> Competitors don't really matter

This is so spot on.

I am also in a competitive space. Couple of my competitor man-child founders blocked me on social media for simply being on their feed. I took it as a blessing. I tuned out from their noise quickly and focus on customers rather than social media attention disorder.

Do yourself a solid. Don't watch competitors. Watch customers and the market.

Haha! I had a YC founder threaten to sue me and tell me that she owned all my IP after seeing a demo :)

Nice! I hope you did something like frame the communication. I think that would be great inspiration.

I do have the call recorded. I can print out her disgusted face the moment I said "it took me like, two weekends".

What a helpful insights bro!

I almost skipped reading the article, thinking it was just another bragging/survivorship bias story. It wasn't. Thanks for sharing.

I want to add another anecdote: I built an app for creating certificates[1]. It was originally a case study for a book I'm writing, so I didn't think much of "target users". But then I decided to make it a real/standalone product. I was struggling to find real users.

Then, just by sheer coincidence, a friend shared his struggle with existing ticket sales platforms. I thought, "Hey, with what I've built so far, it's just like adding another 10% of work" (It wasn't). So I "expanded" the app to become a white-label ticket sales platform[2]. People started using it, and they also use the certificate generation feature ("Your app can create certs for attending events? Sweet!").

I don't know how to distill this into advice, but you get the idea. It's like a South Park meme: Step #1: Listen to users, Step #2: ???, Step #3: Profit!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43483919

[2] https://pentas.id/

What does create a cert for an event mean?

> Competitors don't really matter [...] Sure, there are more "table-stakes" features that customers need before they'll even consider using you, but the real competitor is a lack of awareness of your product, more than anything.

I like this quote a lot. I think it addresses a common execution paralysis where someone identifies a solution to a rich problem space but decides against building it due to there being an obvious competitor.

Very well rounded and grounded article. Like it very much!

Indeed as someone else in the comments said, the personal touch is the best asset you have as indie. So talk with your customers.

I run a Android app, next to my day job, and I pride myself on always putting the customer first, and actually fixing their pain points or implementing their suggestions. Empathy is so important, and something a big company will struggle with.

I'll checkout the recommended books!

What's the Android app? If it's for a general audience, this is a good opportunity to plug it :)

Haha, well it's that you asked. Mini Piano Lite, a piano app. Building it for 15 years already. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=umito.android....

TBH, I find it extremely hard to acquire customers. Even with a rock solid product that is NOT, in any way, below the competition. I get the visits but the signups are non existent. Probably because my audience is geared towards programmers and tech oriented businesses. I can do almost any project but marketing kills me.

Have you considered your price point? I work for bigger companies, we would never go with someone whose base plan is so cheap. This is because it takes a lot of effort to make a purchase, and going to accounting for $10/month for something as important as regulatory compliance or antifraud just doesn’t vibe.

Smaller vendors in your price target might have the budget but not the mindshare to implement.

I’d be curious if you 100x your pricing.

Well, you have that price on the enterprise plan. Are you saying that having my lowest price this low make the entire service look less "important"?

Yes. It’s a mixed message to both be a low end provider or be an enterprise product. Maybe it makes sense but I think it might confuse any purchasing people I talk to.

Folks want to fit you into a neat bucket. If you don’t fit in, it causes emotional discomfort. This can be true even if strictly not the case in your pov - but customers perception and emotional response might explain some of your difficulties.

CloudFlare for example basically gives it all away, except to the people who make so much money that they want to pay a lot for a few niceties.

Maybe because it doesn't work that well, I got "Proxy/VPN detected" on your page when I clicked "Test your connection" and I'm not behind proxy nor I use VPN.

it's not exact science and false positives do happen.

Can you share your experience regarding marketing? Any specific courses you'd recommend, channels you tried and what worked or didn't? I have posted on Twitter, mentioned my product in Reddit comments and also "showcased" it in some Discord servers. All that amounted to around 30 signups in 1 week. But this is not sustainable, and I would like to try some other avenues as well.

30 signups in one week is sustainable I don't know why you would say it is not. Customers will bring customers. I would love to get even 10 a week. I tried them all other than blogging which takes a lot of time and cold emailing. I would say Reddit commenting brings the most.

I think you're right, I may be jumping to conclusions, and I would be in a better position to answer in a month or so whether the 30 signups are good or not. However, the reason I feel they are not enough is because I got them in my launch week (if you can call it that). I won't be able to do this every week, and I would like to find a sustainable way to get new users discovering my product.

