For the last six months, my co-founder and I have been building in public. We post our weekly revenue, our struggles, and our wins on X (Twitter) and LinkedIn. It s been amazing for building a community, getting feedback, and finding our first 50 customers.
But last week, I had a sales call that completely shifted my perspective.
We were pitching a mid-sized client a $99/month plan. They loved the product, the workflow was a perfect fit, and the demo went flawlessly. Then, the prospect said, "I saw your tweet last week that you re only at $300 MRR. You guys are way too small. What happens to my data if you shut down next month?"
I was speechless. The transparency that I thought was our biggest strength had just become our biggest liability. I realized that while the indie hacker community loves seeing the "0 to $10k" journey, actual businesses want to buy from companies that look stable, established, and safe. They don't want to be your beta testers; they want a guarantee that you'll be around in two years.
Hard decisions at the start of the week. A few years ago, the hard thing for me was "to start". Today, it is "to stop". What makes you stop? (besides bankruptcy and running your funds... hh)
What amount of time is needed to know if it makes sense to try to run that business? *God, give me a sign.
In the October-December quarter, Facebook s (Okay, Meta's) daily active users fell by about half a million, from 1.930 billion during July-September to 1.929 billion. This loss was mainly due to a slide in contribution from Africa and Latin America. Source: https://indianexpress.com/articl... What's your take on this?Where is social media heading towards, and how do you envision a new future of social networks? This gif is totally unnecessary but I think it's alright
Like most SaaS startups, we offer a free tier. We thought it was a great way to build goodwill, get feedback, and let people test the product before upgrading.
But last month, I finally sat down and looked at our support desk analytics. One single free user had opened 32 support tickets over the course of three weeks.
They weren't reporting bugs. They were asking us to walk them through how to use Excel, asking for custom API endpoints, and requesting that we build a specific feature just for their use case. I spent hours on Zoom calls with them and writing detailed custom scripts for their workflow. When I calculated the time my small team spent helping them against our hourly burn rate, it was roughly $4,000 of pure support cost.
And at the end of it all? They refused to upgrade to our $29/month paid plan because "the free version does everything I need now."
In other words, what's that one topic that you would really like to understand more about, but can't find anything that covers it in depth? Think team collaboration, time-off management, workplace cultures... literally anything you're interested in. I'm trying to understand what people want to read but can't find, rather than add to the same beaten topics while writing for Pause. Thanks in advance for the help
I recently installed @Augment Code based on an ad somewhere, and I'm super impressed, but haven't heard a peep about it in most channels. But it got me wondering what else I'm missing. This is a crowded field with a few frontrunners and a lot of more esoteric newcomers, but I want to know about the ones that blow your mind but hardly get any coverage.
