336: The 7 Deadly Sins of Indie Hacking
Download MP3It's funny, you need to have this. You need to be more confident than most other people because you need that to start building something that they would never start building. Hey, I'm Arvid and you're listening to the Bootstrap founder. In case you missed it over the last 335 episodes, I'm a huge nerd. And I was listening to a miniature painting podcast recently where 2 of my favorite war gaming creators talked about the 7 deadly hobby sins.
Arvid:And it inspired me to think of the manifestations of these kind of challenges in the indie hacking world. Challenges that I occasionally, and this means very reliably, run into myself. So let's dive into the most common pitfalls of the software entrepreneur, how these things creep up to us and what we can do to avoid them. And in case you need a refresher on your deadly sins, they are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, sloth, and wrath. Biblical in origin but, you know, still very present and funny enough, it was extremely easy to find a representation of each of these in the day to day interactions of myself and the many indie hackers that I virtually surround myself with.
Arvid:And when I first thought about how pride appears in the lives and behaviors of indie hackers, I thought about this common misconception of founders thinking that they know what's best for their customers as the best example. And I think it's true it often comes from a very prideful and arrogant place, one of feeling like you know better. But then I noticed that this exists in many other fields too. Indie hackers regularly think they know what a better version of an existing product should look like or that they could build it much faster and cheaper and that it would be more successful if only they attempted to do it. And it boils down to a belief that as a founder, particularly when you're technically skilled, we just know better.
Arvid:And it's overblown confidence in our own ideas and abilities. And it's funny you need to have this, you need to be more confident than most other people because you need that to start building something that they would never start building. But also not to be overconfident for your self perception to dip into this pride and arrogance. It's a it's a tight rope. It's hard to walk that balance.
Arvid:The symptoms of overconfidence though, they're always very clear in retrospect. When you don't research your market and don't look for validation signals because you know that it will work, You have this feeling. Right? That's when your pride very likely will be your downfall. And I believe that a lot of serial entrepreneurs fall prey to this one in particular.
Arvid:We had a few bad ideas in the beginning and then a good one, the one that worked, and now we think that everything we do is pure gold. We can't do anything wrong. But fortunately, reality isn't interested in our self deception and we quickly get punched in the face with the understanding that every new idea is effectively a gamble and our belief that it would be universally appealing was just hope. And I've been through this several times over the last few years with all different kinds of projects. Most hilariously, when I thought it would be a good idea to launch an NFT collection.
Arvid:That was great. Was that a good idea? I was top pride at that point, and I I'm glad the cricket sounds that I received for that were immediate and very loud. It was really, really bad. And in retrospect, I probably should have never done it, but I I liked that I did because it showed me that there are still barriers, you know, that I probably shouldn't cross.
Arvid:And the way out of this is dealing with it with humility, both dealing with events as they happen and just approaching things in your entrepreneurial journey. And humility is something that I strive for and struggle with, particularly as I build in public. Right? I have to balance this motivational above average confidence level with the understanding that we're all just figuring everything out as we go. And it feels like a split brain situation.
Arvid:Right? I try to encourage people and maybe sometimes even teach them stuff and while on the other hand I'm just like randomly figuring things out. Like it it is really really hard to align these, but the reality is the world is complicated and some things work and some don't. And I have found joy in admitting that things don't work sometimes cause it makes it easier to escape this trap of believing in my own hype way too much. And hype in general is a problem too.
Arvid:I am getting distracted by shiny new technologies on a daily basis. Just yesterday, James Potter, the founder behind Refonic and rate this podcast dot com, the tool that I use for this podcast too, he posted about a new server that he set up. And he shared a screenshot of the CPU and the RAM and all that of this beast of a computer was very interesting and instead of focusing on my own business I just had to find out which tool James was using to show these stats And within minutes, I was reading up on how to compile b top on a Mac. And then I paused. I was like, what purpose other than novelty would that serve?
Arvid:Isn't htop enough for me? I wasn't just curious about it. I let my desire to use the coolest tools manipulate my attention to the things that really should have mattered and that is lusting for tech. I feel this a lot and I bet you do too. There's just so much stuff out there that's cool and that you wanna share that you wanna see.
