The Importance of Adaptability for SaaS Startups: Insights from Indie Creators

It’s not easy to go the indie route and get a hit product right from the get-go. Although, with so many success stories online, it’s easy for someone to believe that quitting their job, building a software product, and posting about it online is the road to thousands of followers and dollars in revenue.

The reality is that there is so much survivorship bias out there, not only in the startup world. That’s one of the reasons why the “build in public” movement became so popular. We like seeing the journey when it’s in progress rather than seeing a special feature pop up in the media “after the fact”.

But you only get to that point through iteration and constant progression. Not getting hung up with any particular idea but adapting to the changes of the market, recognizing when a product doesn’t work, and pursuing a different one.

These are all part of the journey ahead and we will see how that has worked for some of the folks out there who are constantly building, launching, and sharing their journey online.

Every indie creator has a different timeline

You know what they say about “overnight successes”, they are several years in the making. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who “made it” in under a year. And by that, I mean one year of doing it full-time.

If you’re starting from scratch, you have to be prepared to go for more than one year without income.

There’s a difference between doing it on the side along the main job and doing it as the main source of income.

For instance, Jason Leow has done it for 5-6 years while keeping his main job.

And, on the other hand, Ayush Chaturvedi has done it for more than 2 years now.

He says: “I started in early 2021, but officially quit my job to go indie in August 2021.”

In the case of Simon Daley, it’s been a mix of both. Balancing between his own stuff and client projects.

“I had a false start you could say in 2019. I left my full-time place of work to go solo but later that year I returned to client work because I had some tempting offers.”

He flirted with the idea before getting committed and going full-time.

“I then made the difficult decision to go full-time indie hacker from March this year”

So you see, it’s not a clear-cut answer to what works best. I personally quit my job to go solo in 2021, realized how hard that was, and accepted an offer from another company. It wasn’t until February 2022 that I finally quit for real. I’ve been going on my own ever since.

If at first you don’t succeed…

At the start, the first product is not the “big hit” we think. There are several others along the way until you find one that either brings the most revenue or attracts the most users.

These users can then enter the creator's world and discover what else he has built or what’s that he has to offer.

In Jason’s case, his most successful product is his plugins for Carrd. He’s built others before but not to a sizable income level. Products like “GoLifelog” and “Sheet2Bio”.

For Ayush, his top product is called “Elephas”, a product he’s collaborating on with an indie dev. It is like ChatGPT everywhere for the Mac.

If you don’t know him yet, he’s the guy who did a crazy 25 products in 25 weeks challenge.

You’d think that he was launching SaaS products every week. But you’d be wrong. He started building quick info products that were mostly a curation of resources.

Here are some of those:

• Indie Masterminds
• Blue Bird Essentials
• Copy OS
• Launch Like a Pro
• Maker Toolkit

Although, in his portfolio, not every successful product is measured in terms of money.

Ayush mentions this.

“Elephas.app is best in terms of revenue.

Indie Masterminds is the next best, but it's way more fulfilling because I get to work directly with people.”

Now if we look at Simon, we’ll see a similar but different situation. His most successful product, Micro Assets, also built by collaboration, is one of his most recent ones.

“It’s one of those projects that seemed to resonate with people from the very beginning and subscriber growth doesn’t seem to be slowing.”

He also built and launched “SaaS Themes” and “Hacker Cabin” before.

You see now the trend of getting something that works after a couple of tries and having been doing this for a while already.

Every SaaS startup had a first version

Iterating is not only useful for finding a “winning” idea. It is also useful for developing and improving the original concept into a product that people need and want to pay for.

And when we look at a successful product, it’s too easy to overlook all the processes it took to get there. It’s never a straight path. There’s a great deal of “figuring stuff out”, asking for feedback, seeing the changes in the market, and responding accordingly.

Jason’s case illustrates this well.

“Plugins For Carrd launched in Dec 2020 as a side project. It started for fun. I was learning to code, learning Vue.js, and made tiny standalone apps that I realized could be embedded in Carrd as a feature.”

What started as a little project to get some practice in coding, became something more tangible that started taking shape.

“I went and created templates for it even before the Seller Program on Carrd existed. I only had free templates at the start, but seeing the reception to the free ones, I then launched my first paid plugin (a mobile navbar) in March 2021.”

For Ayush, the product started small by solving one specific problem and then it grew from there.

“For Elephas, when we started, it was a simple app to access the best AI features on your Mac Because we thought that folks who valued deep work couldn't be on ChatGPT or OpenAI playground all day.”

And what happened with Simon was what many of us need to take to heart more often; Don’t build a big thing that no one cares about but instead start small and gauge the interest in it.

