The practice of independent development with $40,000

Introduction

When I was chatting with everyone in the community, and then I talked about how the product finally made money, I said, how about I write a booklet or teach a class about how ordinary people like us can make money by making products, and do something really successful and interesting.

After I had this idea, I started thinking about a core question: What is the production-to-production ratio of writing this kind of thing?

The conclusion is: In fact, it has no production ratio at all. 99% of ordinary people are not suitable for entrepreneurship or independent development. Even if I write this thing, few people can succeed based on my experience and experience. What I can write is just basic skills.

This conclusion is based on some examples around me. I have many friends who have successfully started businesses, but they have generally experienced N number of entrepreneurial failures. This kind of experience, pressure and growth brought about by pain cannot be described in plain words.

If the difficulty of going to work is 10, then the difficulty of starting a business may be 80. People with normal mind will still feel that working is great after trying to start a business.

But we always want to try, right? Romance for men is adventure! So the topic of this article is: getting started.

So how can you start independent development without money and background?

* You may not be able to figure out what business is and how to develop independently, so just write on gadgets, scaffolding, templates, anything you can think of, and then you will be scolded for adding more useless things. Then you were scolded and scolded, and you discovered what some people's demands were, and you started to try to serve these people's demands, and found out why these people were forcing so many things, I must develop a universal product or something like that (you shouted).

* You may be smart and want me to learn how others do it. Then you spend money to join planets and WeChat groups, and get to know each of the big guys and your forerunners. Then you find that it is useless and you successfully become a part of other people's business models. Business models can be copied, but success cannot.

* Your goal is very clear. I want to do business from the beginning, and I want to make money. jojo, I’m no longer a human being! I don’t want the bottom line of human morality. I receive crazy traffic from black and red people, hyping up the antagonism between men and women (for example) and traffic incidents. The last look at the results shows that 1,000 people are following you and 800 people are calling you a clown. However, your performance has not changed and you have been scolded as much as you have been scolded.

The answer is to start independent development and focus on getting started. The success rate of independent development without money and background may be close to zero. But real developers will press "Restart" on every failed node. What will happen if they try? .

So let’s start with some more specific personal opinions.

1. Cognitive adjustment: from part-time thinking to entrepreneurial thinking

The most important change before starting to develop independently is the adjustment of your mindset. There is an essential difference between part-time thinking and entrepreneurial thinking.

The thinking of part-time work is linear: invest time and energy and get stable returns. You complete tasks step by step, follow established processes, and expect a steady paycheck. This mindset works well in a corporate environment, but is deadly in indie development.

Entrepreneurial thinking is non-linear: you need to accept uncertainty, understand the effect of compound interest, and understand that today’s efforts may pay off months or even years later. You are no longer an executor, but a decision-maker, and you need to be fully responsible for the direction of the product, market selection, and resource allocation.

2. Find the entry point: small but refined product strategy

The first mistake many developers make is trying to build a "world-changing" product. We all have big visions, but the reality is that indies with limited resources need to start small.

How to discover real pain points instead of false needs? My rule of thumb: Look for areas where people are already paying for it, but have a poor experience. This means the market has been validated and people are willing to pay for the solution, you just have to offer better options.

Niche markets are the best option for independent developers: serving the specific needs of a specific group of people. Instead of trying to please everyone, focus on a niche but passionate group of users. Remember, 1,000 true fans are more valuable than 100,000 passers-by.

For newbies, utility tools are often more successful than platform-based products. Platform products face a "chicken and egg" problem, requiring a large number of users to create value, while utility tools only need to solve a specific problem to provide immediate value.

3. Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Before investing a lot of time in developing a complete product, verify that there is actually a market for your idea. My approach is: verify the core idea with the least amount of code.

Sometimes, MVP doesn’t even require writing code. Just use a simple form and manual processing backend to test the requirements of a service, and only start formal development after receiving enough positive feedback.

Iterating quickly is key: set a cadence of one release per week. This doesn’t mean major updates every week, but rather a habit of continuous improvement. Small improvements add up to make a huge difference.

User feedback is the fuel for product evolution. Create simple feedback channels, such as embedded feedback forms, community discussions, or direct user interviews. But remember, listen to your users’ problems, not necessarily their proposed solutions.

When to hold on and when to pivot is a difficult decision. My framework is: if the core assumption turns out to be wrong (e.g. no one wants to pay for it), then pivot; if it's just the execution details that are problematic, then hold on and adjust.

