What's New: Combatting user impatience

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Your users are smart, but impatient:

• Everyone has those users who refuse to complete the full onboarding process. They don't read the instructions, watch the tutorials, or sign up for demo calls. With that in mind, it may be time to reexamine what counts as "good" UX.
• You need expert advice to fix problems fast. Micro-consulting is a cost-effective way to get help. Dru Riley breaks it down below!
• Founder Rob Hope brings in $100,000 in annual revenue with his long list of side projects. His secret? An 18 minute nap followed by an espresso, every day at 3:00 PM.

Want to share something with over 100,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

⌚️ Combatting User Impatience

by Bharadwaj Giridhar

Your users are stupid. How?

• They aren't patient enough to go through your onboarding tour.
• They won't read the instructions. They'll just skim.
• They skip the video instructions.
• They won't sign up for a demo call.

Remember that game you installed where, in the beginning, it asked if you knew how to play already, and you lied and said "yes?" You were impatient, but ten minutes into the game, you didn't know what you were doing. Your user is exactly that.

The problem is that people are smart, but impatient. This makes them behave like fools. Make your app extremely stupid for stupid people. That's good UX.

Here's how to build good SaaS products:

• One action per page.
• No context switching.
• Force users into actions. Never give them the option to skip, or move to a different page.
• Images and text instructions are likely better than videos, because they're faster.

What are your tips on combatting user impatience?

Create confidence

Shawn Cao says that confidence is key:

Whenever users hesitate, they start to worry. When they worry, they want to escape.

Make every step and each page actionable, and help the user to feel confident in the action. For instance, you may have multiple actionable choices on a page, but there should be only one large button in a bold color for the user to click on.

Know the screen

Ben Sibley says that you have to understand that your users will be situated in various environments:

Users are distracted frequently. They're listening to music, someone else in the room is asking them a question, they're talking to people, and then they come back to your onboarding flow and can't remember what they just did.

From our perspective, we're wondering how the heck someone could mess onboarding up. But we have to be understanding of the wildly different contexts that surround the screens that our users are on.

Commoditization

Jason says that stupid apps address the majority of the population:

The whole point of these apps is that they are easy, which then makes them a commodity. There's nothing wrong with that business model, but you have to understand and accept that it's a commodity, and treat it accordingly.

Many years ago, a question asked while I was in conversation with someone got me thinking: "Do I want to make money off of commodities, or do I want to do something else?"

Answer this, and you'll know how to design your UX.

Impatience may be the goal

Sai Indra Maryada says that many users, himself included, want to dwell in the interface without knowing much about the app:

Some of us like to figure it out as we go! I find that dealing with onboarding instructions right at the start is too overwhelming. As long as your users can access the information containing your rules and instructions whenever they want, let them do their thing.

Note: "Forcing" people into taking action only works sometimes. If your app implements that throughout the product, many users will be happy to leave.

It's not them, it's you

Sanat Hegde says that reviewing the onboarding process may be in order:

We all wonder why a user won't complete onboarding instead of just registering and giving up.

But if this is happening, it means that we need to do a better job at getting them to complete the process.

Infinity7 agrees:

It depends on the audience and how critical the tool is for the business. If it's important enough to them, they will manage to do what it takes, even if it's learning to fly a spaceship!

How do you deal with user impatience in onboarding? Let's chat below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

💥 The small business boom isn't over yet!

📱 Hurricane Ian on TikTok: The rise of the disaster influencer.

🛍 Gen Z's retail priorities are evolving.

🎨 Instagram's revamp may be leaving artists behind.

💄 Society's beauty standards are costing us millions of dollars.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

📈 Trend Alert: Micro-Consulting

from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley

Why it matters

Micro-consulting turns years of experience into a short call.

Problem

You need expert advice to fix problems fast.

Solution

Micro-consulting is a cost-effective way to get help.

Players

Micro-consultants:

• Camille Cocaud: Helps with growth strategy and digital marketing.
• Valeria Dominguez: Helps with e-commerce building and marketing.
• Denise Medley: Helps with children's language, articulation, and behavior.
• Ray Deck: Helps with no-code development and automations.
• Meredith Marder: Helps with building an exit strategy.
• Timothy Ricks: Helps with webflow development.

