After months of hard work, I've just completed building my first AI agent-based product! 🎉

Competely AI Agent is officially live on Product Hunt today, and I'd greatly appreciate your support today - your vote or comment makes a huge difference:

Support Competely AI on Product Hunt

While I've built several AI-powered products before, this is my first AI agent. The past few months have been fascinating, challenging, and filled with valuable lessons. Let’s dive in!

What is Competely, really?

If you’re not familiar, Competely is an AI-powered competitive analysis platform, designed to automate and simplify researching your competitors, saving entrepreneurs, marketers, and product managers days of tedious manual research. Competely helps you understand your competitive landscape and outsmart your competitor in 3 simple steps:

Why I decided to rebuild Competely

I first launched Competely back in December 2023 as an AI-powered competitive analysis tool. Since then, the AI landscape has evolved dramatically. Although the original version of Competely was successful and provided substantial value to many customers, I knew there was room for improvement. Competitive analysis involves extensive, unpredictable research, precisely the kind of task AI agents excel at. Recognizing this opportunity, I decided to rebuild Competely from the ground up using a modern AI agent architecture.

What are AI agents?

There are many definitions for AI agents, but I particularly like the one provided by Anthropic in their excellent article.

Traditional AI products typically use deterministic workflows - meaning their steps and outcomes are predefined and predictable. You ask a specific question or provide a task, and the AI follows a clear, linear path to give you a set response or outcome. For example, a typical AI tool may be programmed to always perform the same actions in response to certain inputs, following a set script or recipe.

AI agents, on the other hand, are less deterministic. Instead of following rigid workflows, they operate more autonomously, deciding their actions based on real-time data and context. They independently plan, reason, and adapt to changing situations. This flexibility makes AI agents particularly effective for dynamic, complex tasks that require ongoing decision-making and adaptability, like competitive analysis, market research, or exploring new and unpredictable areas of knowledge.

In short, while traditional AI tools follow predefined rules, AI agents actively decide what to do next, making them powerful for tasks where adaptability and continuous learning are key.

How AI agents improved Competely

Building Competely with agentic architecture allowed me to significantly enhance Competely’s capabilities. Here are a few examples of how it helped improve Competely:

🔍 Deeper competitor discovery

Our AI agent rapidly crawls the web, performs targeted searches, and analyzes multiple sites within 1-2 minutes. It builds several relevant Google queries using advanced reasoning, and starts crawling and analyzing dozens of pages in parallel. The agent goes much deeper than our traditional competitor search, identifying hidden or less obvious competitors that the traditional workflow missed.

📊 Customized metrics for your industry

Instead of a one-size-fits-all competitive analysis with a rigid set of metrics/fields to compare, Competely's AI Agent dynamically assesses and selects the most relevant metrics several times throughout the analysis. It takes into account your own product, competitors’ products, and everything it has learned so far in the analysis.

🕸️ Smarter crawling capabilities

Our AI Agent intelligently determines which web pages to crawl, and how deep we need to go, based on everything it has learned so far and the type of data that we are trying to extract.

📩 Summarizing changes

Competely AI agent now does automated, autonomous re-analysis of your competitors. The agent compares new results to previous data, highlighting competitors’ changes, trends, risks, and opportunities via clear, personalized summary emails.

🔗 Transparent data sourcing

Competely's AI Agent explicitly provides source URLs for every data point collected while crawling the web. Not only is this helpful for customers, making data verification more straightforward, but this also grounds the model, ensuring it doesn’t hallucinate as much and needs to provide “proof” for any claim it makes.

Key insights from building an AI Agent

I've made plenty of mistakes over the past few months while building Competely AI Agent. Here are three hard-learned lessons I want to share, in case you decide to build your own AI agent:

1. AI costs can run wild with agents

Even though AI costs are dropping, it's crucial to closely track your expenses when it comes to autonomous AI agents. Traditional AI apps typically have predictable resource usage, but AI agents' greater autonomy means their resource consumption can vary significantly. Without careful monitoring, your AI expenses can quickly escalate to hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Most AI toolkits and SDKs don’t include built-in cost tracking, so you'll likely need to build your own solution. For Competely, I wrapped every API call to precisely calculate the cost of each task - such as finding competitors or doing a complete competitive analysis - based on token pricing from AI providers. Initially, Competely’s AI agent costs were very high, threatening the product’s unit economics. Meticulously tracking these expenses allowed me to identify inefficiencies and optimize usage, ensuring Competely’s pricing ($9-29/mo) still remains viable.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic APIs offer email alerts when usage exceeds certain thresholds. I strongly recommend enabling these alerts at the global and per-project levels. Early in development, even before going to production, I received an alert from OpenAI notifying me of hundreds of dollars in API fees! This highlighted the importance of proactive cost monitoring.