I think SEO is the answer to that and I am planning on checking out resources or short courses if there are any since they might help me in the future as well. The reason I was curious about your process was whether you had tried something different which I hadn't tried (or thought of) which might help me avoid/improve on your feedback.

Is this b2b or consumer? You must crack organic marketing via IG/TT for greater reach. Reddit is only good for incremental/early growth. You will get millions of impressions on the other platforms if you play them right. But only if you have something that many people actually want.

It is B2C. I'm from India, so TT is a no go for me. My product is also not exactly Reels material. I'm not planning on doing ads since that is a different path which I would like to avoid as long as possible after I've exhausted all my other options.

Everyone who does TT seriously contracts people to create US TT accounts and proxies into managing them

Not to be a buzzkill, but GP is sharing that they find marketing extremely difficult and it's not been working yet for them.

This would make them the last person to ask for recommendations (no offense intended).

It would seem preferable to seek advice/recommendations from people with a similar goal/situation to yours who are currently being successful at marketing their startup/product.

Exactly, I'm drowning here and he's asking me for swimming lessons :))

I don't want to be harsh, but comparing an IP address to registered allocations isn't a sophisticated product. Have you considered that people just don't want what you're selling?

Please don't get me wrong: I also work in some spaces that are not highly valued by developers, so I empathize heavily. It's a pain in the butt trying to sell to programmers when this audience is literally one of the most difficult and obnoxiously inconsistently price sensitive. (Will spend thousands on hardware, scoffs at $1 apps.)

I am not comparing an IP address with registered allocations. I do very minimal IP address work. You'd have to read the very first paragraph to see that `we don't use IP checks or blacklists`. Doing IP checks will not work against residential proxies. It actually is a sophisticated product.

Successful execution is 33.333% of the journey. Solid marketing is the differentiator.

Take for example, we frequently see Cursor, Aider, Windsurf, copilot, but rarely are there mentions of cline, roo and I think like only once or twice in very early days we saw mentions or Supermaven.

While Cursor runs babble from supermaven creator, many cursor users don’t know what supermaven is though they may know Aider or even cline.

Now draw your conclusion.

P.S. while I have no connection with supermaven, I do use it day to day personally as cursor/windsurf feels overhyped and crucial target to be acquired and enshittified anytime now(windsurf already got digested by oAI).

Good example. I paid for Cursor for my job (with company credit card) without even knowing that Aider, Windsurf, Supermaven, cline and roo existed.

Actually, except for Windsurf, I only learned about the others from your comment.

I get that, not aiming for millions or billions (would be nice ofc). I'm just saying that is extremely hard to bring visits without dumping loads of cash and is 2x harder to make them even signup. I'm good with the execution but this marketing part drains me. A partnership with someone that knows how to bring customers would be ideal I reckon.

What's your product?

Marketer here. Your homepage says

USE CASES For a million reasons. Here's a few.

This is a common pattern ('We serve everyone!'), but you'd be well advised to actually pick a use case early on - you'll find that ecom, gaming, finance (especially), content, security, marketing all have their own specific needs and requirements, and they will want to see how you fit them before signing up.

This also makes your marketing efforts a little easier, as instead of having to spread thin across six different verticals, you can target for instance communities of indie gamers, bloggers, small shops who face this problem. when you've got validation from one of these, its easier to scale, but trying to go too broad too early in targeting is one of the most common errors founders make.

nicely designed site though and a lot of other stuff is on point.

EDIT: Your branding is also a little opaque. I wouldn't naturally associate "visitorquery" with what you were trying to do. Going for a domain like detectvpn even if you had to drop down to something like detectvpn.me feels like more of a direct match.

Thank you for the input, valid points, I'll chew on that. Do you have a specific target market you think I could start with?

In order, I would say that your most promising plays are:

Game studios - a low touch way of getting around smurfing, botting and ban evasion, cheap farming accounts, and likely already think in terms of proxy/VPN abuse. Reach them through Unity and Unreal forums, dev groups, GameSec Twitter/LinkedIn

FinTech / Crypto compliance teams - position yourself as a plug in to KYC or KYB platforms. Behavioural analytics is a big play in fraud prevention, whether someone is using a VPN won't be the whole picture, but is part of it.

Deprioritise marketers, content teams - they're promising but ultimately false positives as no one but the very biggest players amongst them are losing sleep over this.