Micro-consulting platforms:

• MentorCruise: On-demand design, tech, business, and career mentorship.
• Clarity: Get startup advice from industry leaders.
• MentorPass: Get personalized advice from the world's best direct-to-consumer operators.
• GrowthMentor: Get 1:1 conversations with startup mentors about growth, marketing, product, and more.
• Growth Collective: Hire marketing and growth specialists.

Micro-consulting tools:

• Podia: Manage clients, calls, scheduling, payments, digital resources, and more.
• Calendly: Schedule, prepare, and follow up on 1:1, group, and cohosted meetings.
• Calendesk: Manage bookings, payments, landing pages, and customer support.
• Jitsi Meet: Run free, unlimited online meetings.
• Carrd: Create simple, responsive personal websites.

Predictions

• More professionals will become consultants. Marketplaces like Codementor, Clarity, and Superpeer make it easier to get started. Maxine helps with technical writing. Conrad Francis helps with business and leadership. Adrienne Kress helps with book writing and publishing.
• AI will enhance the micro-consulting experience. Analytical and predictive features will save time on manual analysis. Nextyn uses AI to match clients with qualified experts. Xperiti uses AI to vet and match experts based on client needs. Stitch Fix uses complex AI algorithms to help stylists fit clients' style and preferences.
• More professionals will build their own micro-consulting platforms. These are managed marketplaces that foster transactions with curation, ratings, escrow, and standardization. Dan Martell founded Clarity, and advises on being a founder, running startups, and fundraising. Dominic Monn founded MentorCruise, and advises on building marketplaces and running paid ads.

Opportunities

• Offer options. Let clients choose what works best for them, be it 1:1, group, online, or offline coaching sessions. Statechange offers 1:1 and group no-code mentoring. Marketing Max offers 1:1 marketing coaching sessions. Gary offers 1:1 and group training and consulting on Mailchimp.
• Build communities for your clients. Help them support each other and get ongoing support from you. Kelsey is building a community for her video editing students. Ruben Cespedes is building a private Discord community for his clients.
• Offer productized services. These are standardized, scalable offers. Max Stoiber offers codebase audits of React applications. Candice Ward offers coaching plans with additional resources and ongoing support. Jhey Tompkins offers one hour of pair programming and one hour of mentorship packages.

Risks

• Scalability: Micro-consulting is hard to scale. Your time is limited.
• Reputation risk: A lack of knowledge will lead to loss of trust and clients.
• Platform risk: You're subject to platforms' roadmaps, outages, and fees. Prefer shut down after many failed pivots. Set up multiple profiles to mitigate platform risk. Davide Pollicino has profiles on Codementor, Mentor Cruise, and Clarity.

Key lessons

• Micro-consulting sessions can lead to long-term projects. Kevin C. Whelan offers strategy calls that can lead to higher-end opportunities.
• You can take on more clients than traditional consultants. This reduces customer concentration.
• Offering productized services helps solve scalability problems. These don't require your participation.

Hot takes

• In spite of shorter sessions, some clients will expect you to deliver the same value as traditional consultants.
• Micro-consulting sessions don't have to be cheap. Meredith Marder offers her Better Exit Strategy session for $10K.
• Speaking at events, conferences, and workshops is micro-consulting. These are non-recurring, one-off engagements.

Haters

"How can you solve my problem in one hour?"

Micro-consulting has its limits. One hour may not be enough to solve a complex problem, but an experienced micro-consultant can find the root cause and suggest a valid solution.

"People can abuse free advice."

Pro bono consulting is a choice. Decide how much you can give away for free. Limit the number of free sessions when necessary.

"Micro-consulting has scalability problems."

This is true. Previously, we've shared examples of more scalable products. Productized services, courses, and SaaS are great for helping lots of people at once.

"I can turn my knowledge into scalable products right away. Why bother with micro-consulting?"

Talking to clients helps you identify and validate valuable problems that you can solve at scale.

