My Year of Exploration
jacek.migdal.pl
jacek.migdal.pl
> During this journey, my co-founder and I also came to a pivotal realisation about our partnership. While we shared a great personal rapport, our business visions diverged significantly. My inclination was towards sophisticated B2B enterprise technology, whereas my partner favoured B2C models focused on operational excellence. Our efforts to align our distinct approaches ultimately highlighted our partnership’s strengths and limitations. With mutual respect and acknowledgement of our differing paths, we decided to pursue our entrepreneurial journeys separately.
Who the heck writes like this? It seems like a potentially interesting aspect of the story (topics about relationships and disagreements usually are), but it's written in such a bland monotonic way that it extracts all the emotion and intrigue out of it. It reminds me of the language that businesses use when announcing layoffs.
I read blogs to connect with people, not LLMs. I have far far better things to do with my life then waste it stumbling through mostly-meaningless machine-generated word vomit.
If you don't feel it's worth your time to write the sentences, why on Earth should I feel it's worth my time to read them?
Like... where are the results? Where is the solution?
Indie hacking has a lot of faults but at least they jump in on a solution immediately rather than spending time looking for a co-founder and to raise a round.
Maybe you skimmed over a lot of actual work but this seems very self-congratulatory and like the article was written with the conclusion in mind ("join our waitlist") rather than being informative or targeted at any one audience.
Indie hacking might work for some businesses, but many companies need funding, and it is a viable path to create new companies.
This seems like an extremely software-focused business that could have an MVP written by the technical founder while typically I'd expect hardware, deep science (self-driving to name one), etc to need to raise money for obvious reasons.
What is Quesma's planned offering that requires an initial team larger than 1 to be able to bring to market?
There is a healthy amount of scepticism about one-man products in many enterprises due to quality bar, ability to have a quick turnaround, etc.
"Following a disciplined approach"
Were you not doing that before? If not, why switch now? What's the actual difference. Seems like a weird thing to say if it doesn't mean anything. It's like you're trying to boost the word count.
It's not even this particular line, it's just the whole post feels like it was written for the sake of a blog post, and not much else. It puts me off reading more.
For example, pet insurance in some markets is very underpenetrated. Similar to expensive hobby items.
The trick is to bundle it within the existing distribution channel and offer it as an addon.
> I always wanted to build a company. Startups are frequently the most efficient way to make a profound impact. Build something that people need.
> At first, the insurance sector seemed ripe for disruption. The customer experience was lacklustre, and incumbents were reaping substantial profits. Our thorough analysis of startups in this domain revealed numerous well-executed attempts to shake up the space. [...] While we did spot some niche opportunities, they didn’t pave the way to building a billion-dollar enterprise.
> Next, we shifted our focus to employment of record and payroll services, a sector that had grown post-Covid. Following a disciplined approach, we conducted customer interviews and market research. [...] Although the concept was sound, we missed the train. Our timing was too late.
> Our journey led us to technological advancements that agriculture should have adopted more widely. [...] Former ag tech founders warned us about this being a dead zone. Even with the most progressive farmers, the conversations were challenging. We simply lacked founder-market fit.
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I really do not get this approach of "I want to build a business. I have no idea what. I'll try something that VCs might like the sound of, but if I can't raise money after 2 months, I'll move onto something else." This is such a common sentiment which to me does not make sense at all. Building a business is something that takes hard, hard work, long hours, fighting against impostor syndrome and the excitement of an idea that slowly fades away, while only the insurmountable mountain remains. Then the actual work of chipping away at the mountain really starts.
The only way to succeed against all these odds stacked against you is to have a passion, have a vision for a product, however modest and stupid as mine might be, that keeps you going. Because the difference between a cool idea and a profitable business is not how quickly people are throwing money at you, but how much effort, blood, sweat and tears you have sacrificed for your crazy idea. People can make billions selling hyper-advanced technology as well as selling shoes or nails. The thing they have in common is the effort their founders put in their idea.
Am I hopelessly naive in this belief? The entire indie hacking world seems to focus on making money as quickly as possible (the goal always being to disrupt an established player), ideally before you even have a product, and no one really seems to care about the product and effort required to build it.
As much as I am a huge fan of Paul Graham and his writing, I believe this fail early-fail fast approach comes from his Silicon Valley / venture capital way of making things which has conquered the Internet and this space in particular, but is totally antithetical to how the rest of the (non-tech, non-SV) world does business, where raw effort and stubborn belief in an idea is what separates the successful entrepreneur from the failed one.
I actually put this in my list of articles which I call "Another planet's worldview" because the way they phrase their experiences and thoughts is entirely self-consistent but so alien to my own. No judgement and I actually find it valuable to read but it does feel a little like a "CS Savior complex" (although still less egregious than some of the AI savior complexes I see lots of places)
I can read Graham without thinking he's in another planet but, as an example, George Hotz's livestream really makes me think that.
People who have a passion for something can also build a business, and this is who you may be thinking of, and also this is the type that’s often glorified in the tech space. But many passionate founders are quickly hampered by the reality of having to build the company structures instead of being able to focus on the actual passion/product.
This is why many VCs prefer teams of founders instead of a sole one, as they can divide and focus on these separate areas. The idea of a sole passionate founder who grinds away in their garage is more of a “chosen one” trope than a common reality.
There is an entire spectrum between a sole founder chipping at something in a garage, and a non-technical founder picking random ideas from a hat and dropping them with the same nonchalance.
How do you think the various Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos or Henry Ford went about it? Dropping big names because I am certain we both know these figures, but applies to most pre-2010 company founder.
Surprisingly, the world went quickly from 2022, raising as much as possible, growing at all costs, to the belief that indie hacking is the only way.
I strongly encourage everyone to find customers for your idea, as I did for Quesma before starting to raise money. In the current environment, even for initial ideas, the bar is higher than it used to be.