Jason Leow

What's the classic indie hacker's playbook?

- Pre launch a landing page or build a scrappy MVP to validate interest
- Build in public, sharing progress and revenue updates
- No paid marketing, no ads
- Little to no SEO content, all organic reach by going viral
- Obligatory launch on Product Hunt
- Bootstrap your product to ramen profitability, without investor funds

Tweet Hunter's success story is pointing to a new indie hacker playbook in the making. [Ayush wrote a great article](https://www.listenupih.com/tweethunter/) summarising their story, and many of the growth hacks are more uncommon to indies:

- Partnering influencers by giving equity to the startup, pairing technical chops with marketing fitnesse
- Growth hacking through building viral side projects that bring attention to the main projects
- Acquiring smaller projects with good traffic from other indies to redirect attention to the main project again
- Micro equity partnerships with 12 other influencers, where they each get tokens from a pool, and will get returns if Tweet Hunter gets acquired in future
- Use of ads on Twitter to market the product
- SEO content
- Organic reach through founders' Twitter accounts

It's really just a mix of startup tactics with indie methods, isn't it?

These methods had always been around, just not often used by indies because it can be costly (e.g. ads) or just too difficult (influencer partnership assumes you got something worth partnering with). There's also the back story context where the founders had a lot of experience starting startups and failed a lot as well, so the classic 10 year grind had paved the foundation here.

Despite their huge success, I wouldn't go so far as to say go replicate their approach for your indie product.

But it definitely does open up new thinking, new distribution channels and growth opportunities where I would have previously shrugged off simply because it's not in the "indie hacker playbook".

Whatever that means.

I asked myself that question yesterday, and I couldn't recall the last time I had fun.

If there's one, it most likely would be during pre-COVID, pre-fatherhood times. Maybe it's the last time I was in Bali, in December 2019. So it's been at least 3 years.

**3 looong years.**

Through a global catastrophe, a local crisis, and a personal upheaval. Time is relative, they say. And truly, it felt like 30 years not 3.

> "I can't recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I'm naked in the dark." – Frodo

Like Frodo in the *Lord Of The Rings*, I can't even remember how to have fun anymore, after those long dark years. My muscle memory on how to do it... all gone. Everything now is revolves around work or care, duty and responsibility. Even when it's supposed to be a fun leisure activity, I'm 'working' in some capacity - as an entrepreneur, a dad, a husband, a son. Always having to look out for others, care for them.

I thought I was burned out from work, from hustling.

Instead I think I'm burned out. From everything. From life itself.

*How do you take a vacation from life itself?*

I wish I knew the answer, but nothing's coming through... yet.

Or maybe I just need more sleep...

Sunday mornings are always special.

No traffic. No work. No commitments.

Everyone sleeps in, even the birds. It’s so quiet I can hear the world breathe.

I put on some chillstep music, sip on my double espresso, and stare at the screen. I start typing, but after a few words, I stop myself. The sound of my keyboard is spoiling the quiet.

I give up.

I spin 90º to the right, and just look out the window into the morning sky, and just soak it in. It’s a rare beautiful morning sky. Golden light emerging behind the cloud curtains.

Why do I even want to work through such mornings?

I should be out there. I should be walking and soaking it in. I should be breathing in that clean crisp morning air, bathing in that refreshing golden light.

Yet here I am. In my little dusty domain where I rule as king.

They don’t call it lazy Sunday mornings for nothing.

I don’t need to rush. I don’t need to get out there. I don’t need to do anything. I don’t need to be anywhere.

I can be content here and now.

Just being and breathing.

More and more I think my real job of being an indie solopreneur isn't running a business but running myself. My inner mental game, my productivity, creativity, motivation and energy.

And just finding way to maintain the game within myself is the mission.

Like they say, the real product isn't the product but the factory that makes the product. In this case, the factory is me.

And one of the most important parts of managing me, myself and I is my learning rate and progress rate. [James Clear](https://jamesclear.com/3-2-1/october-6-2022) explains it well in his latest newsletter:

> "Balancing success and failure is a tricky thing. I'd say 8 or 9 times out of 10, you should be succeeding. Build momentum. Accumulate advantages. Feast on the feeling of success and let it feed your desire to do more. But 1 or 2 times out of 10, you should be failing. Push yourself and reach beyond your current grasp. Force yourself to try uncomfortable things. Occasionally you will surprise yourself and the rest of the time you will learn.
>
> Win enough to keep progressing. Lose enough to keep learning."

That last line is so dope. And a perfect summary of what my real job is.

Set up enough small wins to keep feeling like I'm progressing, no matter how incremental. But don't get too comfortable winning all the time. Push things outside of my comfort zone a bit so that 10-20% of the time I'm losing *in order* to learn and grow.

