Stop procrastinating time on vanity things and start doing what's actually important

The indiehacker community asked this question

“What is the #1 problem why aspiring entrepreneurs won't start their dream business?
by Eduardo Holschneider “

I thought of sharing more about it in details adding to my existing comment, as this stuck me hard while I am meeting new founders every day at https://tradly.app (a simple no-code tool built on headless commerce api)

Focus:
People kept thinking, researching and speaking about, but never do real work.

They like to share the logo, Colour and get feedbacks
They invite their friends to the social media pages before even the main product is ready
Spent a lot of time thinking about the tech stack. And even going deeper reading about different technologies, their history, etc. Reading is a drug, but we need to read important things.
And many more things

Even after they start, they spent too much time on doing things that doesn’t close to the product. And forget the critical step.

Ideasforsocial (a failed approach)

This is what I did in my early life as well. A lot of my ideas went to nothing because of this as well. I remember the amount of time I spent to read about every tech stack and building a product which meant for flexibility and scale.

Sorry 😞 it never materialised. So, the product was live because of a WordPress plugin bought. Not because of the stack I researched. It’s a still a learning of reading things, but we need to prioritise the critical things.

And I still didn’t get satisfied with the WordPress plug-in. So, I got distracted and installed a discourse under the subdomain. And ran ads for $100 and the result was good enough.

But I again got lost in the focus of customer and went back to tech stack for the main domain. It never materialises and I missed the initial energy.

I am still paying the domain and hosting renewal because this idea stuck me hard. One day, I may restart. But this taught me something, to focus on customers.

I stopped the perfectionism. I find a free tool to visualise the ideas to get feedbacks. A simple draw.io diagram allowed me to show the idea. I am not thinking about mock-up tools or figma. Just a Simple draw.io diagram.

If I'm too convinced, I buy a domain(this also lot of times wasted), start building the product with the least effort on coding, it allows me to test the product and speak with customers. Those customers signals were encouraging to go further.

Story of Tradly

Before 2.5 years, the product (Tradly.app) is not even coded, but I started to do sales calls from the organic traffic leads (SEO). I wrote few articles that focused on the niche segment. For example: if you search, “how to build a marketplace like depop”, mostly we will be there. These signals allowed us to shape the product further and also motivated us to focus on the demand of the customers.

We started with a firebase alternative framework for auth, database, etc. It was first, clients comes in, money comes in. We faced problems in stack. Then we rebuilt from scratch with all these learnings. The product is powerful in our assessment.

Money and clients are the best signals to go afters. Not the initial logo, social media or posting in social networks that we are starting something.

This is something important as well, where we stop contacting friends and focus on customers. For the first year, I never shared anything in my social networks or anywhere. Then After 6 months of continuous MRR increase and I was looking to hire people from my network > that’s where I posted about what I was working on.

Friends and social network is easy to get distracted. Show off can kill us.

So focus on one thing—customer. It should be your girlfriend. Spent more time and know about them. Once you know them, then you can buy the best gifts they like, bring them to beautiful places she may like and foods she loves. Don’t embarrass her without knowing her.