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6 tips from real indie hacker journeys.

Product · Raul Raul

Record videos with your face in the corner

Use Loom or similar tools to record product walkthroughs with your face visible in the corner. People trust faces. These videos work as blog post embeds, YouTube content, and social proof simultaneously. Pages with face-in-corner walkthroughs consistently convert better than text-only pages.

Product · Cristian Cristian

Build products from real client problems, not speculation

Every Cozmoslabs product started with a problem their clients kept running into. They do not build on speculation or trends. When you know a product will take a year to execute, you need to be certain the problem is real. Spot the pattern in client requests, validate that the pain is genuine, and only then commit to building. Being picky about what you build is a feature, not a limitation.

Product · Mircea Mircea

Build the simplest version first

Mircea built SingleFax in a weekend by refusing to add anything beyond the core action: upload, enter a number, pay, send. No user accounts, no dashboards, no analytics. If your v1 takes longer than a week, you're building too much. Strip it down until a complete stranger can use it in under 60 seconds.

Product · Mircea Mircea

Remove all friction: no signup, no subscription

Every form field you add, every account creation step, every subscription commitment is a point where customers leave. I removed all of them. No signup, no login, no monthly plan. Just pay and use. For occasional-use products, this is the difference between making money and making nothing.

Product · Raul Raul

Manual curation is a moat, not a limitation

Algorithms can scrape job boards. Nobody can automate the judgment call of "is this company actually calm or just marketing itself as calm?" Raul manually researches every company in his directory, checking employee tenure, real policies, and community feedback. That process is slow, but it's the entire value proposition. What feels like a bottleneck is actually what customers are paying for.

Product · Raul Raul

Start with a spreadsheet, not a SaaS

Raul's entire business started as a personal spreadsheet shared with friends. He didn't buy a domain, set up payments, or write a line of code until real people asked him to keep going. A spreadsheet forces you to do the work manually, which teaches you what the actual product is. If your idea can't survive as a spreadsheet first, it probably won't survive as a SaaS either.