Recently I take part in a study group about startups covered by USP. Called “Zero to One”, probably the title was stolen from Peter Thiel’s book. In one of the meetings, we had the pleasure to talk with a guy that found 19 startups. He said some cool things, those things stay hitting my head. So I decided to write about it.

The year of 2024 was one of the most important years of my career, I decided to study things that I’m addicted. Build my ideas and the principal factor, try to sell these ideas.

I build more than 5 products.

Onde Hoje, SyncSpot, OpenLawBrasil, Matriculator & Bundler. Some of them give to me some money, but not what I was expecting.

In this process,I learn some cool things about MPVs, between them:

5 Questions to Ask Before your MVP

0. Can I explain it to my mom?

The idea should be simple, and the only way to test it, is trying to explain it for people that don’t know anything about the subject.

1. Distribution

All these products that I build have a distribution problem, so I perceive that just build the software is not enough. Usually what the indie hackers are doing, is to build the software in public, sharing their results using Twitter, Linkedin, and other social networks. Other plataforms like Reddit, Hacker News, and Product Hunt are good places to share your product.

2. Market Size.

Not only the market size, but who are the players in this market. Let’s say that you are building a B2B product, companies usually need a confirmation that you will be capable to serve them. So your team should be trustable. Besides that the market itself, it should be big enough, the work to build a product that will serve a small market is the same to build a product that will serve a big market. I mean, the headache is the same. Obviously, the return is different.

3. Client dependency.

Here we have some types of depencies, like: Emotional, Financial, and Technical.

If you are building a product that alraedy have a lot of competitors, you are not inovating, you just need to find the lacks of the competitors and build a better product. But if you are building a product that doesn’t have competitors, you need to find the people that will use your product, and this is a hard work.

This dependency thing is realted to painkillers and vitamins. Painkillers are products that solve a problem, and vitamins are products that make your life better. The painkillers are the best products to build, because people will pay for it. The vitamins are good products to build, but people will not pay for it.

4. Mean Ticket and recurrence.

Such a good topic, as a indie hacker, probably you don’t want big problems, so, build a product with a pay once, use forever is a good idea.