Why You Should Stop Fearing Shipping

As a novice indie hacker my biggest fear to overcome is shipping. I spent way too much time developing my idea into a product and then I suddenly fell anxious when it’s time to show it to the world.

What if they laugh? What if it’s not good enough? What if nobody cares?

These are some of the questions that I start to think about and the hard truth is that even if those things where to happen none of it really matters for your success!

If you really want to be successful as an indie hacker you must care about the right things:

  1. Solving a really painful problem so that customers are willing to pay you for solving it.

  2. Shipping so that you know if your solution is actually a solution that people care about enough to pay (redundant but must be understood).

  3. Caring only about the actual process on finding and latching on to the right solution, not the idea that you have.

As Naval Ravikant said on twitter:

My number one predictor of whether or not a company will find product-market fit: High shipping cadence.

— Naval (@naval) May 14, 2019

And also Paul Graham:

I would not disagree with that. It might sound like you could spoof this heuristic by constantly shipping random crap. But no one can stand doing that for long. So in practice shipping regularly means you're on the track.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) May 14, 2019

To be successful then you should start caring more about finding the right thing to solve and pursuing it with relentless focus. While also caring about the solution enough to be motivated to pursuit it and find the right angle for it to work with the market that wants it.

Two months ago I stopped being fearful about shipping my ideas and launched my first paid product on product hunt.

It was not one of the top products of the day and it didn’t make me rich overnight (I only earned like $90).

But the truth is that it was an amazing learning experience where I got people visiting my application and actually buying it! A guy from Australia bought it even thought I’m in Mexico, how cool is that?

Now I’m a little ahead, I know a little more about selling online and I validated that I can make it work!

So, what’s stopping you from getting closer to your goals?

Join my newsletter

If you want to receive my latest essays and interesting finds subscribe to my list: