Why
I was inspired by levels and yongfook to make a 12 startups in 12 months project, starting from around July 2023 to July 2024.
However, I want to put my own spin on it and make it 2 startups in 12 months so I can have a longer time frame to build and market the apps.
The reasons to do this, as levels says:
Problem one: finishing We creatives have one common problem: finishing things.
Problem two: launching Fear of failure.
S1: Bookkss (🪦 12/23)
The first startup was Bookkss (July 2023 – September 2023).
What went well:
- The relatively fast iteration speed using Vite (next time we’ll use Next).
- It was fun to build. 😃
What I learned from this startup:
- Use a styling library for faster development, like Material UI.
- Target B2B niches (AI, etc.) for indie hackers, see source here.
- Manage feature creep (lock down features of MVP) – build that out, and get feedback from users.
- Switching from Next to Vite to then back to Next (this was my bad as I enabled the beta App router and had really slow site speeds for some reason, I wasn’t able to diagnose it so I switched to Vite which solved the slow speeds, but I lost SSR (for SEO) which I wanted so I’m in the process of switching back to Next. This is due to each review being kind of like a blog post so we need web crawlers like Google to show these information pieces up on SERPs).
- Practice marketing, i.e., any kind of activity aligned to growth that does not involve building features, as explained here.
S2: HelloRemote (🪦 12/23)
HelloRemote @ helloremote.dev is a job board for remote jobs.
S3 and S4: XTrack and SubsTrackr (🪦 )
XTrack and SubsTrackr help users track tasks and subscriptions, respectively.
- The first one is deployed onto Vercel and uses Serverless technology with Supabase.
- The second one used the t3 stack (Next.js, TypeScript, tRPC, Prisma, NextAuth) and is deployed on Vercel.
Marketing Plan
Once the apps are done-ish, marketing should consist of:
- Posting on HackerNews
- Posting on ProductHunt
- Posting on Reddit
- Engaging on Quora
- Being more active on Twitter/X
- Building in public, as suggested here
- Considering paid ads
- Exploring TikTok
- Using Instagram
- Creating content on YouTube
edit June 2024 – currently the surviving startup is xtrack.ing. Hope it’s subject to the Lindy effect.
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