2. Caching is great - until it's not

In most of my previous projects, caching significantly improved performance, user experience, and reduced costs associated with AI model usage, computing, and proxies. Naturally, I implemented a basic caching layer for Competely using a Postgres database. However, this quickly proved problematic due to the enormous volume of data handled by AI agents.

When processing large sitemaps containing thousands of URLs, and crawling deep into dozens of websites, database connections rapidly reached their limits. Handling multiple parallel requests to cache each resource overloaded servers, exhausted connection pools, and impacted database performance. Additionally, the sheer volume of cache operations quickly grew to millions of database entries, complicating maintenance even during beta testing.

Interestingly, the cache hit rate remained low, and fetching fresh data directly from most websites was often just as fast. This realization prompted me to reconsider whether caching truly benefits AI agent workflows. Evaluate carefully the trade-offs between user experience, cost, complexity, and speed. For Competely, getting rid of caching altogether improved both stability and efficiency.

3. Context windows are sneaky

When building AI agents handling large volumes of data, paying close attention to AI models' context window limits is critical.

Although modern models offer large context windows, it's easy to exceed these limits when processing extensive amounts of data. Therefore, carefully selecting what information to include in each prompt becomes essential.

Initially, it may seem beneficial to maximize the usage of the context window provided by the model. However, longer prompts slow down queries, increase costs, and lead to occasional errors, as the AI struggles to pinpoint relevant information within the vast amount of data provided.

For Competely, I started by feeding a prompt with trimmed-down HTML content from multiple pages into an AI model. Occasionally, context windows overflowed, causing errors. My first inclination was to engineer complex solutions, such as sophisticated prompt trimming or parallelizing queries. However, I ended up with a simpler and more effective workaround: whenever a standard model (128K token limit) overflowed, I simply re-ran the exact same query using a larger context model (GPT-4.1 mini with a 1M token limit, which is slightly more expensive). Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one.

Additionally, consistent tracking of input and output tokens became crucial. I built a wrapper around the AI models to track token usage and limits, which helps me dynamically build prompts that balance speed, cost, and reliability.

The future

Building my first AI agent was incredibly rewarding and allowed me to significantly improve Competely. Given the rapidly evolving AI landscape, there's still much to explore, but this experience has made me excited to build more AI agent-based products, so stay tuned!

Meanwhile, if you'd like to show your support, please visit Competely on Product Hunt and show some love - every bit counts:

Show your support on Product Hunt

Until next time,
- Lior

Here are some of my products that can help you:

1. Competely: get a competitive analysis for your product or idea within minutes, with the power of a diligent AI agent

2. TailoredRead: learn faster with an AI-crafted book tailored to your goals, interests, and background

3. BookAuthority: level up your skills and knowledge with book recommendations by experts and thought leaders

TailoredRead is live on Product Hunt! 🎉

Today, I'm excited to share that my latest product, TailoredRead, is launching on Product Hunt! If you have a second, please check it out and show your support:

Show your support on Product Hunt

What is TailoredRead?

TailoredRead helps you learn any subject faster with an AI-tailored book.
You specify your subject of interest, background, and goals, and get a custom book crafted just for you within 10 minutes:

TailoredRead can create tailored books about almost any imaginable subject.

For example, instead of reading ten generic books about entrepreneurship, you can create one highly specific book based on your background, challenges, and goals.

This can make learning easier, save you days of reading, and help you reach your goals faster.

An idea long time in the making

I’ve always been very passionate about knowledge. In the past decade, along with some brilliant people, I’ve created products that make knowledge more accessible, such as Wikiwand, BookAuthority, and The Master List.

As an avid reader, one thing that I always find frustrating about nonfiction books is the signal-to-noise ratio: You can spend hours reading a 300-page book, only to find that less than half of the content is actually relevant to your interests, goals, and skill level.

You often need to explore many books, review their outline and samples, determine which books match your interests, goals, and skills, and you still end up with books that are one-size-fits-all and aren’t personalized for you.

Earlier this year, I wondered: what if we could flip this model on its head?
Instead of adapting your learning journey to what existing books have to offer, what if books could adapt to your learning journey?