Links

1. "Micro-Consultant." Who Comes to Mind? The tweet behind this report.
2. How to Make $3K MRR as a Micro Consultant Without Selling Your Soul: Guide on how to become a micro-consultant by Himanshu Bisht.
3. Micro-Consulting: The Future of Consulting: Learn what part micro-consulting plays in consulting history.

Related reports

• Digital Products: How to build scalable online products.
• Agencies: How to run and scale an agency.
• Value-Based Pricing: How to price your micro-consulting services.

More reports

Go here to get the Trends Pro report. It contains 200% more insights. You also get access to the entire back catalog and the next 52 Pro Reports.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Trends.vc for more.

🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week

⏳ Explain your project in 10 words or less. Posted by Chris Beauchamp.

📚 15 of the best startup books. Posted by Londoner.

🤓 Selling to large companies as a small startup. Posted by AllOutNerdClan.

🛠 When should you over-engineer a project? Posted by Aesop.

🧑‍🏫 Three lessons that I learned from my failed startup. Posted by Yak Attack.

💻 Marketing advice for first time founders. Posted by Dan Kulkov.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

😴 Rob Hope's 18 Minute Naps

by James Fleischmann

Rob Hope of One Page Love has a long list of current and sunsetted projects, and he's making over $100K ARR from them. Indie Hackers caught up with him to find out more about his journey!

On scratching multiple itches

A lot of the time, I'm scratching my own itch with my projects. For example, I built Case Converter (now sold) in 2008 to help clean up poorly formatted Word Docs for my clients. One Page Love was created to help collect references to one page websites after I couldn't find any good references to them online.

Another reason I might start a project is to learn something new. It feels amazing diving into the unknown. AudioNotes was built to help send faster landing page feedback to One Page Love users, but I also built it because I had never built a macOS menu bar app before.

I also totally suffer from shiny object syndrome. It's pretty bad, guys. I'll see a slight gap or poorly-curated site, and I'll lose hours on domain searches while daydreaming about what I could cook up.

Right now, One Page Love is my main project. It allowed me to ultimately quit freelancing about four years ago. I'm also working on Email Love, UX Love (launching soon), Yo! Podcast, and my e-book, Landing Page Hot Tips. I also have dozens of ideas that I no longer work on. Some sold, but most failed (forward).

On growing his projects

I grow my projects by keeping curation high, saving people time. Also, I always try to add value to the network by writing what is special about the content, adding good search tags, and making the sites fast.

We do cross-promotion between sites, tag people that we feature on Twitter, ensure that pages are coded clean (no pop-ups, etc.), and cached fast for Google.

Create the sites that you'd appreciate visiting.

On schedules

A huge breakthrough for us this year was creating a publishing schedule in Notion. We now aim to post one bit of content on One Page Love per weekday.

It's super difficult to shift attention so many times a day. Without a schedule, I can blink and find that I haven't posted on Email Love in two weeks.

The ideal goal is to spend about an hour adding content to each site per day. The rest is improving the network. These daily content habits really add up.

On napping

I start working around 7:00 AM, and finish up at 7:00 PM every day. I can honestly say that, every morning, I am frothing at the mouth to start working on my network of sites and side projects. I have had this passion for 10 years so far, and it hasn't waned. I take tons of breaks to surf and run. I also nap for 18 minutes every day around 3:00 PM.

Why an 18 minute nap? Man, I’ve been trying to perfect this strategy for years. So, 20+ minutes has a longer wake time, and at over 30 years old, you are almost grumpy when you have to wake up from a longer nap. An 18 minute afternoon nap, followed by an espresso, banks me an easy two hours of productive screen time.

Side projects are never finished

I am learning to accept that side projects can never be finished, as there's unlimited optimization and marketing to do. The only true time you're done is when your business sells, or if your domain expires.

Most evenings, I try to stop working, cook, and watch a series with my wife. I rarely work late anymore, and it's awesome. I am 39 now, and I dig sleeping! At the same time, my wife accepts my chosen path of building online, and knows that sometimes we need to focus on getting it done...no matter what.

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.

Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Bharadwaj Giridhar, Priyanka Vazirani, Dru Riley, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing