The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. A few days ago over dinner, I found myself deep in conversation about the technological singularity. And while that happy moment of humanity becoming this machine augmented brain collective, I always think about the Borg of Star Trek, but slightly better. And while that might still be years or decades away, there's something much more immediate that keeps me up at night at this point.

Because I think about it all the time. And it's the unprecedented acceleration of technological advancement and what it means for bootstrappers, for indie hackers like us. Think about it. Our parents generation, they witnessed the evolution from cassette tapes to DVDs and that took several decades. Right?

People were overlapping technologies and it slowly developed, but those born more recently, they have experienced this explosion of AI technology and interconnected Internet services, social media platforms and all of that in a fraction of time. Over maybe couple months, couple years, these kind of technologies come and go so quickly now. So each generation adapts to their normal speed of progress and that speed keeps increasing I believe exponentially. At least it feels like that to me. And it's not surprising that people are dropping out of this staying with the trend mode much earlier in life than ever before.

I remember my grandparents, they stuck around with technology for a while. They adapted it into the late 50s while my parents generation, they kind of dropped out in their 40s And I feel a lot of my peers that are now in their late thirties as well. They've already stopped going with the flow because stuff has just gotten so complicated. And I think the AI revolution particularly exemplifies this acceleration. Artificial intelligent research has been going on since the sixties.

Like, it's always been around. It's been a part of math. It's been a part of physics long before computing happened as we know it today. But the rapid advancement and the adoption that we're seeing now with LLMs and chatgpt and these tools around this, it's mind boggling. The pace at which these improvements are made and the models are getting better and the astronomical valuations of companies in the space.

All of this tells a very clear story. We are in pretty uncharted territory. Nothing like this has happened like this before. So as indie hackers and software founders, we typically are the people to ride the first wave of these technologies, right? We're the ones that take this stuff and we offer it to people.

We spot untapped market needs and we build innovative solutions using tech that nobody else is yet using. But here's the challenge that is becoming very apparent to me right now. Human cognitive capacity has its limits. No matter how much we would like to believe we only use 10% of our brainpower, there's still an upper bound to how much we can process and create and execute in any given time frame. And I've seen this play out in real time.

Take Peter Level's experience with these photo realistic AI tools that he's been building for the last couple years. Before he could even establish a foothold, a larger player swooped in and took inspiration from his technology built something similar and generated millions by just integrating it into their existing app ecosystem with millions of users. I think that happened like roughly a year ago at this point. And the democratization of technology through these AI assisted coding tools and agentic systems that we're now using. Well that means that even traditionally slower incumbents like bigger software companies with 100 of developers that have to go to sprint meetings and all of that they still can now implement new features much faster than they used to.

It used to take them years to get around to build something like this. Now it's down to months often even weeks. So what is the path forward for indie hackers until we reach this hypothetical singularity where we're all interconnected and, you know, Star Trek Borg and all of that and we live in a virtual world and absolute equality and whatever dream you might have. We need to deal with this, right? So let's think about the strategies here.

I think there are 2 viable strategies that we can employ right now as indie founders. The first one is to leverage collective power and that means taking the indie a bit different. It's not about being an individual and doing everything yourself, but embracing more a spirit than a number. Instead of going solo, I think we should think about building smaller teams of technology curious individuals to share our vision. So, we are just scaling our brainpower horizontally in a team.

It's about combining forces to push that boulder up the hill until it gains enough momentum to roll down on its own the other side. And I've found that when I'm working with people who are equally passionate about the problem space, I move much faster than any individual could alone. Like I'm already helped by AI tools and all of that. That's great as well. But having people who use their genius, their ingenuity to build something with me, build a team.

That's pretty much it's leverage collective power. And that's not just a team of direct peers in your business. It's also a team of peers in their own businesses. It's mastermind groups, it's building in public, it's being part of communities. I think that is still going to be something where inspiration strikes from the outside and you can leverage it because there is alignment.

And it's not the kind of AI alignment that OpenAI and Anthropic talk about, a different alignment, it's an alignment of intent. And I think collective power is exactly that. It's when people walk in the same direction and help each other go further. So the second strategy in addition to this is that we need to think about niching down even more than we already have to as indie founders. We need to get even more specific with our target markets.