That perspective on losing is pretty crazy in a way, isn't it? Seek out loss ***intentionally***, in order to learn.

That way, losing is no longer a stain in your success story track record. It *literally* is a stepping stone amongst many to success.

Failure is just research. Loss is learning.

Seeing this way, there's no way you *can't* win.

Q: How do I set a different image in the mobile version as background? There is no such setting in Carrd currently.

A: You have to set the Background setting for your site to Color, and then write some custom CSS to set the background-image on different screen sizes (using media queries).

I played around a bit and came up with this solution:

Different background image for different screen sizes on Carrd -

https://responsivebackgroundimage.carrd.co/

Copy the code here:

https://jsfiddle.net/xgvw0y3q/

Killer question I learned this week from the great Elon Musk:

"What did you get done this week?"


Big tech CEO:
Elon: "What did you get done this week?"

😂😂😂

Tech memes and jokes aside, I found that to be a simple yet piercing question. It's the simple questions that's always the most arresting. Especially when asked because someone sees through the BS, from CEO to CEO. Can't imagine how it feels like to be on the receiving end of that text message!

I love collecting beautiful questions. A great answer stays fixed in time, and might become wrong when the context changes. But a beautiful question is evergreen, always inspiring to reflect on. Ask it each time and you get a different answer. And the most beautiful questions are often the simplest and most unassuming.

This is a great question for self-reflection and journaling, as an entrepreneur, maker, creator.

Did I make anything that moved the needle this week?

Anything that has concrete impact on the mission?

What did *I* get done this week?

When employed: Company pays a monthly subscription to you for your work. You're answerable to your boss.

When indie: Customers pay a monthly subscription to you for your work. You're answerable to your customers.

Let's get real here... is there *really* a big difference? 🤔

I'm usually the first one to put my hand up that there's a HUGE difference for sure. I'd shout "Because I want to master my own fate!" But lately, been reflecting on it, and I'm not so sure there's a *huge* difference.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying there's NO difference. There's definitely differences between being employed versus being an indie solopreneur. But I'd argue that the day-to-day experience is **a lot less different than we (want to) think it is**.

Think about this:

- On job it sucks to have a bad manager. When indie, it sucks to have to deal with an unreasonable customer. Both feel the same. Both shit on your day the same way.
- On job you're selling your time. In business, you're selling your time to the product—building features, marketing—in exchange for customers. Sure you get equity and you're building a potentially scalable asset, but it's not like it's 100% passive. Nothing is. You still got to show up to work in exchange of your time for financial returns, right?
- On job, answerable to whims of a single person - your boss. When indie, answerable to whims of customers, co-founder(s), investors(s). No business is an island. You still have to make decisions being accountable to or constrained by others. Total autonomy is a false illusion.
- On job you get arbitrary income ceilings. When running a business, you get market 'ceilings', where winner takes all. There's a power law at work here. Most earnings is consolidated in the top few creators in Patreon, while most of the rest don't earn a living wage.
- On job you risk getting fired. But you can job hop and choose from hundreds of potential employers. As entrepreneur you diversify risk from a single point of failure (your job) to many customers, and you can fire any one customer out of hundreds/thousands, but that's assuming to get to that many customers in the first place. You risk your startup failing first (at an even higher risk than being fired).

So let's get real... on balance comparing between the two, is the lived daily experience really all that different? Feels like for every pro there's a con on both sides. Not one is better over the other in any definitive way.

Ultimately, I feel the main difference is in values and taste. In the same way I say I like eating chocolate versus someone who hates the taste.

Truth is, despite saying all the ways it's a lot less different than I thought, I'd still choose indie solopreneur path. Because that aligns to my values and taste, for autonomy, creativity, meaning.

But at least talking this through, I'm drinking less of the entrepreneurship Koolaid. I'm under less illusions, less enamoured of the benefits of self employment over employment. So that I get a more balanced view and expectations of my own path.

0 ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 100%

In Annie Duke's *Thinking In Bets* book, she talks about decision-making skills from playing poker. Poker's not all that different from entrepreneurship I feel. And "thinking in bets" is definitely how I relate to running a business, making products. It's not called "a portfolio of small bets" for nothing!

One line in particular—about learning from success and failure—stood out:

> "You’re not always right when things go your way; you’re not always wrong when they don’t."

**Mindblown.**

Gosh I'm so wrong. Again.

You see, I'm kind of a personal growth geek. I love learning. I like improving myself. I enjoy reflecting on my progress. Above all, I love extracting lessons from successes, and especially failures.

I'm always asking: "What did I learn?"

Maybe that way of learning worked well in a predictable world in school, sports and later in work, where it's easier to isolate and observe how your effort play out against the results you get. It's easier to learn from success and failure.

