BC STARTUPS

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Jon Yongfook
@yongfook 7 years, 7 months ago 2025 views

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Candid and potentially controversial series of tweets coming up... (I hear twitter is good for that sort of thing 😅) read 👇🏻

Here’s what it feels like to launch something to the indie maker community:

Launching a free, open source tool:
“This is awesome! You’re awesome!”

Launching a commercial tool:
“TWO DOLLARS? You are literally Hitler”

I’m exaggerating for comedic effect of course. But there’s a lesson here...

I knew before I started working on Promomatic to be very wary of building a utility tool for makers. Makers are by definition problem solvers and their favorite hobby is finding a better / faster / cheaper way to do what your product does.

It’s so tempting to build things for makers because they seem accessible (thanks to PH, IH, Reddit etc) and you get an immediate feedback loop.

But I see too many indie makers getting seduced into an endless loop of building products for other makers and ending up generating little to no revenue.

I don’t think there is a long term business opportunity in “utility” tools for indie makers. It’s fine to launch to that audience, but you need to quickly move up the value chain if you want to survive.

As an entrepreneur you don’t want an individual pondering whether your product is worth a single digit dollar amount. You want a *business* to not bat an eye at putting your 3-digit monthly / annual subscription on the corporate card because you solve such a valuable problem.

So, don’t do what I’m doing. My goal is not to sell to indie makers. My long term goal is to move up the value chain to businesses. For that, I will need longer than 30 days.

Plus, launching in and of itself is the majority of the challenge for me right now. Turning one of these things into an actual business, that can come later :)

In summary, don’t expect to make money from tools aimed at indie makers. If you do find yourself in that situation and you want to grow revenue, you’ll need to move up the value chain to SMEs.

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