The key more than anything for both is going to be to emphasise in your positioning the ease of integration. Remember how Stripe had the exact code you needed to use on its homepage for ages? You've got to give the impression that integrating this is going to be super simple.

I feel like you spend quite a bit of time on your homepage selling why someone would want to do it, but not so much on the how and why you make it so easy fo them. Clicking into your docs it looks super simple, but the minute someone's had to click into your docs if they’re a non-dev audience, you're losing people.

You also absolutely must have a GDPR story. You’re detecting proxies and VPNs. This means you’re inspecting user connection data, possibly in real time, and possibly storing flags or identifiers. Even if you’re not processing names, emails, or cookies, under GDPR, IP addresses, device signatures, and behavioural data = personal data if it’s tied to a user.

Your GDPR story needs to cover data type transparency, what exactly what you collect: IP, device type, headers, connection method? If you’re processing requests in memory and returning results via API, that’s low risk. Highlight it. Offer EU hosting or at least say “data processed within EEA-compliant infrastructure." IANAL but you'll want to have a lawyer look at it.

You're showing me pricing in euros, which is a bit off putting (I'm in Australia). It wouldn't stop me if I knew your product already and knew I needed it, but as a "cold" visitor it's a small thing that stops it being an insta buy.

Same, from United States and not seeing dollars is a bit funky.

I wonder if there are opportunities for more call to actions. e.g. I scrolled the page and the only links to sign up are at the top (I’m on mobile).

Compare this to https://stripe.com/ and it’s super obvious how to “Start now” from anywhere on the page.

We are also listing prices in EURO only.

Our server bills are in EURO.

Our salaries are in EURO.

Our subscription for business operations are in EURO.

Our accountancy costs are in EURO.

It helps that our focus is on European customers, but that said, it is hard to justify going with USD pricing.

I was thinking the same, and switched to EUR price only, cause I’m in Europe. Payments dropped off like it’s a free fall. Added double pricing (EUR and USD), and got back to acquiring customers, and the majority of my purchases are in USD.

Is it painful in terms of accounting? Yes. Do I lose money on conversion rates? Yes. Am I making more money? Yes.

Unless you exclusively target a particular market, most people in US might not even know what EUR is. For them it might be the same as Zimbabwean dollars to you.

> Do I lose money on conversion rates? Yes

Depending on where your vendors are situated, you might avoid the conversion losses by having USD accounts AND EUR accounts.

We use two separate banks (for redundancy), each of which allows us to have incoming payments in EUR, USD, and a couple of lesser currencies (CAD, SGD) and we keep a balance in each.

And then we use the USD balance to pay, eg. DigitalOcean, and the EUR balance to pay eg BunnyCDN. So we mostly don't have to incur the conversion loss.

You are right. I’m sorry. I have edited my original comment.

Thank you, appreciated.

> … most people in US might not even know what EUR is.

Really?

No it's not, not if you want to win customers from the US. Their annual budgets are in USD, so they don't have the flexibility to pay more next year just because the foreign exchange rate has shifted. You take the foreign exchange risk by listing prices in USD, but it could just as well be a windfall, and your customers pay stable prices in return.

LPT: you need sales

is this sarcasm?

Probably referring to having a sales team/person, rather than actual sales.

Hard to judge what is wrong/could be better as I couldn't gather what your actual project is. Maybe there are some obvious glaring mistakes on the landing page or something that scares people off?

Or it might just be trying to solve a problem that people don't actually have, or communicated poorly what problem it solves. I tend to see these being the most common reasons people don't even sign up.

Oh, the problem is there trust me. I am very close to both industries and I know for a fact that my service covers big holes. I'm just a sucker at converting.

Try to convert people that you know and trust you. You might learn why you are not converting people that do not know you

> Ship first, worry about scale later

This is repeated constantly, but I fear that it is internalized as “write shitty code and throw money at it later.” If you have taken the time to learn your language well, you can avoid a lot of really bad decisions that don’t cost you additional time.

Similarly, on the infra side of things (where this advice is usually doled out), maybe take the time to have a modicum of understanding about the tools you’re building on. If you’re using a DBaaS, your vendor almost certainly has monitoring built-in, often for free, or a nominal cost. USE IT, and learn what it is you’re looking at. “The DB is slow” could be anything from excessive row locks due to improperly-held transactions to actually hitting an underlying resource limit – and for the latter, 9/10 it’s a symptom of something that’s misconfigured, or not understanding your RDBMS’ operation.