How I validated the idea

Before writing a single line of code, I wanted to validate this idea. I ran a simple Google Forms survey letting people apply for an AI custom-tailored book.

I promoted the survey on BookAuthority, and within weeks, I gathered hundreds of responses from people who wanted to create a book.

This accomplished several things:

• I found that people are open to creating and reading AI-crafted books, therefore validating my basic hypothesis.

• From the comment, I learned that many people are curious about this concept and that it solves their need to learn faster and in a more focused manner.

• I learned who my target audience is.

• I built up a waiting list of 400+ people who want an AI-tailored book

• I learned a lot: what kind of books people want to create, what goals they want to accomplish, what’s important to them in a tailored book, and more.

This was invaluable and very revealing, as some of the answers really surprised me:

I didn’t think producing a PDF version was part of the MVP, but it turns out PDF is how most people wanted to consume their books:

Also, I initially thought the product would target experts who want specialized advice, but it turns out many people are interested in reading a book tailored for them, regardless of their level of expertise:

Insights from customer interviews

It has become clear that there was a demand for the product, and now I had a lot of data in my hands.

I started by analyzing the survey data (443 participants x 12 questions) with help from ChatGPT and Claude and revising my initial hypothesis of the product. No hypothesis survives contact with the customer.

While the survey provided good quantitative and qualitative data, I figured I still needed to talk to customers to better understand their needs and expectations of the product

I emailed the waiting list, offering free tailored ebooks when the product launches in return for a quick 30-minute Zoom call:

Over the next couple of weeks, I interviewed a dozen customers and learned more about their goals, reading habits, and needs. I learned why they decided to sign up and what their expectations of the product are. These interviews also fortified my conviction that there’s a real demand for that product.

Building TailoredRead

Equipped with all that knowledge, I had a pretty good idea of the product that needed to be built.

I usually work on an MVP for a few weeks and launch it.

However, this time, it was clear that the product might take a while to build, so I decided to break down the MVP into several, incremental MVPs, each one derisking a specific aspect of the product. I then made 3 soft launches, spending about a week on each one:

1. Soft launch of book-generation engine - validating the technical capability to create well-written, cohesive, full-length books with state-of-the-art AI.

2. Soft launch of sign-up and book creation flow - validating the conversion from website visitors to engage users who end up creating a book.

3. Soft launch of payments - validating the pricing strategy and users’ willingness to pay for AI-created books.
   willingness to pay

After these milestones, I transitioned into continuous-delivery mode, where every day, I make incremental improvements to the product.

Learning from real customers

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been learning from our early customers, and iterating on the product and marketing. Here are a few things that I’ve learned:

• Trust building: many potential customers wanted to see what a book might look like before purchasing, so I set up an Explore Page where you can see samples of 100+ books created by real users, with their permission.

• Signup flow: while the initial sign-up and book creation flow were fairly good, we still had quite a few barriers and drop-off points in this process of creating a book. Some were already fixed, and some are still unresolved.

• Commercial licensing: while all books were sold with a license that allows personal use, several educators and authors reached out regarding commercial licensing that would allow them to distribute the books they create, so I recently introduced additional licensing options.

• Mobile responsiveness: building a Kindle-alike paginated online reader proved to be difficult. Unfortunately, my initial implementation was not great, and books were not readable on certain resolutions. I had to rebuild a large portion of the online reader so that the display is adaptable and readable at various resolutions.

  

• PDF download was unreliable: in an MVP fashion, I started by having users download their PDFs with the browser’s print dialog. Many users had problems with this mechanism, and it yielded a lot of support tickets. I ended up creating a job to render a book as a PDF on the backend, which wasn’t as big a deal as I thought (thank you, Cursor + Claude 3.5). As a bonus, users can now download PDFs in both tablet and phone resolutions.

The public launch

I’ve been iterating on TailoredRead and improving it for the past few months, and recently, I finally felt like the product is mature enough for a public launch.

Today, I’m very excited to launch it publicly! 🎉

TailoredRead is live on Product Hunt today, and I would really appreciate your support:

Show your support on Product Hunt

Got any thoughts or questions about the product or the process? I’ll be on Product Hunt all day to answer your questions!

Talk soon,
- Lior

P.S. If you decide to give TailoredRead a try, use the code LAUNCH50 at checkout to get your tailored book for 50% off.

This newsletter is 100% free. Answer 4 short questions to help me make the newsletter more relevant for you.

