HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I’m sleeping
Comments:
Related:
“Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I’m sleeping” (this): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29790964
“AMA: I make $100K+ ARR from my microstartups” (3 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28561132
“Show HN: I passed up an opportunity to make $200K from my microstartup” (2020): https://twitter.com/1HaKr/status/1301142901510995969
“Show HN: My Indie Hacker goal - Earn $100 a day to keep your desk job away” (2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304674
“Show HN: I made $9000 posting on Hacker News about my microstartup” (2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=1hakr
And so on: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=1hakr
To answer the question “how do you advertise your products?”, clearly it is to spam Hacker News until you get lucky.
How to validate ideas?
Not OP, but validating ideas is (relatively) easy. First, you figure out who will use your product. Then, you get a few of those people to use or discuss your product. You only need a few people, and they can be close acquaintances. After showing the product to a few people you imagine to use your product, you come to a determination of whether or not they liked your product. This part is a little subtle. You don’t ask them “did you like my product?” Instead, you try to figure out if your product seems like something they were excited about, would continue to use, and, most importantly, tell others about.
Think about it like this. If you show the product to a handful of people that you imagine to be ideal users, and NONE of those people are excited enough about your business to share it with others, then what chance of success do you really have?
To give you a concrete example. I made an app that was a pretty revolutionary take on reading short stories. I had a few friends try it out, all of whom were passionate readers. They said they liked it, but I could see that none of them opened it again after their initial test. To me, that was all the signal I needed to pivot to something else.