos and keep collecting traffic off the old videos posted by others. I also passively explore other growth vectors (like Microfounder!)

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What's your advice for other microfounders who want to get started?

1. Do something nobody else is doing. don't try to do something that has an obvious direct competitor. it can be a remix of other things though—ultimately all creative works are remixes or mashups. 2. Charge all your users, always and from the begin...

Plan less and execute more. I see a lot of people who do a lot of planning but never get their idea into production.

Don't over-think or over-engineer things. Ship the MVP asap and build in the tech stack you know best 🚀

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