I was listening to a podcast by The Indie Hackers featuring an interview with Tara Reed of Apps Without Code, and I thought it'd be nice to pen some thoughts down. I really love what Tara Reed is doing; it's just such a great way for folks from beyond the typical tech industry to bring their ideas to life.

Link to the podcast: From 0 to 5M Without Writing Any Code with Tara Reed of Apps Without Code - The Indie Hackers Podcast

1. Build the product or close the sale - which should I do first?

This duality of building the product and closing the sale has without a doubt earned its spot at the top of my list. It's a big question all entrepreneurs have to face. And having worked on KubeInn - a multitenancy manager for Kubernetes, over the past six months, it's a question that I'm constantly asking myself now. As for Tara Reed, she's a big fan of closing the sale first and she shares her reasons why.

First, we're never going to feel like the product we've built is fully, fully ready, where everything's perfect and wonderful. It just doesn't come. So it's only a matter of time before we have to put ourselves out there, so why not do it now?

Besides, there's an advantage to closing the sale first: we can get customers onboard and have them be part of the process of finishing the product. And it's way more exciting when there are potentially excited customers on the other line. We're not just alone in our rooms by ourselves coding.

Furthermore, people just love talking about their problems. If it's a problem you're hoping to solve, it makes a lot of sense to start talking to others about it and seeing if they are facing the same problems. That way, we can garner interest for our projects, and perhaps even meet our potential customers!

2. Finding a niche, and customers with a willingness to pay

This one's a tough cookie.

Developers often choose to list their applications on the app store for 99 cents. But when we're bootstrapping, we're going to need a lot of 99 cents to pay our bills. Tara Reed recommends finding a niche of customers who are much more willing and able to pay for your application. How? Here are some approaches.

First, we can think about our marketing positioning. We can ask ourselves, what do people think of when they think about my software? Because again, we're not really selling our software. We're selling the idea that our software represents. I'm not building a multitenancy manager for Kubernetes; I'm helping to ease the burden of managing infrastructure on developers. It's cliché I know, but as Courtland Allen succinctly describes, a cliché is usually something on the border between something that's really good advice, but also advice that no one ever follows, and so it needs to be repeated ad nauseam. By changing our marketing positioning, we can instantly get our product to be in a different price range in people's minds.

In addition, Tara Reed shares about white labelling, which essentially means finding a company or an organization who wants to have their own version of the application you're building. Instead of asking individuals to give us somewhere between 99 cents and $5 for our application, we can license and white label our application to these organizations and charge them a much higher fee that they can use for all of their clients. I suppose this is similar to what my relationship with SingAREN (although I'm not charging them; in fact, I'm really grateful for the opportunity to work with the team), which has given me a wonderful opportunity to test my ideas out with really supportive folks.

3. Taking breaks

This one really resonates with me. We all know how commonplace burnouts are in the tech industry. Yet apart from burnouts, Tara Reed shares about another key motivation for taking breaks: it forces us to take a step back and think about the bigger picture.

It's November, which means I've been working on KubeInn for slightly over six months now. And that's the longest I've ever worked on a solo project. So I absolutely share Tara Reed's sentiment when she says that the more rest she takes, the better she is at seeing big picture problems like vision setting. Just being away from the computer, not worrying about the nitty gritty implementation details; it's something that I'm actively trying to cultivate. It's tough trying to strike the balance between focusing on the forest and focusing on the trees, but the alternative's way tougher.

Wrapping up

Finding gems like these is one of the many reasons I love listening to podcasts. Kudos to the team at The Indie Hackers for this. With all these tips mentioned, perhaps it is time for me to act on them. And that's why I'm attending KubeCon (North America) 2020 tonight to talk about KubeInn. So, wish me luck!