The days of these random experiments to figure out our audience that is becoming a luxury that we cannot afford anymore. We need to reduce complexity and the best way to do this is through precise niching. Like, going even more niche, so we can apply our brain power and the available technologies much more effectively. And the key here is to think about a niche as something that is both meaningfully and initially invisible enough to our competitors to avoid immediate attention. Because if larger players have an easier time building the things that we are building into their existing delivery systems and distribution schemes then the risk is much higher for us as indie hackers, right?

If we build something that I don't know a company like Adobe already has on their radar then it's really just some effort from their end that can put a lot of pressure on us. So we need to find as much smaller circle of customers that we can delight and that when we put effort into making the product and the features delightful to them would not make as much of an impact for a bigger incumbent that that is the place we need to go. I know this is a bit cryptic because it's hard to kind of grasp what exactly this looks like. But think about the perfect customer that you have and then take even just 20% of that. Make it even more specific.

Your perfect customer maybe somebody who works in customer service and they have a team of maybe 20 to 50 people. And you know that might be your customer persona. Well now your extreme niche might be somebody who's working in customer service for a financial company. And it's a team of 20 to 30 people. Much more specific and much more similar in terms of other customers that you might serve.

So everybody has the exact same problems. Any effort you put into this is going to be even more helpful because if you build something for somebody with 20 people it might be as required for somebody with 50 people on their team, right? But if it's 20 to 25 all of a sudden everything you build has similar impacts for all your customers. And that makes you more powerful, makes you more effective and it makes it harder for an incumbent that has to serve a much bigger space to build the exact same things just as well. The future of Moats, that's really what this is about in entrepreneurship will increasingly rely on two factors here.

And this kind of where collective power and nichendown comes from, distribution and adaptability. And there's an interesting tension here as well because we need to protect our technical innovations from being easily replicated. Because there's still immense value in community building and selective transparency, like sharing what you're doing, but there's also a lot of value in having a thing that somebody else cannot easily copy. And that's kind of the problem with building public already has shown itself over the last couple of years. It has always been an issue just how much do you share so that people are inspired, but don't have a blueprint to do the thing by themselves.

And I think we can look into the community at how people are doing it right now. Let's look at Josh Pickford right now, what he's doing with the Maybe company or what the people, Ryan Kulp, Brian Serakowski are doing with terminal and how they're handling their plugin system. It's very open kind of sharing and custom plugins built by people who are using the product and sharing it with each other. I think that is important to still do like involving actual humans from these early stages and building these genuine relationships throughout the process of creation of the product. And they're creating a different kind of mode with that.

Not a technological mode, but a connection mode. People feel genuinely more connected to the journey and they are less likely to jump ship for a competitor because they are invested in it. But the trick moving forward will be to find the right balance between keeping things on the wraps and sharing what you're doing. It's safeguarding the critical technical details while fostering genuine community engagement. And I think that's really hard because the most important things, the most maybe most interesting things in your business that would be the most interesting to share are also the things that you kinda have to keep on the wraps a little bit.

It's it's really tough in a world where this technological development and adoption happen at this ever increasing pace. Your Your biggest challenge won't just be building something valuable anymore because that's still always there. It will be protecting the unique mental acrobatics and the innovations that you've baked into your product that you can share while building a loyal community around it with the things you can. It's a delicate dance and for those who can master it I think there's still a lot of opportunity in the indie hackerspace, but we just need to be smarter about how we position ourselves in this accelerating world. And this might sound almost defeatist a little bit because it takes some value out of indie hacking.

Maybe that's just adopting to a changing technological landscape, but just make sure you are embedded in this community. That's the only thing that really matters because if you are, then you will see trends just a little bit earlier. You will be informed of developments or potential collaborations, potential partnerships just a little bit earlier. And that's the edge that you will keep by being part of this community. So, yeah, India hacking bootstrapping, it's not dead yet, but it's getting harder.

And it always is. Competition is always ramping up, technological change is always speeding up. That's just what we have to deal with. Embrace it, enjoy it and you'll figure out a way. And that's it for today.

Thank you for listening to the Bootstrap founder. You can find me on Twitter at Avid Kal. If you wanna support me in this show, please share podscan.fm with your professional peers and those who you think will benefit from tracking mentions of their brands and businesses and names on podcasts out there. PodScan is a near real time podcast database and has a stellar API, at least my customers tell me that. So please share the word with those who need to stay on top of the podcasting ecosystem.

Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.