4. Technology choice: pragmatic

As developers, we are often attracted to the latest and coolest technology. But in independent development, technology choices should be pragmatic rather than showy.

Choose the technology stack you are most familiar with so you can focus on solving business problems instead of learning new tools. This is really critical. Our technology will really use new technology for the sake of using new technology. I have suffered too much for this.

Balancing development speed with technical debt is an art. In the early days, speed is often more important than perfect architecture.

Regarding infrastructure, use ready-made SaaS services as much as possible instead of building your own. Calculate the cost of your time carefully: Spending a day configuring a server may seem cheap, but if the value of your time is $100 per hour, then the day actually costs $800, and a hosting service may only cost $100 per month.

The choice between open source tools and paid services follows the same logic: if a paid service significantly saves you time, it's usually worth the investment. Remember, your scarcest resources are time and attention, not hundreds of dollars.

Let me give you a recent example, such as tracking. Because the traffic of the current product is relatively large, the free tracking now has to be charged, which is about 3000$ a month. I thought about it and it would take about half a day to replace an open source self-hosted tracking system (I would lose some data analysis functions and the beauty of the dashboard), and it would take about 2 days to solve possible problems (such as inaccurate tracking). Then I think I should replace it with self-hosted and self-deployed.

5. Marketing and customer acquisition: starting with zero budget

We developers often underestimate the importance of marketing, thinking that good products will be discovered naturally, and I can just post a post. This is true. My friend is also starting a business in Beijing. He is working on Apple Vision Pro in the AI ​​scenario. I said you don’t need to find KOLs or seek influence. He told me that I post and rely on users to spread the word (the marketing part is very light).

I don’t know if this is right, but my personal opinion is that without marketing, no matter how good a product is, it may remain unknown.

1. Content marketing is a powerful tool for independent developers. Sharing your build process, technology choices, and business thinking not only attracts potential users, but also establishes your professional profile in the field.

2. Community marketing requires sincere participation rather than hard selling. Find where your target users gather (such as a specific forum, Reddit subreddit, or WeChat group), provide value first, build trust, and then mention your product appropriately.

3. Product self-diffusion mechanism is an accelerator of growth. Consider how you can embed sharing functionality into your product or create moments where users naturally want to share.

4. Word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective but also the most difficult form of marketing to obtain. It requires your product to truly solve user problems and provide a great experience.

6. Pricing and Business Model

Pricing can be one of the biggest struggles for indie developers. We tend to underestimate the value of our products, fearing that the price will be too high and will scare away users.

Free growth vs early fees is a key decision. My advice: If your goal is to build a sustainable business, start charging early. Free users often bring traffic rather than value, and their feedback can also mislead the product direction.

How to design a reasonable pricing strategy? Research the competition, understand the market price range, and then consider the unique value your product offers. Don’t be afraid to price higher – you can always lower your price, but it’s harder to raise it.

Subscription vs one-time payment vs value-added services have their own pros and cons. Subscriptions provide a stable revenue stream, but it is more difficult to acquire subscribers; one-time payments are high in upfront revenue, but may not be sustainable in the long term; value-added services are a compromise. My strategy is to use a combination of one-time payment for basic features and a subscription model for advanced features.

How to deal with user resistance to payment? Communicate your value proposition clearly, emphasizing the problem your product solves and the benefits it delivers, not just a list of features. Offering a risk-free trial period or money-back guarantee can also reduce users’ purchasing concerns.

7. Time management and mentality adjustment

Most indie developers start out as a side hustle, which means you have a limited amount of time to make progress.

How do you advance your side hustle while maintaining a full-time job? The method I adopt is: fixed 2-3 hours a day on weekdays, and longer concentration time on weekends. The key is to build a sustainable habit rather than occasional bursts of work

Energy management is another key factor. Physical and mental health directly impact creativity and execution. Maintaining regular exercise, getting enough sleep, and eating a healthy diet are not optional but a necessity.

Identifying your most productive hours is also a factor - some people think most clearly in the morning, while others have their creative juices flowing at night. Schedule your most important tasks during your productive hours.

8. Find your teammates and investors

In my opinion, independent development is just a phase. You may develop independently in the beginning, but people have limits. To do bigger things and make more profits, you must have teammates (or maybe I have passed that stage, and the income from independent development cannot support my desires).

