Indie TM #15: Pick a Customer Before Another Feature

Two weeks after a photograph tried to become a living room, Indie TM #15 returned to one founder and one product. Andrei Gudiu brought ACTE123. The full first-person story is in his journey. This recap is what the room did to the plan.

What Andrei put on the table

Motorcycles kept sending Andrei to vehicle registration. On 26 October 2024 he read a board where several cases shared seven requirements.

A procedure plus a scenario yields a versioned plan. ACTE123 asks the questions and turns the answers into steps, requirements, fees, and forms.

The Dumbrăvița story showed why the questions matter. One counter stamped a translated contract. The next required an authorized translation and the English original. One missing question caused another trip.

The room asked how the systems connect

Timișoara has a portal. Lugoj uses ConnectX. The room argued that the hard part is the walk between institutions, not the login inside one portal. Access to RO-ID sounded closer to PSD2 due diligence than to opening another form. GOV.UK offered the useful comparison. It asks questions and produces a printable plan, even when the final step still happens in person.

Then the roast started, and it was about the homepage, not the JSON.

This is several companies

The room’s diagnosis was rude and useful. ACTE123 is a personal vault, an org procedure tool, a shareable profile, a marketplace, a swipe UI, a voice counter, a PDF mapper, a civic campaign, and an SEO publisher. That is too many sentences for one landing page and too many buyers for one sales call. The room wanted Andrei to pick the org that would write its own procedure. Kindergartens, registration firms, apartment admins, or a workshop could be that customer. Do not pitch ten solutions to a person who only needed a checklist.

The kindergarten that belongs to someone’s sister became the concrete objection. Inspectors want a paper file. Printing from the system looks like extra work. Until you can name the pain that makes her pay, you do not have a B2B product. You have a relative being polite.

Call fifty kindergartens before you add another mode

Validation advice was unfashionably analog. Record a two-minute video for kindergartens. Call fifty of them in Timiș. Do not lead with the solution. Ask what hurts. The sister who will not switch is the interview, not the objection to talk around. A model that turns an existing paper procedure into a form matters only after someone has said they want that form.

Andrei already wanted a human who has worked registrations and can type. The room treated that hire as more important than another model. A model can draft much of a procedure. The practitioner must finish the part that sends people home.

Write Sardinia, then hope the models copy you

Marketing, the question from the start of the night, finally got a plan. Programmatic pages should cover long-tail procedures such as registering a car brought from Sardinia, not “car registration” as a category. Watch the news for the next institution mess and publish a guide while Google is still hungry. The prize above both is to become the source language models cite when someone asks what papers they need. The plan is the article. The article is the plan.

It is also a way to stay B2C forever. The room let the SEO sit next to the B2B call list and did not pretend they are the same calendar.

Fifteen editions in

Edition fourteen asked who pays for a sofa that exists only in a photograph. Edition fifteen made the room ask who pays for this queue before Andrei builds another feature. The answer was one customer who already keeps a file, fifty calls before another mode, and a homepage that sells one job. The afterparty invitation sent us to Check-Inn to keep talking about the jump from zero to one. See you at the sixteenth.