Personal notes from building and shipping 5 micro-products in 24 days

Hi Indiehackers community 👋

This piece is a collection of notes from the past 24 days while building 5 micro-projects (https://twitter.com/artlapinsch/status/1485890020472930307/photo/1)

What Did I Build?

1. Content Marketing template to write & publish via Notion x Super
2. 80/20 of building databases in Notion (video course)
3. A database template to collect and manage micro-project ideas
4. A micro-course about becoming better at naming things (projects; startups; etc.)
5. A micro-SaaS tool for writers to go from idea to draft

Most of these are Notion templates + video walkthrough tutorials hosted on Gumraod.

The micro-SaaS is the only product, which has a no-code backend:

• Carrd as landing page
• Tally Forms as Q&A flow
• Zapier to pipe data from Tally into Gmail
• Gmail as a channel to send structured Q&A replies to users

My Misconceptions Before This Month

Before starting the 12 projects in 12 months challenge (https://www.artlapinsch.com/twelve/) I had the following assumptions:

• 1 month is quite short to build & ship
• I will most likely end the year with less than 12 shipped projects (similarly to what Pieter Levels & Jon Yongfook did)
• Products need to be polished/sophisticated before I can "launch" them
• If people tell me that they NEED this product, they will also drop everything once I ship it to test & use it 🙄

Suffice to say: I was wrong on many accounts :D
TL;DR: You don't know what you don't know. Especially not ahead of time.

Personal Notes

1. Ship fast. Ship often. Half-baked and published ideas will get more response than perfect ideas, which live in your head.
2. Artificial deadlines are a godsend. They serve as a forcing function to me.
3. Initially I thought a month was too short to ship. Somewhere in the process I built/shipped an info product (ideation, build, creation of gumroad page) in one day and that became the norm. Projects 3-5 were all built & shipped in one day. Yes, those are easy to do because it's effectively a template + a one-take video recording but I could have been much slower.
4. Carrd is Bae. $19/yr for 10 landing pages + SSL certificates built-in. Use it in combination with namecheap (e.g. my project namestorming.xyz had a domain registration cost of $0.89 per year 🤯)
5. My goal for month 1 was to build the shipping muscle and get better at some of the associated workflows (writing landing page copy; creating visual assets for the landing pages; testing + shipping the user flows; etc.) → I hope this will help me for the upcoming months/projects.
6. "'Build in public and they will come.' they said" ... not sure about this one. I get occasional responses but it's far from a safe bet to build an audience. At least it's too early to tell. I had my twitter account for 10+ years... most of those were dormant years. Then in early 2021 I re-activated at around 500 followers and now hovering somewhere at ~1200 or so. BIP is definitely helpful for me to document everything for myself. When I write blog posts, I just embed the tweets to avoid double-writing the same copy.
7. In early Jan I participated in Daniel Vassallo's "Portfolio of Small Bets" cohort → great group of people and the main takeaway was: "the world is random. You don't know what will be successful. That's why a solid course of action is to put out a lot of small bets to create serendipity/luck surface area" ... that's kind of how I'm thinking about the 5 small projects this month
8. Most of these products are currently free. Instead of monetizing I'm piping the email addresses of users into my ghost newsletter and trying to build my audience. My guess, if people don't like the stuff, they will unsubscribe. Alternatively, if they find the products useful, then chances are they are interested in the behind-the-scenes writeups.
9. It's fun.
10. I currently have time, since I don't have any other commitments and am living off of my savings. My monthly expenses are relatively low (living in EU).
11. I'm sure pretty the shipping cadence will change in the coming weeks. I don't know if I'll ship more or less though 🤷‍♂️
12. I'm curious and a bit excited/anxious what will happen once I step out of my comfort zone (info products + educational content) into new product areas/types.

Biggest learning so far:
Challenge yourself to cut down your time to market significantly.

I hope these notes are helpful or entertaining to at least one person.

Let me know if you have feedback/questions/comments/etc. Would love to hear your thoughts 🙏