It is very important to identify teammates. This is a big turning point. Simply put, it mainly depends on the ORI of this person.

ORI here refers to "Output-Return Investment", which is the ratio of output to input. When you consider a teammate, the central question is: Are you paying him a salary worthy of his production?

This seemingly simple question actually involves multiple levels:

1. Direct Output: How much actual work can this person accomplish? What is the quality of his code? How quickly and efficiently is the problem solved? Stronger developers may be able to complete 3-5 times the effective work of ordinary developers in the same time.

2. Indirect contribution: In addition to direct output, can this person improve the overall effectiveness of the team? Does he bring a unique perspective, experience or connections? Although some people do not have the highest direct output, their presence greatly improves the efficiency of other team members.

3. Growth Potential: What is this person’s learning curve? His current output may be average, but if he grows quickly, he may become the most valuable member of the team in six months.

4. Risk vs. Stability: Is this person reliable? Will he leave at a critical moment? Recruiting and training new players is expensive, and a teammate who is stable but slightly less productive is sometimes more valuable than a teammate who is highly productive but could leave at any time.

In the early stage of entrepreneurship, resources are extremely limited and every penny needs to be carefully calculated. Even if you have money to recruit people, you must ensure ORI. You need to ensure that each team member creates value that exceeds his or her cost. It’s not just a matter of technical skills, but also initiative, responsibility, problem-solving skills and cultural fit with the team.

How is a person's ORI assessed? The following points can be considered:

* Specific achievements and impact in past work

*Performance under pressure and uncertainty

* Ability to learn independently and solve problems

* Collaboration effects with other team members

Remember, in the early stages, you want "jack of all trades" rather than "specialists." Choose people who, while they may not be the top talent in one area, can contribute value in multiple areas and are willing to take on work beyond their capabilities. Ultimately, a team's success depends on each person's ability to create value that exceeds their cost.

8. My recent experience

Let me share my recent entrepreneurial experience, a practical example of going from 0 to achieving a monthly income of 40,000$+ (but this actually has nothing to do with independent development, I have already passed that stage):

Start on vacation

In the past time, due to some luck and opportunities, I have almost achieved financial freedom (originally I wanted to retire at 30, but it turned out that I could achieve it earlier), so I started vacationing and spending money. I played for three months, but I couldn't play anymore because I was too idle. Maybe I am just a cheap person, and I want to do things in my free time. The real opportunity came when my boss found me, gave me some cakes, and then chartered me a flight to Beijing and a hotel for half a month. I wanted to find out what he wanted to do and see if we could work together. If not, I would go back and charter a flight for me.

Because what he wants to do is AI ROLE PLAY, my first AI company is also called MyShell, which can be regarded as the same track, but the subdivision is AI VOICE WEB3 companionship, which I am not optimistic about. My intuition is that there are too many products of the same type, and the market competition is too exciting. I went there with the mentality of giving it a try and having a high probability of coming back (a strange explorer). I wanted to leave on the third day of my stay. I really felt that there was no chance of this happening.

The boss had dinner with me and kept chatting, about why I gave up my previous business?

I mentioned many reasons, such as: the vision was too big and I found that the team’s capabilities were not up to the mark and I was relatively lacking in growth... The main thing was to express that after I evaluated the pros and cons, I felt that this project would be difficult to succeed, so I gave up early.

He started to Pua me, which probably means: This may be a common problem among smart people. We always think that we can see the results in advance, and give up directly after weighing the pros and cons, but do we really see the results? Obviously yes, but we only see the results that we can see at this level, and we fail to make every effort to turn to the next page and see what the results are. Some people are just stupid and have never thought about whether this can be done, but they can persist and dig deeper until they find a gold mine.

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

So I was convinced.

The first two months: all problems

There were some questions that made me very uncomfortable at first:

1. H5 is almost unavailable on the mobile terminal (the previous friend directly used V0 to quickly block a website in a week, and it is only barely available on the PC), but the main traffic comes from the mobile terminal.

2. There are too many bugs and the pressure is high. Everyone should understand that things produced by AI are very difficult to change.

3. The cost of communicating with teammates is huge and it is part-time.

4. No income.

5. There are problems with project commercialization ideas

The most fatal of these problems are 3 and 5.

The third question: I killed the front-end in the first month, the back-end in the third month, and then hired a back-end partner. The core problem is: the inability to communicate and establish an efficient collaboration system.

