Is your product a 10X improvement?

The issue is not 10x or 1x. It is business owners treating their companies as an investment. Even if that business is a project with a Stripe account, it still needs to be viewed as an investment. Meaning that it must have a return and protection against a loss.

I graduated from a Top 5 Accelerator, raised seed funding, and became revenue positive as a startup CEO. However, nothing in that process did anything close to treating our time as an investment. In short, we worked for pennies on the dollar. That is not a wise investment.

The smart alternative is to build something that generates revenue greater than the amount invested. Be it 1 to 10x.

If you're doing product innovation (i.e. a better way to do something that people are already happily doing, like calling taxis or filing taxes or making todo lists) then you need a big product improvement (e.g. 10x) to overcome their inertia of staying with what's already comfortable and working.

If you're doing problem innovation (i.e. solving a new or unsolved problem for a customer who isn't yet dealing with it), then you don't even need to be 1% better... you just need to exist and be correct for their particular needs/constraints/understanding/language/etc.

Product innovation is harder and riskier, but obviously can still work very well (pinterest, uber, segway, facebook, airbnb, etc). But that's why most bootstrapping folks talk about starting with the customer/problem, searching for painful unsolved problems, and going from there. Because that second approaches reduces the need for you to be a 10x product genius, and allows you to just do an average job helping a real person and still end up super successful.

It is true that, generally, people will not switch to a solution that is marginally better. And very often, solutions that present themselves as marginally better are actually marginally better at one aspect, but significantly worse in all other aspects.

To take the example of the favorite software in companies, I will not switch out of, say, Microsoft Excel just because your application looks better. Microsoft Excel has so many nice features I value a lot.

Now, for the 10x, I think it needs to be taken with a grain of salt though:

• for people in Europe and Asia, I think we need to remind ourselves than 10x story includes the usual American hyperbole way of telling about things ;-). In Europe, the people describe average stuff as 'not so good', in America, as 'great'.

• You can have solutions that are equivalent or even worse than the existing product, but address a big irritant. Unix was not better than mainframe (actually, it was worse for a number of aspects), but it was more open and less expensive. Sometimes, you can win by having an equivalent product and selling it better or being nicer or being cheaper.

• while consumers will only switch for a revolution, many aspects of enterprise and industry stuff are very optimized already. On something very optimized, even gaining 10% can be huge. There is probably money to be made now on optimizing a few percents, say, of solar panel efficiency, engines efficiency.

Yeah 10x if you're trying to build a many billion dollar company. As an indie hacker can you build something that does $100 a month first?

You sound like Elon Musk :D. I think it's a great way to evaluate businesses in manufacturing / hardware but I think it's quite hard to measure let alone achieve 10X improvement for most of the products we have in this community.

I think VC are looking for the next FB to jump on. So if you wanna start building something to compete with the giants ofc you will need 10x. nobody will switch from gmail for example to another email for anything less than 10x.

But IHers, I believe, are playing under the radar where big companies are not looking, they are more interested into the $1b+ markets.

To answer your questions, I think there are enough room to share market with other small players as long as you provide value and gradual improvement. is the questions is more who are you comparing yourself to and in which market

I'm hoping it is with my personal page builder, https://oneprofile.info, in terms of design at least :)

Aiming for 10x.

We're already a huge improvement.

Any improvement on a zero base is an infinite times improvement. :-)