Most people talk about building like it’s about speed. Ship fast… move fast… break things… Really?

The longer I’ve been building stuff, the more I see that the real work happens before anything actually ships. That quiet, slow phase where it doesn’t look like much is happening yet.

I have read many books about creating a startup, product iterations through experiments, finding market fit, and leveraging viral effects. They share a playbook that might work (or pretend to work) in the VC world.

The thing is, the indie-solo-bootstrap reality plays a different game from the silicon-valley-BS-unicorn fantasy. The good news is that there are many great books and resources available for those dreaming of a lifestyle business.

The spark to find my process came from one the first chapters in the MAKE book. It’s a good book for someone who wants to start building things and has no idea where to begin.

As a big fan of the Go Horse methodology, I tend to go straight to the building step. And that’s no good. That was the reason I decided to prioritize more the planning and research steps more in my life. And I wanted to build things that matter. Or at least, things I care about enough to finish. I realized that having a clear path helps when you’re stuck in the “what should I build” loop.

So here it is: my secret building process.

Let’s start with the first one, which is actually creating a list. From now on, I love lists.

1. My top problems

Spend a couple of weeks simply listing the problems in your life. (If you don’t have any problems, try making your life a bit more interesting stepping out of your comfort zone)

The Secret: Just write them down. Don’t worry about fixing them yet. It’s harder than it sounds because our brains want to jump straight to the solution. Try to resist that. Just let the problems linger and bother you.

When you’ve got a solid list, rank the stuff. Be real about what actually makes your life miserable and what’s just small annoyances you complain about. Keeping it simple is best. I tried a fancy decision matrix once, but it was way too much work and didn’t help much. Just going by the order of the problems worked best.

I’m still working through some things from my list from three years ago. But yeah, it’s a list that I occasionally add new items to. As you can see, there are various problems, such as the desire to write more or eliminate hair in unwanted places. 👙

I spend around 2 weeks and come up with 20 items. I’ve used Notion, so I could later document the next steps and status.

2. Solve them (without building anything)

Start by addressing the first item and look for possible solutions that already exist. Test them. You may actually find a product that solves your problem perfectly. If so, congratulations, you just saved yourself months of work. Job done. Move to the next one.

The secret: I was pretty amazed that just by switching up my habits and pushing myself out of my comfort zone, I fixed a bunch of problems. I started a 5-minute-a-day workout (which felt like a lot since I’m usually pretty inactive), and that kicked off a chain reaction, helping with stuff like back pain and improving my sleep.

I also began volunteering at local non-profits, which really helped my networking. And the best part? It didn’t cost me a thing and didn’t involve any tech.

Three years later, most of the items are done, and I feel it’s time to go back to step one again very soon.

By simply adding a status to the list, I was able to track them easily.

3. Market research

Alright, now the real game starts. If you didn’t find a solid fix for a big problem, your experience testing existing solutions earlier will help you see what’s missing. Here’s where most people go wrong, don’t start building just yet. Check out some marketing numbers first. Use SimilarWeb or SensorTower to gather some data about the players.

Check-in: I prefer a market with big players, either in revenue or traffic, hitting millions a month. I’m a bit cautious about untapped markets. This probably isn’t the best problem to tackle while bootstrapping. I think I need to be really excited about the project to decide to keep going.

The secret: By the way, being excited is a huge part of my process because building something is tough. There will be lots of times I’ll want to quit, so that excitement has to push me forward during those moments.

4. Now it’s your time to shine

Now that you have a good idea of what you want and what the market looks like, split your time in two. If you are a product person, really force yourself to spend more time on marketing, and the opposite for marketing folks.

4.1. Test the market

This next step totally changed the game for me: run ads and use simple forms to figure out acquisition costs. Getting users’ emails also helps you build a list of beta testers to stay in touch with. And yeah, you gotta talk to people dealing with the same problems.

Marketing Requisites: You have to spend money here, there’s no way around it. Someone who tells you otherwise is trying to trick you into buying their stuff. If you’re not willing to pay to find customers, either this problem isn’t that big a deal to you or you don’t really believe in your idea.

Tip: Last time I did this, I ran a Meta campaign using their Lead Online Forms. I tested my idea against 3 others to compare CAC and ended up finding another opportunity. Check out the Bird Rise story.

4.2 Build an MVP

While your ads are running, you can start building. This should answer technical questions and solve your specific problem. Keep it small and meaningful for now, because in less than six months, it will surely become a little monster with all the features added from user feedback.

Tech Requisites: Be careful with the scope and tech stack. You don’t want to build something that requires high server costs or maintenance.

Use your own product. Remember, this came from your list of top problems you wanted to solve in your life. But try not to fall in love with your idea. Fall in love with the process of solving problems. Share your MVP with those first people from your initial Ads. Do the adjustments based on their feedback. You will have bugs. Many bugs. If users are not reporting bugs, you are not hearing them. It is hard to get good feedback. I still struggle here.

