Useful real life conversations feel like they're "going somewhere" whereas conversations with agents feel on going. It's a an annoying little thing. I used the /office-hours skill from gstack and the conversation actually came to a useful guided decision and close.

I went through @DrewAutomates analysis of 19 @starter_story interviews to find what actually gets founders to $10K MRR — here are the patterns. 0 of them credited their product as the reason they grew. Every one pointed to distribution first. Here's how they actually got users — with the real numbers. (Full article linked at the end) ⬇️ 1/9

Idea selection: 17 of 19 founders said pick a proven idea, not a novel one — "if it's been done before, you know people want it." Tibo put it bluntly: you'll have a 90% failure rate, so compress the search into weeks, not years. The best ideas came from real pain — Hassam automated the 20-30 hrs/week he was wasting on Amazon research. Others mined where users already complain: Louis read thousands of TikTok comments, and Sam dumped days of Discord chat into ChatGPT to "list all pain points." Pontus used Ahrefs to find apps with both organic and paid traffic (a strong demand signal) and built a better version — while Bhanu pulls 90% of his traffic from 50 free tools, not his main product. 8/9

Last week I decided to join @shipordie_ On Saturday we had a meet&great with @jackfriks and @marclou and the entire crew, had a chance to show what we've been working on and get feedback. I know so many people who've working on indie hacking on their own in the dark over the last 7 years and haven't gotten that magical FIRST user. What makes this group interesting is that everyone here is at different points in the journey, but all looking to get better. The entire program is run through a discord, as well as the ShiporDie site, where you do the initial log in and set your "mission" - either a mission to launch in 30 days or market in 30 days. Here's what works well:

4. They're iterating like crazy. When the project launched, it was basically a way for people to gamify the process of launching a startup every 30 days. Quickly they added a Marketing track. The marketing was just B2C SaaS. I shared that I'm working on a B2B SaaS and would love a track on that (email, linkedin, etc) - and it looks like it's on the way.