Arvid:This feeling of posting a picture of your new MacBook Pro M6 or whatever or the compulsion to rewrite your front end in Svelte when the React app or the Angular JS 1 app you've been tinkering on for years is still perfectly fine. It's over engineering, but of a devious kind. When we lust for tech we intentionally ignore the potential technical debt that any major change with this tech undoubtedly will occur. Nobody ever rebuild their app from scratch without running into 50 unexpected and equally catastrophic problems along the way. Instead of this boring and good enough, we long for exciting and maybe slightly better.
Arvid:Maybe. Potentially slightly better. And like lust in the corporeal world, digital lust destroys the context it appears in. We over complicate our products. We repel most of the mainstream customers that we have because no one wants to buy from someone who chases trends all day long.
Arvid:We destroy relationships and it ultimately blocks us from seeing things through. It's really hard to finish something when you're constantly distracted and chasing these new things. My recommendation, make sure that the core of your software product, the whole business, is built on boring and reliable technologies. And I don't mean, like, old and rusty stuff, I mean, tech that you can trust to work at scale and in a pinch. Right?
Arvid:Most recently, I've been working a lot with Laravel and PHP, and there are still a lot of people out there who believe PHP to be the same thing that it was back in 2,006 when it was PHP 4, it was really bad. But now that it's PHP 8, it is less bad, it's really nice. It's really good to work with because the ecosystem has improved. And I think JavaScript had a similar development over time too. Right?
Arvid:And I don't wanna go deep into like the whole TypeScript, JavaScript, script and earlier CoffeeScript and all that debate or which bundler you should use and all that, that doesn't really matter. Pick a thing that is supported, that works with the detect options that you have, like what comes with Ruby on Rails, what comes with Laravel, look into those things, look at how things are integrated, look for communities that are out there that are big and supportive and positive around that technology and not just chasing hype. You see this a lot in JavaScript where there is a lot of development, a lot of things that change over time, and people just chase the newest things, that creates a kind of toxicity in a community that makes it hard to then leverage the community to solve your problems when you actually implement that in your code base, that kind of stuff. So if you want to indulge in these things, that's fine. Do it, but build a small project for fun.
Arvid:Don't risk the long term integrity of your business for this quick adrenaline rush that you feel when you mastered yet another tool. And this was something that came up when I listened to my miniature podcast because many painters often chase this feeling of making progress whether it's real or not. When we buy that slightly better brush or this new set of paints, we feel like we're getting better because there's something of higher quality. You should see my paint collection. I have over 400 different bottles of acrylic paints for my airbrush, for glazing, for inking, for dry brushing and all of these many things that I could nerd out over for hours.
Arvid:If you ever wanna talk to me about it let me know, but do they make me a better painter? No. I still have to spend time on actually putting paint to miniature. Put on handling the brush and learning how paint flows on a model. And that's time in the weeds and that is a measure of progress.
Arvid:Not how many paints I have. And this often means now bringing it back to coding much more than coding up yet another cool feature or buying another slightly different shade of blue paint, Right? There's something else. And I I love this phrase feature bloat because it so visually describes gluttonous behavior. We stuff our apps with all these cool features that nobody uses or only a few people use, and we make things slow and convoluted.
Arvid:We bloat them up. We feel like we made big strides forward because we spent days on this feature when all we did was really making things bigger but not better. Our feature gluttony leads to our users being overwhelmed most of the time. I wouldn't be surprised that in a significant part of indie hacker churn being directly related to us stuffing our apps with things out of our unending hunger for snacking small feelings of making progress. And how do we get out of this?
Arvid:Well talking to our customers of course and I try to force myself into this. I force myself into a customer information diet For anything that I wanna build, I have to talk to a prospect or a customer I think might like or need that thing. Ideally, it's something that a customer wanted or told me about. It gets kinda complicated and you should really read the mom test, this book, or deploy empathy, the other wonderful book in the space to understand how to talk to people. But I talked to a customer, I presented to them in the form of a conversation around the job to be done that I believe it would solve.