Here are some of my other products that can help you:

1. Competely: get a full competitive analysis for your product or idea within minutes, with the power of AI

2. Flawless: get AI-powered actionable suggestions to improve usability, conversion, and messaging for your homepage or landing page

3. BookAuthority: level up your skills and knowledge with book recommendations by experts and thought leaders

This week I'm back with a deep dive into the tech stack I used to build StatusSight. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just interested in building products, I hope you'll find some tools and techniques to make you more productive. But before we start, a small ask:

I would love your support on Product Hunt

I’ve been working on StatusSight for the past couple of months, and I’m super excited to launch it today on Product Hunt!

If you have a second, please go to the Product Hunt page, and show your support or leave a comment! I’d be very grateful 🙏

Support StatusSight on ProductHunt

Now that I’m done asking for favors, let’s dive right in:

The Foundation: TypeScript and Next.js

I built StatusSight as a Next.js app written in TypeScript.

Why TypeScript? Well, TypeScript gives me the warm fuzzies with its static typing, catching silly mistakes I make before they become big headaches in production. Used in tandem with a strict ESLint configuration, it catches my bugs on a daily basis. Embarrassing, I know…

Next.js is a natural choice for me. I’ve been writing JavaScript/TypeScript for two decades, and using TypeScript on the backend alongside the front end has proven to be a blessing.

Here's where it gets interesting: in StatusSight, I’ve decided to split the Next.js app and deploy it to two different platforms:

The main app is deployed to Vercel. It has a great developer experience and a very robust platform, allowing me to continuously deploy new versions several times a day.

The “status checker”, which is the service that crawls 3,000 status pages every minute to look for changes, lives on a dedicated inexpensive Hetzner server managed with Coolify (an open-source Vercel alternative).

Why the split? Simple: cost and efficiency. Vercel’s pricing structure is complex and tends to be unpredictable. It’s suitable for building a web application but tends to be very expensive for services that run 24/7. With my own Hetzner server, costs are capped and predictable. I only utilize Vercel to process status pages when there are actual changes to the status page, which reduces the workload by 99%. My wallet says thanks.

My New Coding Buddy: Cursor with Claude Sonnet 3.5

Okay, this one's a game-changer. StatusSight is the first time where I wrote an entire project using Cursor with the continuous help of AI, and let me tell you, it's been a revelation.

I have tried Cursor before with my OpenAI API keys, and it was... fine. Marginally better than Visual Studio Code paired with Copilot. But then I took the plunge and upgraded to Cursor Pro and actually took a few minutes to learn what Cursor Pro can do. Holy smokes!

I disabled GitHub Copilot and started using Cursor's built-in capabilities for AI code completion, editing, and chat. The difference is night and day!

But wait, it gets better. In recent weeks, I've been using the new Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI model in Cursor, and my mind is officially blown.

With the help of the AI, I now write complete features, identify bugs and remedy them, and answer questions about the code. Since I started using it, I've barely touched Google, StackOverflow, or ChatGPT for coding. It's like having a super-smart coding buddy who never sleeps or gets cranky.

Whether you’re a savvy developer or new to coding, I highly recommend you give Cursor a try (it comes with a two-week Pro trial) and see how much it can increase your velocity.

Making It Pretty: Tailwind and shadcn/ui

For building the user interface, I went with Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui.

I was skeptical about Tailwind when I started using it, but after a while, I found it helps me create better-looking apps faster. Once you learn the ropes it’s faster and easier than writing CSS. It’s also more encapsulated, so the styles are easier to understand and maintain as the codebase grows. Furthermore, it’s a great guardrail to ensure the UI stays fairly consistent across the app, with normalized spacing, font sizes, colors, etc.

shadcn/ui is a set of well-crafted components that you can install with a single command. I often had to tweak the default shadcn/ui components for StatusSight, but here's the thing - it's easy to modify, and even the modified versions are much better than anything I'd create from scratch. Why reinvent the wheel when you can just add some cool rims?

Pro tip: Keep an eye on V0. I played with it and I'm considering it for my next project - it looks promising for speeding up the initial UI brainstorming and development.

Email Magic: React Email

Last but not least, let's talk about transactional emails. You know, those email notifications StatusSight sends whenever a service has an outage? I needed a tool to dynamically generate the HTML for these emails, and I heard good things about React Email before.

First time using it, and wow - what a fantastic developer experience. Imagine designing your emails and seeing all changes in real-time in your browser. No more sending a gazillion test emails to yourself.

Also, creating emails that work across different email platforms and clients has traditionally been a pain, and React Email abstracts all of that and create emails that look and work well everywhere.

