Pick an idea you can defend with a sentence
If you can't describe what your product does and who it's for in one sentence, you don't have a positioning yet — you have a feature set. Spend a day writing 10 candidate one-liners before you write a line of code.
- Who, specifically, has this pain?
- What's the current ugly workaround they use?
- Why are you uniquely placed to ship a fix?
Ship the smallest thing that's chargeable
The first version should be embarrassing in scope but never in quality. Pick one workflow, do it better than anything else on the market, and put a paywall on it from day one. Free-tier-first scales into a churn problem six months in.
Build distribution before you build features
Most indie founders over-index on product. The successful ones treat distribution as the product. That means a directory listing, a launch on Product Hunt or Startup Spotlight, a public X account, an SEO landing page per use case, and an embeddable badge that drives backlinks.
If you don't have a plan for the first 100 visitors before launch day, you don't have a launch — you have a deployment.
Optimize for boring metrics, not vanity
Weekly active payers and 30-day retention are the only two numbers that matter in the first six months. Traffic, signups, and X likes are distractions. Cut anything that doesn't move those two.
When in doubt, ship faster
Every week you don't ship is a week your competitors do. Set a one-week ship cadence, even if the thing you ship is a copy change or a new pricing tier. Momentum compounds.