Arvid:So I don't really show them the feature and then we say, hey, I'm building this really cool graph for whatever. I'm trying to figure out, well, what is this gonna help them with? And then I asked them about, can you tell me more about this particular thing that you need to accomplish? And most of the time, what they need is actually not what I had in mind. And that is very humbling and is extremely helpful because it keeps me from just jumping at it.
Arvid:Right? I can do this in a call, which I prefer because you get more information like that, or you can also do it in the DM, just please just do it. And if you do learn that it's something that people actually might like you can jump right in and gobble it all up, you just don't pre feast, make sure it's something digestible and healthy for your business. And I mean your business. Just because you've seen something cool in a competitor's product doesn't mean that your app needs that too.
Arvid:It's the unique relationship between your business and its users, its customers that informs what they need, and obsessing over competitor features here isn't healthy. It often comes with a sizable serving of envy as in I wish I would have thought of that or I wish we would have this that kind of stuff. And then we feel like we should sneakily be inspired by that particular feature and implement it. And when we set out to actually build it, we then noticed that it's just the tip of the iceberg. The person we admire for that feature, maybe the person we're envious about, they didn't just come up with a clever feature, they suffered years of experience to be able to come up with it and think about it and contextualize it.
Arvid:And I don't think our envy extends that far. We want the good stuff now without having to put in the work. And that's hard particularly in social media because what we see is always just a tip of the iceberg. Right? We see the end result, we don't see the path there.
Arvid:It's kinda hard to not envy the end result when there's no path visible. You think, oh, they just came up with this, but obviously there's way more in the background that we often don't really see. We want the public recognition for the final thing, for being smart, for being capable and knowledgeable, but we don't wanna go through the many years of struggle to get there. And when that green eyed monster sits behind the keyboard it just starts trolling people on Twitter, so don't let it. Instead, focus on your unique value proposition here both for the business, for your product and for yourself.
Arvid:Because both are brands that will take time to develop, and your capacity and your capabilities will grow as you move towards your own unique style and voice with your own unique ideas as well. And you'll get there. And being original will make this journey much more interesting for you, obviously, because it's much more exciting and for everybody who's supposed to follow you on this journey. Right? In the long run, just being original and being present in your own journey will make these things fall into place.
Arvid:And, unfortunately, a lot of founders are incredibly opportunistic and short term thinkers to their own detriment. Again, like with confidence, a certain level of opportunity spotting is required to be a good founder. I mean, that's just what entrepreneurship is. You wanna make money. It's part of it.
Arvid:So, of course, you need to find the opportunities for that. But if we over commit to making money, it becomes a battle against our customers. How much can we squeeze out of them before they run away? And it should be blindingly obvious that this kind of behavior destroys any kind of reputation that a founder might have in their community with their peers with their customers. Yet every day, I see somebody trying to pull another quick one on their audience or their prospective buyers just trying to, you know, cheat people out of their money.
Arvid:Greed is such a dangerous mindset. It makes us play these finite games, cheesy giveaways, follow for follow, unwanted cold DM outreach, that kind of stuff, while we should be focusing on the infinite game of becoming a better entrepreneur every day. Let me say this straight, a good entrepreneur knows how to make money, clearly, but a greedy one weighs every decision on its money making potential. That's the difference. Can there be a good and a greedy entrepreneur at the same time?
Arvid:Probably, but even if you look at the richest of the folks that we admire and quote on a daily basis, they have understood that money is a consequence of good decisions, not a good decision in itself. And what's that old and often partially misquoted saying, the love of money is the root of all evil? Well, yeah, as a founder, I would rather build a reputation as a trustworthy contributor and maybe pillar of a community than as somebody who's scraping the bottom of the well for a few coins. Yet funny enough, the flip side of this, the flip side of chasing only money is completely ignoring the need for money and running a business and that is also a problem. So I have this t shirt that has a Harry Potter related quote on it.
Arvid:It says, my Patronus is a sloth. And if I need to explain this to you, you'll probably never find it funny so I won't, but I do wanna talk about suffering entrepreneurial failure by omission, by not spending time on things that matter. And greedy founders spend too much time trying to make money, right? We already kinda clarified that. And slothful founders lose themselves in product work which can be very high intensity and have very little to do with being lazy, and still it slowly kills the business effort by suffocating the potential to do marketing and sales.
