Disclosure: I work on Opennomos.
Three months ago, I set out to build two products simultaneously: a photo cleaner app and an MVP development framework. I'd read all the indie dev success stories and figured shipping fast was just about writing code faster. I was wrong.
Here's what actually mattered.
1. The Real Bottleneck Isn't Coding — It's Decision Fatigue
On any given day building a product, you make hundreds of micro-decisions:
- Should this button be blue or green?
- Do I need pagination or infinite scroll?
- Should I fix this edge case now or ship first?
Each decision burns mental energy. By 2 PM, I couldn't make good choices anymore. The solution wasn't "be more decisive" — it was eliminating decisions entirely.
I started using a simple rule: if a decision doesn't affect whether the core feature works, flip a coin and move on. Ship the ugly version. You can fix it when users complain (and they will).
2. Your First 10 Users Don't Care About Polish
I spent two weeks perfecting the onboarding flow for my photo cleaner. Beautiful animations, contextual tooltips, the works. When I finally launched and watched real users interact with it, they skipped past every single tutorial and just started tapping buttons randomly.
The takeaway: your first users are explorers, not readers. They learn by doing. A polished onboarding flow matters when you have 10,000 users, not 10. Ship the bare minimum and watch where they get stuck — that's your real roadmap.
3. Audience > Product (Every Single Time)
This was the hardest lesson. I built a solid photo cleaner and showed it to other developers on Twitter. Feedback was lukewarm — "nice UI," "clean code," generic praise. Then I showed the exact same product to people who regularly take 500+ photos at events. The reaction was completely different: "Wait, this solves my actual problem."
Same product, different audience, 10x the enthusiasm. Before you build anything, ask: Who specifically has this problem right now, and how do I reach them?
What I'd Do Differently
Looking back at 3 months and 2 products, here's my revised playbook:
Week 1: Talk to 5 potential users before writing a single line of code
Week 2-3: Build the absolute minimum that solves exactly one problem
Week 4: Ship it to the 5 users from week 1, get brutal feedback
Month 2-3: Iterate based on what actual users say, not what you imagine
The indie dev path isn't about building faster — it's about learning faster. Every day you spend building features nobody asked for is a day you're not learning what they actually need.
What's the hardest lesson you've learned shipping a product? I'd love to hear it in the comments.