iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

#focus #startup #product #wearable | Will Ahmed | 83 comments

Listening to your customer is really important and one of the highest leverage things you can do as a founder but it also needs to be contextualized. Use it as a guideline, NOT the roadmap. Building based on feedback only makes you build by committee, not vision. www.linkedin.com/posts/willah...

linkedin.com

“Is that a watch?” No, it’s a WHOOP. “Why doesn’t it tell the time?” This is a popular conversation I find myself in. The short answer is that Whoop is great… | 83 comments on LinkedIn

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You might ask "What % of users use this feature?", see that it's 10% (which might be, like, 2 people total), and decide it's a failure. But the RIGHT question is "Of users who *know* about this feature, what % use it?". Poor marketing and onboarding/discoverability is your problem, not the feature.

I think b2b saas operators likely shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to interpreting data. We want to be data-driven to believe we make the right decisions, but our sample sizes are so extremely small that the data often suffers from sampling and survivorship bias, let me explain:

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Ex: I owe much of my past/present wisdom to Patrick McKenzie (@patio11), but I also think there are nuances to blanket advice like "keep charging more". It's great beginner advice, but bad at scale; it locks you out of entire market segments and forces competition against more sophisticated co's

Now that I'm where they once were, I've found MUCH more success leaning on my intuition and discarding the old guard's advice, mainly because a lot of it came from a vastly different time (pre-covid, pre-LLMs). Plus, whether we succeed or fail, I'd feel better having followed my own decisions.

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When I first started my SaaS nearly a decade ago, I was in my mid-20s with little experience, so I leaned heavily on the wisdom of those who had already been building successful businesses for years. Their advice became SaaS best practices.

Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 13/03/2025

Question, am I laughably behind if I'm still using webpack (in ruby on rails)?

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Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 03/03/2025

Flipper's great, man, thanks

Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 26/02/2025

Bananas make smoothies taste better but they also have polyphenol oxidase which oxidize the (good) polyphenols in stuff like blueberries btw.

Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 13/02/2025

The inverse of this is when I introduce bugs to a feature and people complain and then I'm like oh ok people really do use this feature.

Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 13/02/2025

Product hack: If you're unsure whether or not you need to support a legacy feature, just remove it and see if anyone complains. This has saved me a ton of time and money (e.g. removing integrations that cost $ but no one really cared for).

Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 13/02/2025

That's not our sun in this shot, it's just a diagram to show the size of our solar system compared to a small bit of the Carina nebula, which itself is 7,500 light years away from us

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Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 12/02/2025

Incredible content

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Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 06/02/2025

One does not simply *ignore* the baby seal

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SEC.gov | The Journey BeginsLock

New SEC clarity on crypto tokens should open up a new wave of startups in America. Not dissimilar to the deregulation of cannabis and consumer drones a decade ago. www.sec.gov/newsroom/spe...

sec.gov

The Journey Begins Commissioner Hester M. Peirce February 4, 2025

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All companies at $0 MRR have the exact same problem, and companies after $20k MRR, $50k MRR, and so on have different sets of overlapping problems. Knowing what level of maturity a person's company is at provides the context necessary to give proper advice, introductions, actionable suggestions.

But yeah, /open started as a way to get real data on how companies grow and then became a justification for MRR brags. I still think MRR transparency is good, but rather than brags, to signal company maturity:

it's the lowest-hanging fruit. The ones who venture into other industries and do the hard work of figuring out a repeatable sales channel are far and fewer in between. Moreover, selling SaaS to say, funeral home directors, isn't glamorous and doesn't yield a lot of clout ;)

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The selling to other indies and reddit marketing also comes across as laziness to me. I, too, would love to sell to people exactly like me and wish I could sustain a growing business by simply posting on social media. I think it's a sampling bias issue. We see a lot of these types because (cont'd)

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I totally just reiterated what you said in your other post 😅 either way, totally agree. Where are you finding valuable discussions about building businesses now?

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Totally agree. Post-covid, it seems to have been co-opted by a cohort that cared more about being seen as a maker than actually making. I still think there's a lot of value in dedicated, intentional, small communities, the main channels like Twitter and major subreddits are just saturated now.

I guess my point is, in a healthy community, I WANT to know what everyone is working on and I'd want to hear from them semi-regularly. The no-promote rule in subs really goes against this for the sake of less noise, which I think you can avoid in other ways.

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I will also admit that there are a lot of inertia headwinds at play here (which is why people congregate on reddit). You can't just build-it-and-they-will-come, and I'm admittedly not great at creating and growing communities myself.