It's so good, it almost makes me want to send more emails. Almost.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it - the technologies I used in order to build StatusSight.

While StatusSight is one of the more elaborate products I’ve developed recently, thanks to these tools, I believe my velocity as a developer has at least doubled.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”

I’m not a big fan of chasing the shiny new “tool/framework of the day” since it’s often a distraction from building and shipping a product.
Having said that, AI-powered developer tools and no-code tools improve at an exhilarating pace, so now is a good time to explore the latest tools.
You might find that by investing one day in learning a new tool and “sharpening the axe,” you can significantly increase your productivity and save yourself months in product development.

Happy building, and may the force (of AI) be with you!

P.S. If you haven't checked out StatusSight yet, we're still live on Product Hunt. Your support means the world to this indie hacker!

Until next time,
- Lior

This newsletter is 100% free. Answer 4 short questions to help me make the newsletter more relevant for you.

Here are some of my products that can help you:

1. StatusSight: stay ahead of third-party service outages with custom health dashboards and email alerts

2. Competely: get a full competitive analysis for your product or idea within minutes, with the power of AI

3. Flawless: get AI-powered actionable suggestions to improve usability, conversion, and messaging for your homepage or landing page

4. BookAuthority: level up your skills and knowledge with book recommendations by experts and thought leaders

In today's newsletter, I'll explore how entrepreneurs rely on dozens of external services and APIs to run their products and businesses.

I'll discuss the costs of third-party service outages, and how most people handle them.

Finally, I'll introduce you to StatusSight, a new product I'm working on that provides real-time monitoring for all the services you depend on.

Check out StatusSight

We all depend on dozens of services

Whether you're building products, selling them, running a business, or working for a tech company, you depend on many third-party services. For example:

• Infrastructure: AWS, Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, Supabase, MongoDB, GitHub, Sentry

• APIs: Auth0, Stripe, Algolia, Twilio, Resend, OpenAI, Plaid, Cloudinary

• Marketing and Sales: HubSpot, ConvertKit, Salesforce, Google Ads, Mailchimp, Marketo

• Product: Segment, PostHog, Figma, Optimizely, Zendesk, Intercom, Hotjar

• e-Commerce: WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, Amazon, PayPal, Square, Quickbooks

• Daily Work: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Notion, Calendly, Loom, Monday, Asana, 1Password

These services enable you to achieve more in less time, focus on your core business, and better serve customers, which is fantastic!

The harsh truth about service outages

Unfortunately, any external service you use is another potential failure point.

Almost all services encounter issues or outages at some point, even services built by giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook.

When that happens, it can lead to a variety of problems:

• Product Disruption: Your product may experience a complete or partial outage, service degradation, bugs, or data corruption.

• Customer Dissatisfaction: Customers may become frustrated and flood you with support tickets or rant publicly on social media.

• Revenue Loss: The outage may prevent you from onboarding new customers or driving existing customers to switch to competitors.

• Operational Downtime: Your work and collaboration with your team may be disrupted, stalling projects and reducing productivity.

• Increased Costs: Dealing with outages and remediating the damage they cause can take days, costing you time and money.

  

The importance of learning about outages early

Most people learn about third-party service outages way too late.

Quite often, you may find that your product has an issue through angry customers. It could then take hours of debugging to discover that the issue is due to a malfunction in a third-party service.

On other occasions, you might learn about the outage from Twitter or from a coworker.

In both cases, the damage is already done at that point: customers could not make a purchase, your email campaign wasn't running, or your database was corrupted.

Status pages are great… until they aren’t

Many services offer a status page where you can see active incidents and subscribe to be notified when issues occur.

While helpful, status pages have their own set of problems:

• Cumbersome Management: You have to sign up for dozens of different status pages for each service that you rely on, which is time-consuming and difficult to manage.

• Inconsistent Alerts: Each status page offers different alerting methods, such as email, text messages, Slack, RSS, etc. This means tracking different alerts on different mediums.

• Irrelevant Notifications: You often get bombarded with irrelevant alerts that don't apply to your specific use of the service, e.g. you probably don’t care about an outage in SendGrid webhooks if you don’t use them.

• Reliance on Company: Status pages rely solely on the company that owns the service to provide updates, which means issues often surface late or don’t surface at all.

Introducing StatusSight

This is why I've decided to build StatusSight - an all-in-one status page for all the services you depend on.

It aggregates the status of various popular services, providing a single view of your entire infrastructure in one place, so you don't have to subscribe to dozens of status pages.