The fifth question: The boss’s original idea was: similar to onlyfans, use high incentives and spend money to build a creator ecosystem, and use the creator ecosystem to attract users and cash flow. Then we talked about it and realized that this path would definitely not work (he himself also tried talking to creators in the early stages, but it was too difficult). In the end, we decided to increase the platform’s traffic first and then attract creators.

As for other problems, they can all be solved through the liver~.

February-April: Exploring growth channels and the path to differentiation

This month has almost ushered in the fastest growth stage, but the core problem is that our customer acquisition cost far exceeds the revenue brought by users, CAC > LTV (Customer Acquisition Cost > Lifetime Value, customer acquisition cost is greater than user value).

We were quite anxious at the beginning, thinking that we couldn’t just push the traffic directly, and we could just increase the traffic and take a look first. Later, we were scolded and woke up. If the product is not good, don’t talk about the traffic. If the ROI is less than 1, you will still lose money no matter how you invest.

So we started to optimize the product and make some functions that are different from those on the market. We created a SceneSnap function (Role Play scene snapshot, AI image function), which is somewhat similar to Hoshino’s Star Thought, but the essence and effect are completely different. We are the only one on the market who does this. Even though it has been 3 months now, I feel that no competitor in the same category is better than us.

In the month when the function was released, ORI straightened it up, and a lot more.

April-July: All new questions

1. The previous SEO was in vain and there was a problem with the strategy.

2. Because SEO also needs to transfer the technology stack, the entire front-end must be rewritten with another technology stack.

3. There is no stable channel that can release a large number of channels (while maintaining ORI)

The pass is difficult, but the pass is passed.

1. Find a senior SEO consultant to come up with a strategy and we will implement it.

2. The mental pressure of refactoring is extremely high, because there are a lot of bugs and customer complaints after refactoring, but they can be solved by maintaining patience and a stable mentality. The entire cycle is almost a waste of one and a half months.

3. This problem has not been solved. The team itself does not have students with strong growth and marketing skills, and is still looking for people.

4. Continue to deepen the product. In addition to the complete set of self-deployed images I completed for production and commercial use, my back-end classmates also completed a set of free text models for production and commercial use in July, and the unit price per customer has increased significantly.

During this period, our ORI and customer unit price for the month were pushed to a level that was exaggeratedly high in the industry, which was a small comfort as the scale could not be increased.

9. Common causes of failure and avoidance strategies

The experience mentioned above was actually experienced by the team, but in my independent development journey, I also witnessed the failure of many projects and experienced my own setbacks. Here are the most common pitfalls and how to avoid them:

Technology Pitfalls: Over-Engineering and Perfectionism

As developers, we tend to pay too much attention to technical details and spend a lot of time on architectural design, code refactoring, or pursuing the perfect user interface. Remember, users care about how the product solves their problems, not how elegant your code is.

Therefore we need:

* Set a clear release deadline and release the product on time even if the product is not perfect

* Adopt "good enough" standards rather than striving for perfection

* Remember the 80/20 rule: 80% of the value comes from 20% of the features

Market trap: "pseudo pain points" without real demand

Many products fail because the problem they solve is not painful enough, or is simply a problem imagined by the developers themselves. I once spent two months developing a tool only to find that the target users didn't even think it was a problem.

Avoidance strategies:

* Before writing the first line of code, confirm that at least 10 potential users have clearly stated that they need this solution

* Ideally, find users who are already solving this problem in other ways (even inefficient ones)

* Think about whether someone is willing to pay to solve this problem, not just "this is a cool idea"

Execution Trap: Three Minutes of Heat and Giving Up Halfway

Perhaps the biggest enemy of indie development is a lack of staying power. Initial enthusiasm can easily fade, especially if you encounter technical difficulties or market feedback isn't as expected.

Avoidance strategies:

* Break down big goals into small milestones and celebrate small wins regularly

* Establish accountability mechanisms, such as publicly sharing progress or finding a partner

* Record development logs, review the progress made, and enhance the sense of accomplishment

Mindset Trap: Unrealistic Expectations of Success

Many developers expect their first product to be a hit and then give up when reality doesn't turn out as expected. Successful indie developers often fail many times before finding the right direction.

Avoidance strategies:

* Treat your first product as a learning experience rather than pressure to succeed

* Set realistic goals, such as "get your first paying user within six months" rather than "earn 100,000 a month within six months"

• Learn to learn from failures, every project should make you more experienced than before