Mindset Ask specific questions that reveal the real role
Builds systems that make hiring decisions better
Generic interview questions ("tell me about yourself," "what are your weaknesses") produce rehearsed answers and almost no signal. Two questions that consistently produce the opposite are "What does a typical day look like in this role?" and "What separates a great hire from an average one?" The first forces the hiring manager to describe the real job instead of the job description. The second forces them to articulate the dimension on which people actually succeed or fail. Use the answers to design the rest of the interview. If a hiring manager cannot answer either clearly, the role is not ready to be filled.
Related advice
Flavius D. Build for a practice everyone agrees is right but nobody does
The richest product territory is the gap between "known best practice" and "what people actually do." Structured interviews are universally accepted as the strongest predictor of job performance, and almost nobody runs them. Double-entry bookkeeping, security key logins, automated tests, pre-commit hooks: same pattern. Look for a practice that experts in your industry agree is correct and operators skip because it is inconvenient, then build the tool that makes the right thing the easy thing. The onboarding pitch writes itself.
Flavius D. Price against the cost of the mistake, not your competitors
For tools that sit on top of high-stakes decisions (hiring, compliance, security, legal), the wrong benchmark is competitor pricing. The right benchmark is the cost of one bad outcome. Pace is built for hiring, where a single bad hire typically costs one to two times the annual salary once you factor in ramp, opportunity cost, severance, and team drag. A tool that prevents one bad hire a year is paying for itself many times over at almost any price. Teach your prospects to do that math in the first five minutes of the demo, and pricing objections mostly go away.
Mircea Agency experience is a superpower for shipping fast
If you've spent years building software for clients, you already have the hardest skill in indie hacking: the ability to ship. You know how to scope, build, deploy, and handle payments. Stop thinking of agency experience as a disadvantage. Mircea built SingleFax in a weekend because he'd already solved every technical problem it required, just for other people's businesses.
Raul Build from personal pain, not market research
Raul didn't do market research or competitive analysis. He built exactly the thing he wished existed when he was fired and job hunting. Personal pain gives you an unfair advantage: you know the problem deeply, you can tell real solutions from fake ones, and you won't lose motivation when growth is slow because you genuinely care about the problem.
Extracted from
Indie TM #7: News as a Traffic Locomotive