StatusSight currently monitors 25+ services (more coming soon) and shows their real-time status. It’s the first solution of its kind to show high-resolution minute-by-minute information:

In the coming weeks, I plan to introduce a personalized dashboard where you'll see only the services you rely on. You'll be able to subscribe to get alerts via email or Slack when these services malfunction so you can address it before it affects you, your customers, or your team.

In the future, I intend to add a community layer, where users can discuss issues with other users and share their experiences. Users could even report new incidents themselves, helping companies and other users stay informed.

Let me know your thoughts

I'd love to hear your thoughts about StatusSight:

StatusSight: all-in-one status page

Do you find it helpful? What features and services would you like to see?
Please reply and let me know.

Until next time,
- Lior

This newsletter is 100% free. Answer 4 short questions to help me make the newsletter more relevant for you.

Here are some of my products that can help you:

1. Competely: get a full competitive analysis for your product or idea within minutes, with the power of AI

2. Flawless: get AI-powered actionable suggestions to improve usability, conversion, and messaging for your homepage or landing page

3. BookAuthority: level up your skills and knowledge with book recommendations by experts and thought leaders

In this newsletter, I'll cover 5 essential levers for growing your product as a solopreneur: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue (also known as "AARRR").

While there are many ways to measure and grow a product, the AARRR framework offers an intuitive, funnel-alike view of your users’ journey.

This framework is helpful for anyone building online products, but it's particularly relevant to indie hackers and solopreneurs because it provides a simple and structured approach to product growth.

By thinking about, measuring, and improving these 5 levers, you'll be on track to grow your product in no time.

Let's dive in!

Acquisition

Acquisition is the critical first step of attracting potential customers to visit your site. This is the foundation of all growth, since without people visiting your site, you can't drive any usage, let alone growth.

You’re likely to get your first dozen users manually by talking to them, but it’s necessary for you to have a long-term strategy for getting more users at scale.

For indie projects, you'll usually focus on free acquisition strategies like social media marketing, content marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).

If each customer generates a significant amount of revenue (high lifetime value), you can consider paid acquisition such as advertising in search engines (SEM), social media (SMM), and newsletters. Some products are more expensive than others, so they would require low-touch or high-touch sales process to get customers in the door.

When creating a hypothesis for a new product, it's helpful to think about one or two channels that would drive most of its growth. Don’t choose too many!

Note that some acquisition channels, like Product Hunt or going the press, can help launch your product and drive some traffic for a few days, but they aren’t valid as long-term acquisition channels.

Measuring acquisition is straightforward - focus on the number of daily/weekly/monthly visitors to your site. Tools like Google Analytics can help you break down the traffic you get by channel.

Improving your acquisition is about driving more users, and more relevant users to your site, and is largely dependent on the channel you use. You’d usually want to increase the volume of users you get, while keeping user relevancy/intent high, and the user acquisition costs low.

Activation

Activation focuses on getting visitors and users to take action that would help them get value from your product, and understand how it helps them (the Aha moment). Without it, visitors are unlikely to see the value of your product and return to it.

Start with forming a sensible hypothesis of the few steps a user needs to take to realize the value of your product. Then, design the new user onboarding flow to drive users to take one action at a time (a single, noticable call-to-action). For example: Sign up → Personalize your feed → Watch a video on the feed.

You measure activation by tracking the percentage of users who take a particular action, like signing up or personalizing their feed. You can use event-driven analytics platforms like PostHog or MixPanel to measure that.

Increasing activation is done by improving your onboarding process. Ensure it's simple, intuitive, and leads users quickly to take the necessary actions to realize the value of your product. Live usability tests and session replay tools would help you understand how new users interact with your app and where they get confused or hesitant, so you can improve the onboarding flow and the activation rate.

Retention

Retention is about ensuring users return to your product and keep using it. Without proper retention, you have a leaky bucket, and you will lose all your new users in a matter of weeks or months.

When developing indie products, it's important to consider how long would users use your product for:
With products like Notion and Canva, the ideal customer would continue and use the product every week for years, which means they are more inclined to pay a monthly/annual subscription, and increasing retention would be a core metric for the business.
With products like Downloadable Guides or Resume Review Tools, even the ideal user is likely to get most of the value immediately, and they have no reason to return, so retention is tricky and it’s often better to charge a one-time upfront fee.