Even though my entire following list is all indie hackers (remember follow lists?), I still find bsky (and Twitter) pretty poor at organizing #SaaS discussions. Maybe the solutions are: 1. Invite/verified-only SaaS subreddits 2. Invite/verified-only SaaS Discord servers

TL;DR various subreddits are getting overwhelmed by self-promos so they've instituted weird rules, leading to people revolting. I'm only fascinated by this because: 1. Reddit is fantastic for organically building communities 2. Reddit's startup communities are plagued by low-quality promotions

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Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 01/02/2025

It's surprising that there are already ones listed from 2024, I wonder what the story was there (maybe a lot of pivots?). Some also still have sites so I'm not sure what qualifies as inactive here

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When I realized this, I decided that the only thing in my control was how fast it took to ship and distribute each new feature. Easier said than done since the larger a codebase/product gets, the slower new features take to ship!

Haha no worries mate just offering some unsolicited feedback 😛

It does to me but hey, maybe I'm not your target audience :)

Yes but I also try to not remark negatively about customers' attention spans and instead treat it as a matter of respecting their time 😛

Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 27/01/2025

I wouldn't call it a "gen tiktok" thing, it's just recognition that you probably exist in a heavily competitive space and you need to prove your value prop asap. Consider all the fake offers and absolute time wasters on the internet, you still need to signal you're not one of them at bare minimum

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Folks who are starting out and are the most active in talking SaaS are desperate to promote. But successful people don't really need to talk about SaaS, they just operate. There are mastermind groups, but those are kind of dead. Maybe SaaS just isn't an interesting subject past a certain MRR

Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 27/01/2025

It's been interesting to see reddit startup discourse go crazy due to the amount of bots and promotional posts, meanwhile there are bsky threads about how to cross-promote your startup all over reddit. There seem to be no good communities to talk SaaS. It's actually a double-pronged issue...

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Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 24/01/2025

Just disabled the auto-renew on two .com domains that hadn't been used since 2016. RIP to the side projects that never came to fruition: latescratch .com -> Some kinda fantasy sports tool? rumblebros .com -> Podcasts with my co-founder? If anyone wants to reserve them for cheap, let me know ;)

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Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 11/01/2025

In our own little ways, we tried. And at every step of the way, we were disparaged and called SJWs, snowflakes, woke, and pushed in front of trains, all because we wanted other people to have nice things, too. Then at some point I grew older and it was healthier for me to look out for myself 🤷

Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 03/01/2025

Pretty interesting; unsure if I'm a good customer fit (there also doesn't appear to be pricing info yet) but I'd love to talk more about how this might work at scale.

Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 03/01/2025

Are you finding that the average youtube video has relevant subtitles, or is a lot of it auto-generated slop still? I've been considering using something like this so I appreciate the work, just feel like the transcriptions aren't all there for the average video in my industry yet

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Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 02/01/2025

I'm also curious what stage most people are at, advice @ 0-1k mrr is totally different from 10k-100k, for instance. I'm sure there are more at 0-1k but the internet is rife with starter advice. I don't think people need another person telling them to "do marketing"

Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 02/01/2025

For 2025, what kind of content do #indiehackers wish to see on bsky that I could talk about? I have almost a decade of indie hacking experience and have cultivated many lessons and hot takes.

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Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 30/12/2024

Just do high value tasks only, and the highest value thing you can achieve is product market fit, if not already there. And the way to get there is simply talking to people, building, and selling.

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Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 30/12/2024

I once did a swot analysis for my startup back in 2011 (I was like 22). That was the startup that failed the hardest of all, tons of time and money wasted

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Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 26/12/2024

Starting with a bad idea isn't awful, you can still organically come up with new ideas from that iteration. But the best way IME is by figuring out which audience you want to solve for first, then talking endlessly with them to figure out which of their shared problems you should solve.

Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 26/12/2024

The best way to start is coming up with an idea organically OR from deeply researching, not because it sounds good on paper. Forcing yourself to start can be good for the sake of inertia, but always ends up being poor founder fit. You can still start, just don't expect that iteration to succeed.

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Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 24/12/2024

I think you provided great counter examples and I agree with all. IMO the game is fine, it's just that ball as entertainment also has to compete against MUCH better video games, films/movies, social media, and so on now for attention. Aren't ratings just down across the board?

Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 24/12/2024

It's a neat idea, especially how it works out for the Olympics etc, but won't be a reality anytime soon. No one would be interested in watching a Minnesota or OKC game, meaning millions lost for those teams/cities/staff. LA alone would need to be split into 10 teams to account for the talent

Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 23/12/2024

😂 It's actually unreasonable that I'll pay the equivalent of $20/mo in unused domains but refuse to pay for Disney+ and other services

Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 23/12/2024

I'd be lying if I said I haven't been guilty of doing this in the past. Still waiting to use about 8 of them for something ;)

Kevin Ko @kokev.in · 22/12/2024

I'll be honest: I play a trick on idea-stage founders. I tell them to talk to 50 prospective customers first. The deceit is that if you can't find 50 people *now*, you won't find them *after* you've launched, either. This helps founders rethink which audience they can actually reach and sell to.