📅 Today marks 6️⃣ years since I left my job to start my indie-hacker journey. We're now making millions a year but we started from 0, many times. Here’s a list of semi-controversial beliefs I have about bootstrapping a successful product: • Don’t waste time on a rebrand. You

📅 Today marks 6️⃣ years since I left my job to start my indie-hacker journey. We're now making millions a year but we started from 0, many times. Here’s a list of semi-controversial beliefs I have about bootstrapping a successful product: • Don’t waste time on a rebrand. You don’t have a brand; you have a product barely making $2k a month. • .com, .io, .so, .ai – in the end, no one cares. • Don’t think affiliation will fix your acquisition issues. It’ll just create another acquisition problem: acquiring affiliate partners. • There is no silver bullet. There isn’t one thing that will grow your product from 0 to 1, but many things will grow it from 0.10 to 0.11. • If you don’t know where to begin, copy what works best. That probably means emulating the best in class, not your competitors: Stripe for documentation, Amazon for conversion, Apple for copywriting. Expand your "copy-scope". • Once you find an acquisition channel that works, forget everything else. Every dollar spent elsewhere is a dollar that could have been spent with a guaranteed and increasing return since you’ll get better at this acquisition channel. • Be the generalist, hire specialists. The best way to work with people better than you is to find those who excel at one thing. People who are good at everything will not work for you; they’ll build their own company. • Never offer a plan with “unlimited” features. It leaves money on the table for “whale” customers who could make up 70% of your revenue. • If you can’t offer both a cheap plan and exceptional support, then don’t offer a cheap plan. Feature-gating support means potential big customers will have a terrible experience and look elsewhere, and worse, you’ll never hear from them. • There is absolutely no reason not to add Google login and any relevant social logins to your signup page. • Read all your competitors’ reviews on G2/Capterra, several times per year. • It’s delusional to think that if you can make it to $10k MRR, you’ll magically get to $100k MRR. There's this little thing called churn you know. • If you share your success on Twitter, you will get copied, 100%. There’s no way around it. • People who tell you, “Build this feature and I’ll subscribe,” will never subscribe to your SaaS. • “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick are the best 130 pages you’ll ever read about product development. • The easiest way to sell your product when your start from 0 is to provide value to your target-demographic for free: participate in forums, engage in Facebook groups, answer on Twitter. People will like you, want to know more about you and will be open to learn about your thing. • Launching on ProductHunt is a nice baptism of fire if you’ve never launched anything, but don’t overthink it. It’s not as impactful as it used to be. • You’re probably never going to sell your SaaS for a 10x multiple. Heck you'll probably never be able to sell your SaaS at all. That doesn’t mean you don’t have a great asset but 2-5x multiple is what happens in real life 99% of the time.