Retention is usually measured by the percentage of users returning to your app and using it again after their first visit. It may be useful to measure day-1 retention (the % of users returning the following day after their first visit), day-7 retention (the % of users returning after a week), and day-30 retention.
Some analytics tools can show you retention in cohorts, so you can see how product and marketing changes you’ve made affected the retention:

Improving retention requires talking to your users and iterating on feedback to make your product indispensable and hone in on your ideal customers. Some consider strong retention to be one of the key indicators of product-market fit.

Other than improving your product and targeting more relevant users, there are also tactical ways to improve retention, such as sending daily digest emails or notifications and creating time-based features. See the book Hooked by Nir Eyal to learn about creating hooks that drive users to return to your product.

Referral

Referral involves getting users to share your product and invite others to use it. It is hard to accomplish, but it's especially valuable for indie hackers since it provides free, organic growth. 

Consider your product’s referral potential:
Some products, such as single-player SaaS tools, don't have a high referral potential, but they can still be shared through word-of-mouth by happy users.
Other products are naturally sharable since users derive more value by inviting others to use the product - think Facebook, Dropbox, or Slack.

Whether you’re in the first or second group, you can consider integrating social or collaborative features within your product, creating shareable content (profiles, awards, badges, embed widgets, contests, and campaigns), or offering incentives to refer others (affiliate program or discounts).

While word-of-mouth is hard to measure, referrals where one user invites others directly through your product can be measure by generating unique links for each referral, such as mysite.com/invite?ref=472873.

Revenue

Revenue is the ultimate aim, turning your product's value into a viable business. 

You may directly monetize your users by charging them a one-time pyament, monthly/annual subscription fee, usage-based payment, or commissions.
You may also indirectly monetize your users by placing ads, sponsored content, or affiliate links in your product.
Look for a business model that fits your product's usage pattern, when value is provided, and your target audience's ability and willingness to pay.

Revenue can easily be measured monthly or annually with most payment providers like Stripe. If you have a subscription model, you'll usually want to measure monthly/annual recurring revenue (MRR/ARR). It’s also important to measure your conversion rate, namely, what’s the percentage of your users who become paying users.

To increase revenue, start by analyzing your current sales data and talking to your best customers to understand what drives purchase decisions. See if you can increase the percentage of new users who end up paying, either through a trial period, no-trial approach, or a free plan. Experiment with different pricing tiers and promotions to discover what maximizes revenue, always relying on feedback from customers and data to inform your decisions.

Take the first step

Using the AARRR framework will help you plan, measure, and accelerate your growth in a structured way.

Start by writing down a hypothesis of the right strategies to drive acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue for your product. You can then choose the metrics you want to track for each area and set up analytics tracking. Once this is in place, you can start experimenting with product and marketing changes to improve each one of these levers.

I hope this framework helps you grow your product and see it fulfilling its full potential.

Until next time,
Lior

This newsletter is 100% free. Answer 4 short questions to help me make the newsletter more relevant for you.

Here are some of my products that can help you:

1. Competely: get a competitive analysis for your product/idea within minutes with the power of AI. No tedious research needed!

2. Flawless: get AI-powered actionable suggestions to improve usability, conversion, and messaging for your homepage or landing page

3. BookAuthority: learn any skills with book recommendations by experts and thought leaders

Today, I will cover why much of the advice you read online or receive from others can set you up for failure, and how you can apply critical thinking to identify relevant vs irrelevant advice.

Knowledge is essential for entrepreneurs

As an entrepreneur, you must learn how to do many things on the fly. Especially as a solopreneur without a team, you need to learn many disciplines quickly: development, product, marketing, sales, content, operations, and more.

Without the proper knowledge, you cannot execute your vision and make it a reality, and you risk making mistakes that will cost you a lot of time and money.

You don’t have unlimited time to learn all these skills through trial and error, so you must learn from others.

Advice is everywhere

Fortunately, we’re at an age where you can get tons of advice from fellow entrepreneurs, operators, investors, and thought leaders who’ve built successful businesses.

Even if you don’t actively look for business advice, you still get it regularly via:

• Social media: Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

• Articles on news sites, blogs, and newsletters (like this one)

• Videos you watch on YouTube or Netflix

• Just talking to other entrepreneurs, friends, and your support network

That’s a great thing - people sharing their knowledge and experience empowers the next generation of entrepreneurs, and that’s a net positive for everyone.

The hard truth

Unfortunately, much of the advice you consume is irrelevant or downright harmful to your business. The advice might not apply to you, since it comes from someone with a different company type and stage, different skills and resources, serving different customers in a different industry.