For example, do you have a write-heavy table with a UUIDv4 PK, lots of columns that are heavily indexed, and some medium-large JSON blobs in it? Congratulations, you’ve created Postgres’ (and MySQL, but for different reasons) worst nightmare. Every write is amplified by the indexes, and even if you’re doing an UPDATE and are only hitting one of the indexed columns, all of them will be rewritten. The UUIDv4 PK means your WAL traffic is going to skyrocket from all the full page writes, and if your JSON blobs are big enough to be unwieldy, but not big enough to have be TOASTed, that’s another huge amplification to writes. All of this can easily result in hitting IOPS limits, network bandwidth limits, or CPU saturation from additional queries piling up while this one is dealt with, and all of it could be easily avoided by having a basic understanding of your tooling.

This is an awesome comment. As someone who doesn't spend much time in the DB tier, I especially appreciate the real-world details in your final paragraph. Do you have a blog where you write about this stuff, and/or have any particular recommendations for learning or reference materials? I'm sure there's no substitute for experience when it comes to developing an intuition for good db design, but I'd be grateful for your expert advice if you have more to share. TIA

I don’t generally blog about it, but I may at some point.

For specific discussions on what I wrote about, I recommend (other than reading Postgres’ docs, of course) this [0] and this [1], and anything else on those sites.

If you like technical podcasts, postgres.fm [2] is pretty good.

[0]: https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/hot-updates-in-postgr...

[1]: https://www.enterprisedb.com/blog/impact-full-page-writes?la...

[2]: https://postgres.fm/

Awesome! Thank you!

Also, you really should consider creating a blog -- your writing is good, and well-informed.

> If you have taken the time to learn your language well, you can avoid a lot of really bad decisions that don’t cost you additional time.

From my own experience, I can say that this mindset can easily become an eternal excuse to procrastinate building and shipping. “First, I must perfect my knowledge and tools—only then will I build my perfect product.” But that’s just another form of perfectionism, and often, it’s equivalent to never shipping anything at all.

Yes, it’s easy to accidentally or purposefully do. An example of what I’m talking about is “I’m going to cause an N+1, row lock contention, and slow writes by looping over a list of IDs while holding a transaction open, retrieving information for each, and then doing a single write.” This is something that is shockingly easy to do with an ORM if you don’t know any better, but it’s also one of the easiest problems to solve once you do.

Or, explicitly germane to a language vs. an ORM, something like concatenating strings instead of building them in whatever your language’s method of doing so is. Does it have that big of a performance hit in a vacuum? No, but it also takes no more effort to do it correctly, and small gains add up, so why not do it right from the start?

> Never give away "unlimited" anything

This is resonating very much with me, but perhaps for a different reason. I'm launching a product within a business that is already successful. I get to give demos to potential customers, and I've been making a point of saying, "And this aspect of the product is unlimited" about many things in the product. On the one hand, related to the above, it's potentially possible that a whale user could cost us, but it's frankly unlikely. But it occurs to me that if I put a limit on certain aspects of the offering, it will likely make it seem worth more -- it's a scarce resource if we treat it as such.

I'm sure you've already thought about this but bear in mind that as a buyer, I don't want to hear "unlimited" for things that have material scaling costs for my service providers, it just sounds unsustainable and likely to change later or be the cause of an issue.

On the other hand being free from arbitrary limits is great.

Unlimited usage like that means someone else has to pay for your usage - when the provider's pricing changes or their growth declines your usage may no longer be subsidized by someone else's. You risk becoming dependent on them without knowing the true cost of your usage, which also might not be sustainable for you.

For additional context, this recommendation also comes from having customers explicitly tell me they can't tell their bosses that 1 status page is the same price as 200, when their existing enterprise contract for a similar service is 6 figures.

It was too cheap relative to what they expected to pay.

I can relate, though I am not that far. I spent few years working full-time on developing my product, had a business plan, spent money and things like that. Only to finally go online and get zero bites. I was counting on few people to become instant customers, none of that materialised. Even friends left me hanging out in the cold. So that was quite a cold shower and a slap in the face. But in the end, it was my own miscalculation. Also, the mobile UI is important. I did not underestimate it, I just had no time to implement it. It will take weeks or months to do and I pushed it as the next thing, after I am done developing the current feature. In the end, you cannot do it all, certainly not out the gate. I am still kinda on schedule and progressing as planned with things, I was just expecting more interest. I had to adjust and refocus, but in the end, it is about being able to keep going.