Arvid:Yes, I said it mostly for myself, but also for you. If we don't do sales and marketing we're lazy and no amount of 10 x ninja dev work will ever balance that out. Time boxing is my approach here. It's the approach that I use for overcoming my hesitation with doing things that I don't feel perfectly comfortable doing when a lot of that is just talking to human beings. It's much easier to talk to a machine.
Arvid:But if there's a calendar entry with the start and an end time, I know that I will get things done without losing track of time. And while we're at it, building in silence is a poor way to reward yourself for the amazing things that you're doing and you're working on. And I get it, I'm a developer too, we do our best work in our computer dungeon, but it's only part of the work. If you wanna do coding stuff full time get a job as a developer, but if you wanna be an indie hacker you have to share what you're doing. Because they won't come just because you're building.
Arvid:They might come when you start talking about it and they will come when they trust you to have built something exciting and useful. Trust in this digital world is being built in wide open spaces. It's being built in public. And enrollment from other people comes from them feeling involved and invested in somebody else's journey, and that journey has to be visible. So put yourself out there and share yours.
Arvid:It is a really really solid way to branch out and to reach people. And maybe you reach the wrong people, one day a hater might come along. They will tell you that your product isn't original. Hey, they might even tell you to do more marketing and sales maybe on a podcast that you listen to. You hate it.
Arvid:You hate every part of it. And this unsolicited feedback often strikes hard at us because when we share our work in public, we're vulnerable. We're exposing ourselves to criticism when we could have just hidden in a dungeon and built stuff away from all the dangerous world with all these other people around us. We're exposing ourselves to criticism when we could have just hidden in our dungeon and build stuff away from the dangerous world that is other people. And yet, the wrath that we feel when someone just doesn't get what we're on about, that won't serve us.
Arvid:Just like chasing short term monetary gains, getting revenge for a Twitter post is not serving you. In the long run, it might feel good for a second or 2 to show people what you think of them, these armchair founders dragging other people's projects through the mud. I've seen my fair share of them, but that's my perception. Maybe that's not what they actually do. Maybe it's what we think they do, right?
Arvid:When you look through a visor, every other person is an enemy knight yet they often are just concerned. There's just real people with their real issues and some real concern probably for themselves, very likely for their view of the world that you might be kinda shaking up a little bit, and sometimes even concern for you. And concern drives behavior. And instead of letting their concern enrage you and drive your behavior, use it to engage them kindly and then facilitate changing their behavior. Negative feedback is still just feedback, and it's probably the best kind of feedback you can get because criticism is a consequence of friction, and friction exists whether it's communicated or not.
Arvid:So instead of bashing back when somebody talks to you, consider that where there's one loud person, a few dozens are probably silent, yet they think and feel just the same. Detach yourself from your product and your whole business. You're the wrangler not the wrangled. Right? When you meet criticism find the underlying source of friction All opportunities to make better and improve.
Arvid:All opportunities to make better and improve, which is what the infinite game of entrepreneurship is all about. So with all these deadly sins, what should we focus on? What keeps us aligned with who we want to be and what we want to create to serve those we chose to empower? Well, the virtues of successful in the hacking are humility, focusing on value over hype, and employing pragmatism and originality, keeping things simple really, and developing receptiveness towards the thoughts of others, criticism, I guess, and the tasks you might not yet be very good at. And more than anything, I'm really just talking to myself here.
Arvid:I could improve in every single department, and I appreciate being held accountable by you, my fellow indie hacker and founder. It's a community effort for us to kinda step away from these very easy to fall into pitfalls. Right? So it's not easy to avoid them. It's easy to fall into them.
Arvid:But at the very least, it's definitely worth reflecting on just how much they are influencing our path towards financial independence because that's really what entrepreneurship is all about. And that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening to the show. You can find me on Twitter, avitkahlaviadkhl. You'll find my books and my Twitter cross tattoo.
Arvid:And if you wanna support me in this show, please tell everyone you know about podscan.fm and leave a rating and a review by going to ratethispodcast.com/founder. Makes a massive difference if you show up there because then the podcast will show up in other people's feeds and any of this will help the show and me. So thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.
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