Check-in: While you’re going through this, you might realize your idea isn’t really fixing the problem. Technical issues pop up. CAC might be too high. The problem could be trickier than you expected. This is a good time to pause and think about whether you want to keep going. Quitting now isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually pretty smart. It saves you from wasting months on something that a solo person or small team can’t crack. Just go take a shower and have a good cry.

5. Launch

I fixed all the bugs, adjusted the product based on early user feedback, and developed a decent version of the marketing strategy. Now it’s time for a reality check. What I want to figure out now is the real cost to attract paying customers and how much they’ll actually value my product. That way, I can get a clearer idea of whether this product will be sustainable or if I have enough money to keep it going.

The Secret: My go-to plans are short- and long-term subscriptions with a 3 to 7-day trial and lifetime discounts. This approach allows me to account for some costs related to the trial (CPT) preety fast and generate some revenue from lifetime discounts.

I like weekly plans as an anchor for other plans and as a way to measure if the product is good enough. In a month or so, I should have a better idea of retention based on renewals.

There will be many iterations here, from onboarding to pricing. Be patient before making major changes and try to get a good volume of users first.

How about growth hacks, virality, and organic strategies, Dieguito? – Your Favorite VC

Sorry, but I don’t trust organic growth as the main strategy (yet?). With the flood of AI-generated apps, welcome to the bloody ocean of the app market.

Apple and Google wouldn’t surprise me if they start charging per app published instead of by developer account. The only people who don’t like paid acquisition strategies are VCs, they love to hear zero-marketing budget BS.

6. Measure

The most important metrics for me are CAC related: CPT (Cost per trial), CPS (Cost per subscription) and ROAS. That is it. Retention, Profits and LTV are critical, but they take a while to measure meaningful data. You will change prices a lot until you find what works.

Good tools to help you with that are Mixpanel (connected with the Meta API) and RevenueCat.

Smart Keys Dashboard

Check-in: From those numbers, do another check-in. Scaling ads while bootstrapping is tricky and can get expensive quickly. Proceed with caution. You can see the blue line rising faster than revenue in the first chart. Six months later, I reevaluated to make the ad spend more sustainable.

What about Experiments, weren’t you the king of A/B Tests? – Your Favorite Scientist

First off, I’m not the king, maybe more like the Prince 💁‍♂️. I used to get super excited about experiments, especially the chance to discover something novel. I spent tons of hours designing, coding, and running experiments, sometimes with awesome results from tons of data points. But the weirdest part was that when we rolled out the experiment to all users, we didn’t see any change.

What was probably happening was a lack of statistical power, which is a major issue in science itself. People often talk about statistical significance, but that’s really just an agreement that the result is unlikely to be due to chance, unlikely… unlikelly.

Another thing to think about is what you actually measure. Experiments should ALWAYS be judged by the final metric, which is REVENUE. Tweaking middle metrics like signup rate or onboarding steps doesn’t always affect revenue. Sometimes a big jump in signup rate doesn’t do anything for revenue (I’ve even seen it go down 💸)

The Secret: So, when I start a new project, I usually don’t have the cash, team, or tons of data to run experiments. These days, I’m more into getting ideas from behavior construts that big companies have already tested a lot, like social proof, authority, commitment, scarcity, and so on.

10. Scale (or not)

Welcome to the real world, you’re now a real player in the market. Scaling means you’ll be up against those big players you checked out months ago. Your campaign performance won’t be the same with your small budget. You’ll probably need more creatives, get more support tickets, and messing up your server or introducing a bug could disrupt thousands of users (While I’m writing this, I’m waiting for Apple to approve a bug fix for a version I messed up, and now users are stuck.).

I consider it actually a good success if you can deliver a good product but can’t scale during the first months. You solved your own problem and helped other people solve theirs. Scaling takes time and requires good cash flow.

The Secret: If you’re going solo, find a buddy to do a bi-weekly check-in with. I’ve been doing this with a friend who’s also building stuff. Sharing progress and struggles helps keep you accountable and gives you new insights from another perspective.

The truth: This part of the process is still a work in progress, and I’m not totally sure I cracked the secret here. Either way, whether you managed to scale or not, it’s probably a good time to take a shower and have another cry.

That’s it

This is a live process. It involves some iterations and may take time. It has evolved since I read the nudge from the MAKE book that if your list of problems is small, you should make your life more interesting. I signed up for the 540-mile bike ride from SF to LA, which brought me beautiful problems to solve.

For Smart Keys, I followed most of the steps above. However, I admit that in other projects, I skip some parts I don’t like much, such as properly testing the market.

Air Fiesta is a very poor example of a project that failed on many levels. It started by not addressing any of my problems, was technically complex, had a huge scope, and I did inadequate market research. I did it simply because I had free time and was excited about building a game using the Google Maps SDK related to a cause. I even added to my list of problems just to justify its development: “I want to create games again.” 🥸

But I am trying to be better at it. Bird Rise was actually a pivot inspired by insights during the market test. And Air Fiesta and other tiny games actually brought a main insight about using games as a marketing tool. So maybe I am learning something after all.