“We both agreed clearly right from the beginning to not get too complicated. We just started with a newsletter…”  “...We could have spent 6 months building a marketplace that nobody wanted but it was important for us to validate the idea.”

And once you start getting traction and seeing that there’s interest, you can start putting more time and effort into growing the product further.

“Now that we have good growth and people approaching us for sponsorships or asking for their projects to be listed, we feel that we are almost at the stage to take some more baby steps into other areas.”

Not every idea turns into a successful product. And even for successful products, the initial idea is not what makes them successful.

It’s only when you keep building it, iterating with feedback, and paying attention to the market around you that your product becomes successful.

Case Study: How a failed product can give way to a successful one

Knowing when to quit or when to push forward is a tricky skill to develop. There are no “hard and fast” rules to follow. You only get experience by being in the trenches, doing it, failing, and then trying again.

That’s even more important in the AI era where everything moves so fast. And to show you how that can happen “in the wild”, here’s an example.

David Gutierrez is an indie hacker who has built many products. He’s no stranger to launching on ProductHunt. But even when you’ve done it a few times before, there’s no guarantee of success in the future.

He launched a product called “PicAvatar” and announced it on Twitter. It did very well by many people’s standards. After all, having 200 users from an initial launch is not something to scoff at.

But despite that initial traction and getting many people to use the product, it didn’t turn any profit.

Some people, when facing a situation like that, would be like “Oh my product is trash, maybe the idea sucked, I’m gonna go build something else”.

What he did instead was talk about lessons learned and thank those who supported him in the launch.

From here, one can scrap the project and move on to something else. But that’s where the adaptability part comes in.

He not only took lessons from that experience to improve the next products, he did much more than that. In this case, that was repurposing the code and functionalities of the previous product to create another one that solves an actual need.

And he went on to launch again on ProductHunt in just 7 days.

Building on the buzz generated from the previous launch, this one did even better.

Not only was the launch successful, but the new product outperformed the previous one by a large margin.

This goes to show that “adaptability” doesn’t mean completely pivoting away from the initial idea. It’s about finding what didn’t work and why it didn’t work before moving on.

There are still surprises around the corner

Even when you have internalized the concepts of adaptability and constant iteration, there are still events that take you by surprise or situations you weren’t expecting.

This can happen at any point along the journey, much more often than you’d expect.

Sometimes it’s what’s hidden in plain sight, other times it’s when you were expecting a negative and instead found a positive, or you found the type of support you never imagined.

For Jason, the unexpected was finding out how a fun project would become one of his most successful products.

He says:

“I didn’t have expectations for it, yet it went on to do well. It was just a side project. The product was a by-product of me learning to code. I gave it away for free at the start. I didn’t set out with grand ambitions.”

It’s one of those serendipitous cases where you don’t build something and then go out and find a need. You don’t force it. Instead, you build it while developing a skill and then the opportunity reveals itself.

“Product-market fit found it (yes, PMF found it, not the other way around) and it rolled along on its own momentum. In fact, for the first 2 years, I hardly ever marketed it intentionally.”

Sometimes things work when you don’t try to make them work by any means necessary, you just let them grow organically and they can either blossom further or wither away.

“It just kept growing all on its own. In the 2nd year, the revenue doubled. That’s when I knew it had PMF and I was sitting on a golden opportunity all along.”

In Ayush’s case, the surprise was finding how most of the users came from an online channel he didn’t expect anything good from.

He mentions:

“We got great responses from places like Reddit and Hackernews. We expected hate there, but instead we got customers. And surprisingly we only got copycats on Twitter. We expected to get customers there, but didn't get any.”

“We never thought this would happen, it was a great learning experience.”

And for Simon, it wasn’t so much an unexpected but rather a challenge.

“Everything you want to work on, every idea you probably have, someone, somewhere already did it or is about to do it. It can feel like you are constantly about to tread on someone's toes.”

But even when it feels like it’s too difficult and the competition is too fierce, there are silver linings.

“Both times I made the leap, I’ve ended up meeting and working with some great people that I might not otherwise have met. I’ve been supported in many ways by people in different parts of the world - it's such a supportive community.”

Conclusion

There you have it. Indie hacking can be a tough space to be in. But being adaptable, paying attention to the market, and listening to what people say, will get you pretty far.

This way of work is not for everyone. Traditional entrepreneurship requires a certain profile that’s not common. Indie hacking is even less common.

If you get into it you’ll need greater risk tolerance and capacity for dealing with uncertainty more than usual.

But it’s a quite fulfilling way of working and making a living.

Simon mentions this.

“Anyone who has walked this path knows how tricky and long it can be, but the benefits of controlling my own schedule and working on projects I want, made it the right decision for me.”

That’s all I have for you this time.

Thanks a lot for reading. I hope this was useful and gave you a better perspective on this subject.

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