I would blame 90% of your lack of bites at your horrible mobile UI.

Mobile UX is important for everyone. For content creators, your target market, is crucial. If you postponed it for any other feature, you underestimated it.

For what is worth, I had a great experience using Cursor/AI to make a web app style mobile friendly. It also did some help with the copywriting as well. I would give it a try if I were you.

No intention of being harsh, but, from my point of view, your mobile UI is breaking your business. So immediate action seems advisable.

Good luck!

Looking at your site. I think the big disclaimer around the site not being for mobile is more off-putting then then the actual UI. Especially as a landing page it is fine. Maybe put that disclaimer later on ?

There is info in the FAQ section, but of course, people complained that they should be told when they enter the website as they see it looking broken on their phone. As you can see on your own use case, there is no pleasing everybody :D

This is one of the best articles about running a bootstrapped business that I've ever read.

These are all great tips that obviously come from years of hard work and introspection.

> When I started, I integrated with standard SaaS product analytics software that most big SaaS products use. They tend to have features like session recording, where you can see exactly where their mouse moves in your product, and funnel tracking for working out how many users make it the whole way through from landing page to using your product.

I had the same experience. When I started out, I'd see people talk about complicated views in their analytics with cohort analysis and A/B testing. I'd think those people were succeeding because of their analytics, so I kept trying to build complicated views in Google Analytics or investigate expensive alternative analytics platforms. And I eventually just landed on going even simpler than Google Analytics and not checking it unless I had a specific question I wanted to answer.

> People will suggest you should build particular features to improve your product. They'll never use those features.

I've experienced this as well. Early on, prospective customers would tell me that they'd definitely buy if I had X feature, and I'd spend a week implementing it, and then the customer would disappear or say they couldn't purchase for some other reason.

> When a user signs up for OnlineOrNot, I have an automated email going out asking what brought them to sign up today. I explicitly tell them I read and reply to every email. This is the main source of my insight for building product.

I like this a lot. The main competitive advantage indie founders have is a personal touch and direct access to the founder.

I think too many indie founders over-automate and over-outsource their customer interactions. It always drives me crazy when I use a product from an indie founder, and I reach out with feedback and the response is just a generic, outsourced customer service rep who says, "Thank you for your feedback. I'll pass it along to the team."

> Tracking your MRR is a crap way to measure how you're doing as a business... Find another success metric to figure out if people are actually using your product, and whether it's bringing them value. Things like number of images generated, or number of form completions, for example.

I agree, but I'll add the caveat that the other metric should be as proximate to revenue as you can get.

Early on, I made the mistake of measuring success based on things like social media followers or SEO rank, even though those things didn't directly translate into revenue. I felt like I was succeeding, but I eventually realized I was pursuing metrics that were too loosely related to revenue.

> Early on, prospective customers would tell me that they'd definitely buy if I had X feature, and I'd spend a week implementing it, and then the customer would disappear or say they couldn't purchase for some other reason.

The trick I've found for this is to pre-sell. Would you buy, now, knowing that the feature is on the roadmap and will be there soon?

If yes, and they vote with their credit card: we build ASAP, to fulfill the promise.

If no, it might mean you should not waste time on that feature.

>The trick I've found for this is to pre-sell. Would you buy, now, knowing that the feature is on the roadmap and will be there soon?

Yes, exactly! That's the same solution I landed on. I'd say, "Great! You can pre-pay for three months of service, and your billing cycle won’t start until that feature is available."

Great read. What success metric are you using? Total requests?

I've been working on increasing the number of folks using the service, and how many checks each account runs (since I charge per check, I'm motivated to make that experience the best I can)

> you'll have customers that demand you rewrite your app just because they gave you $9

I've also seen this first hand. Customer emails me 3 times within 3 days and one of those emails included him stating that "time is precious". He subscribed on the $7 / month tier... and then cancelled the next day anyway because he didnt even read what the product did... sigh

So... what happened?

Did 2 hours a week work? Is it profitable now? Is it your only job? If so how many years of 2 hours a week did it take to become a livable income?

I love this philosophy of beating out the enshittification and not hypergrowing.

Many of those questions are answerable from the article. It’s 2 hours a day, it has a $500 MRR, they still have a full time job

Congrats on four years, Max! Thanks for mentioning my book, glad to hear it has been helpful!