Guides on building a waitlist, validating your idea, and getting your first 100 users. From an indie dev, for indie devs and makers.
Support is the highest-quality research channel a small product has, and the fastest way to burn out if you treat it as an obligation. How to answer, what to automate, and how to say no.
RouzbehSeptember 2
Picking the number is one problem, presenting it is another. Plan names, the free tier decision, trials and card-up-front, annual billing, and the things founders add that quietly cost them customers.
RouzbehSeptember 1
At twenty users churn is not a metric, it is twenty stories you can read individually. The most common cause is not a missing feature, it is that the problem does not happen often enough to build a habit around.
RouzbehAugust 28
Most onboarding advice assumes a product team and a tooling budget. At ten users the fix is not a guided tour, it is the empty state, one obvious first action, and doing it by hand while you still can.
RouzbehAugust 27
Two different tactics get called the same thing. Submitting to directories is a small one-off. Running one is a content asset that compounds, and it only works if the pages say something nobody else has.
RouzbehAugust 25
MCP connects a model to live data. RAG compresses a corpus that will not fit in a prompt. They solve different problems, and picking the wrong one produces confident wrong answers.
RouzbehAugust 22
Launching turns a pitch from a story into evidence, and that changes who will talk to you and what they ask. Whether to raise at all, the numbers investors look at first, and where to find the right ones.
RouzbehAugust 20
The useful output of competitor research is not a grid of ticks. It is a list of the specific reasons people leave each tool, and where to find those reasons written down.
RouzbehAugust 19
A signup with no source attached cannot be repeated. The twenty minute setup, the UTM naming that does not turn into a mess, and the three reasons your best channel will look like direct traffic.
RouzbehAugust 16
Scoping is a subtraction problem, not an addition one. The one-sentence test for what stays, the five things that always creep in, and why doing part of it by hand is a feature.
RouzbehAugust 14
Ten conversations will tell you more than a thousand signups, but only if you stop asking about your idea. Where to find people, the questions that work, and how to read the answers honestly.
RouzbehAugust 13
A flat waitlist is four different problems wearing the same coat. How to work out whether you have a traffic problem, a page problem, an audience problem, or an idea problem, before you fix the wrong one.
RouzbehAugust 11