But not so for entrepreneurship.

Because of the volatile, uncertain and complex and ambiguous nature of running a business, it's not always possible to isolate and observe results from inputs accurately. Sometimes it just circumstantial, or plain dumb luck.

So in "You’re not always right when things go your way; you’re not always wrong when they don’t.", when I succeeded, the things I did aren't necessarily the right things. That I can understand, due to factors like luck. But what's more mindblowing was realising that when I failed, the things I did aren't necessarily the *wrong* things!

Learning from failure (or success) isn't always as helpful as we thought!

If we shouldn't emulate success stories of other entrepreneurs because we can't isolate the factors that led to success, then we certainly shouldn't read too much into failures.

**Learning from both success and failure are overrated.**

*What should I do then?*

- Don't form lessons and learnings. Form hypotheses. and experiments. Don't take anything as solid truth until I've acted on and applied it, and that it's shown to be replicable and reliable.
- Even things that I tried, worked, and repeatable on one of my products might not be useful on another product I run. Same person, but different product, different business context. So always be ready to review.
- See lessons as suggestions, learning from the successes/failures of others as brainstorming ideas to try, not new rules to follow.
- It's tempting to extract new rules to follow when doing post-mortem reviews from failures. DON'T. It's still ok to do reviews. But be highly suspicious of anything resembling a new rule. Form my next hypothesis instead.

Above all, aim to be your own person.

Thanks for the idea, @cjthacreator ! 🙏🙏

Had to refund because customer bought both plugins and didn't want this one 😩

Interesting insight about the nature of our likes and dislikes:

"If you like coffee, you don’t really like coffee. You like coffee at a certain dose and frequency. Change the dose and frequency, and what you like and dislike changes. Applies to almost everything." – @dvassallo

Dosage and frequency is an important nuance on our likes/dislikes.

I love coffee, but past 3 cups a day, I start to hate what it does to me.

Likewise, I say I love making products, but really it’s at a specific dosage and frequency too. Focus on one product for too long, and I start to get bored. That’s why I have a portfolio of products to vary my dosage.

I say I love being an indie solopreneur, but in actuality it’s at a specific dosage and frequency. The fun parts has to be a bit more frequent in dosage than the not-so-fun parts (like doing taxes, admin, burnout). The moment the pain is more than the fun, it gets hard to keep at it.

Likewise, the same for dislikes. I used to say I hate coding. But that’s because my dosage and frequency was too low to experience the benefits, to build confidence from competency. Past a dosage point, I started to say I like coding!

Tl;dr - Our likes and dislikes are not fixed. It can change, depending on context (like dosage and frequency). Don’t over-identify with it.

Just saw this insight in [James Clear's newsletter](https://jamesclear.com/3-2-1/september-29-2022):

"In sports, one of the primary sources of advantage is choosing how to play the game.
In life, one of the primary sources of advantage is choosing which game to play."

For the longest time, I just played the game the same way everyone else played, in sports and in life. I was an athlete and also played lots of sports in school. All sports and games had their own rules, and you didn't get to decide which rules made sense to follow and which ones didn't. We don't get to make the rules, we had to just accept them as they are and win or lose against them. Same for life in those early years. You just went to school, and complied. Those best at compliance get rewarded, gets called a "good boy or girl". Again, no student makes the rules in school. And after years in school, even if you were given the chance to make rules as a student, you wouldn't even know how. This is worse in good students. I was a good student.

So it's easy to imagine the downstream impact... After more than a decade in such an environment, the muscle memory is set, and you go on in work and life the same way. Just following the rules of whatever games you find yourself in. And the only choices or freedom available to us is choosing how to play the game.

*We've never been invited to even consider which game to play in.*

This I find, is the one thing I'm constantly having to unlearn and relearn in entrepreneurship. The hardest thing about entrepreneurship for me had been how there's really no rules. There's not even a standard game.

It's like a footballer, basketballer and golf player came together to play a game with each other based on the game rules they follow separately in their own field, and the only thing they had in common is that they all deal with a round spherical object.

That's entrepreneurship.

And therefore lies the danger – the moment you try to emulate any one of your entrepreneur heroes, you might be unwittingly getting yourself into someone else's game. Where you (again) have to play by someone else's rules. Just like in school.

I want otherwise now.

I feel a strong desire to align this whole entrepreneurship thing to my own inner game. I want to invent my own rules, play my own game.

Sure, I still want to learn from others, feel inspired by stories of other indie solopreneurs. But selectively and mindfully. And with a discerning eye. Collective learning that helps me play my own game better, not get pulled into someone else's game.

So... ready player one (and only)!

Can imagine this being useful for those selling Carrd templates to showcase the whole template!

https://autoscrollonhover.carrd.co/