I read The Indie Makers Handbook, Here are the key ideas

What are Startups

• Startups are about shipping 10 to 30 different products, learning from them and see if anything sticks.
• Startups founder needs persistence the most and a little bit of luck. When you products are failing, no-one is buying from you, you will need to stay persisted.
• Startups are about constantly pivoting in real time, when things are not working well.
• Startups are about actions. If you have no action, nothing will happen.
• And most importantly, Startups are about constantly shipping something.

Solve your Problem

• Find ideas from solving your own problems.
• Find problems in your own life that you face and see if you can make your challenges easier using Tech.
• Business is about solving a lot of people's problem in exchange for money.
• Businesses can in any form - website, form, app or even a physical service but they do have one thing in common - they solve a problem.
• When you solve your own problem, you might realise that there are plenty of other people having the same problem.
• You need to know a lot about the problem to get started. Yes, once you launch, you can learn from feedback of your customer, but you need something in hand to get started. So solve your own problem, you will always have one customer to have feedback from. YOU.
• Do things that makes you explicitly very different. Don't be afraid to do things other are not doing. Don't be afraid to have a unique perspective. It will give you more unique ideas.

Startup Mistakes to Avoid

• Don't solve someone's problem. You might not be an expert on someone's problem. For example, you are building a healthcare app to connect sick patients with doctors. You not a doctor, neither you are a sick patience who goes to doctor regularly. You will never have the insider insight and you will always do a shitty job at solving someone's problem.
• Don't go for shinny ideas you have no experience. The problem with most startups is that people look at the industry from outside and think there is a lot of opportunity and money in it but it's wrong. You are looking at the problem or industry from far outside.
• Having no connection with industry. Most startups fail because they have no connection, expertise or passion for their industry. They are in there for the money alone, looking at it from far outside without an actual perspective on the problem.
• Starting with a Solution. The guaranteed road to failure is to start with a solution, not problem. A lot of companies start with a solution not the problem. Don't make solution for the problem that don't exists. Find the problem first.

Start with a Niche

• Start with a niche. Niche are specific market segments that are shallow enough to easily access but not many players are into it.
• Start with a micro-niche. For example, Booking Software for hairdressers is a niche. But how many hairdressers are there in the world. Millions of them? What about hairdressers for african people. Roughly around 10,000 of them.
• Capture a micro-niche and step by step expand to other niches. Why step by step? Because if you fail you can again go small to niche.
• Vertical Growth from multi-niche. You can captured the hair dresser market, now go to nair salons, restaurants, home services etc...

You become big by starting small.
Stop thinking big. Think small first.

The real great startups are built with smaller things. Focus on small things first. You don't do or can't do the small stuff, how can you do the big part?

Keep track of Ideas and don't be afraid to share ideas

You ideas are only a multiplier of execution. Execution is the real deal.

Perfection is the enemy

• When building a MVP, remember Perfection is your biggest enemy.
• Perfection causes inaction which kills startups.
• Things become perfect through lengthy iterations.
• MVP should just work fine. It need not have shinny vanity features, just the core features that gets the job done.

One who can build and sell is unstoppable

Leverage today is not a team of specialised people or bunch of VC money backing you. Leverage is having the skills of building and selling.

Today is the best time to start a startup. Internet had made it a level playing field for everyone. The one can build useful products fast and can sell them is the real winner. And there is a ton of opportunity since most people are unique and have a different set of skills and a different set of problems.

Launch is very important

• Even through products can be launched today in a matter of minutes. Anyone can put their code on a server in 15 minutes and setup a website anytime. Launch is till very crucial.
• It's gives a sense of urgency if you select a date by when do you want to launch.
• Launch is still a special thing, which can give you the initial boost for your product.
• Decide a date and time when you want to launch. Have your product ready 2-3 days before that. Test it. Ask your girlfriend to test it. Ask your mom to test it.
• When you are building a product, keep sharing with people what are you building. And what's it gonna look like.
• Launch on Product, Hackernews, Reddit, Betalist.
• Share your product with press. Even if you feel like your product is not worth the press. What's the harm is sharing with them? All not taken shots are missed.
• Follow the website: https://submit.co and find relevant sites for Press.
• Don't just launch once. Keep launching. Every time you come with a list of features you audience might want. Launch again. Create Product V2, Product V3 and go on...
• Keep launching side products. These are products which might be a little different to your core product but target the same target audience. This way you can launch again and again, generating PR for your core product.
• Some most famous examples of side products are Unsplash by Crew and Pablo by Buffer.

Grow organically first, scale later

• Organic is always better. Organic users gives you better feedback if you are doing the right thing.
• Once you have got a traction. Let's say 1,00,000 MAU. Scale it with ads and other paid channels.
• Common mistake people make is that they do the opposite. They start with ads and other paid channels. And once the funding is dried, the growth just stops.

Two ways to get organic growth

1. Reach more people who don't know about your product (New users)
2. Retarget People coming back and using your product (Returning users)

How to get organic growth

• To get new users, keep launching. Start with your first launch but don't stop the launches. Keep launching again and again with new versions of product. Add more features and launch again.
• Do a product spin off of the features which are strong enough to be a standalone product. For example, Peter did with placestowork.co as people who were into NomadList were also looking for co-working places to work.
• People care about personal stories about startups and people. Tell stories to press and people. Stories can be more personal than features. Tell about your own stories and struggles before or during the build up of your product.
• Make sharing easy for people. Use <meta> and og: tags to make your website easy to share. Have an image as preview of the most important information and make human readable urls.

Build in Public and Build with your users

• One great way of storytelling is building in public. Share the journey though blog, tweets, videos or whatever medium possible. Be transparent and share with others.
• Transparency works because people like to be part of success or failure stories. Share the stuff you learn from trying to build a product. And with every little step of your journey, there's an opportunity to get attention by sharing it in public.
• But make sure, the audience you share with is also the audience who might buy from you. Having the same audience overlaps builds your authority while also building your business.
• Another part of growth is having the features your users want or need. Always have a way to ask for feedback. Add some sort of feedback box either on website or someplace else with the goal to collect ideas on what to build next.

Building a great product is more useful than asking people to share on social media or asking them to come back on your website. Build a great product. If people love it, they will come back. So whatever you do, focus on making the product great first, then think about growth later.

[Still a WIP]

Come back, I will add more to this article.