Social media posts tend to simplify learned experiences into catchy, one-size-fits-all advice. This overgeneralization can lead entrepreneurs to follow others’ advice without understanding the nuance of why it worked in the first place.

Many entrepreneurs indiscriminately apply advice, rules, and best practices from people they look up to. I know I have done so many times.

Truth is, the further along a business is, the more unique its operating context is. Every decision made, every feature built, every goal set, every lesson learned. This means that the further along you are, the more context-specific the advice should be. Generic one-size-fits-all advice will likely set you up for failure.

Applying critical thinking

When you read or get advice, it's important to apply critical thinking and consider the other person’s path that has led them to give this advice.

What’s the underlying reason it worked for them, and would it apply to you?
Would it work for your company, goals, product, and industry?
Is this advice still relevant today, or have things changed?

To help you better assess the advice you get, here are 5 common pitfalls and how to avoid them:

Pitfall #1: different company stage

Advice often fails to account for the varying stages of a product or business. Strategies employed by giants like Facebook and Apple - such as doing brand advertising or building proprietary infrastructure and technologies - are often not suitable for a small startup or indie project. These companies have large amounts of cash, big teams, and can take several high-risk, high-reward bets powered by their abundant resources.
Make it a point to get advice from people one or two steps ahead of you, but not ten steps ahead of you. Before you apply any advice, ask yourself whether it makes sense for a company of your type and size, and for the kind of product you’re building.

Pitfall #2: different customer and industry

The effectiveness of product, marketing, and growth advice is highly contingent on the industry and the customer. For instance, Tinder's viral marketing strategies in the dating app space may not work for a B2B software company like Slack.
Prioritize product and marketing advice from people who work within your industry and serve the same type of customers, and ask yourself whether any product or marketing change you make would work for your customers.

Pitfall #3: different goals

The underlying objectives behind the advice you receive may not align with your goals and vision, since every business and every founder has different objectives. For example, while WeWork pursued rapid growth and market dominance at the expense of profitability, a company like Basecamp has prioritized sustainable growth and profitability over rapid expansion. You may want to build a high-touch product that serves enterprise customers, or a self-service product with minimal support and sales. Both are valid, but the same advice often doesn’t apply to both. That’s why it’s important to decide and be clear about your business goals. Ask yourself: would applying this advice get me closer or further to my goals?

Pitfall #4: overlooking timing

Having good timing is often a critical factor behind a product's success. Some companies managed to pull off amazing growth just by being at the right time, in the right place, and offering the right product.
However, markets and trends evolve quickly, and some advice that is based on last year’s experience might not work anymore. It’s possible that the market is more saturated now, customers' preferences and attention have shifted, or customers are just tired of an overused strategy.
Before applying any advice, ask yourself whether the fact that it worked for someone in the past, means that it would work for you now.

Pitfall #5: ignoring survival bias

Entrepreneurs who have tasted success often attribute their victories to decisions they’ve made, overlooking the role that luck and timing played in their achievements. This post-rationalization makes them think the strategies they used were the reason they succeeded, and they go on to provide these strategies as advice to others. In reality, many of these successes are influenced by factors beyond strategy.
10 entrepreneurs may advise you to switch from a subscription to a one-time payment model, since they had success doing it. However, there could be 100 other entrepreneurs who tried one-time payments and failed silently. Success stories are more likely to be shared, making it seem like a certain strategy works for everyone while overlooking the many times it has failed.
Avoid this pitfall by actively looking for contrarian views of people who tried the said advice and failed, then make a well-informed bet about why a certain strategy would succeed or fail for your business. It’s worth investigating why a certain strategy worked for a particular business, rather than taking the advice at face value.

That’s it folks. My goal was to give you some tools to better navigate through the heaps of advice we all get as entrepreneurs. Advice is everywhere, but not all of it fits your journey.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and perspective - please comment below.

Until next time,
- Lior

This newsletter is 100% free. Answer 4 short questions to help me make the newsletter more relevant for you.

Here are some of my products that can help you:

1. Competely: get a competitive analysis for your product/idea within minutes with the power of AI. No tedious research needed!

2. Flawless: get AI-powered actionable suggestions to improve usability, conversion, and messaging for your homepage or landing page

3. BookAuthority: learn any skills with book recommendations by experts and thought leaders

Today, I’d like to share 5 frameworks to help you find ideas for products you can launch quickly, without a large team or tons of money.

Building a product as a solopreneur is hard. You see startups with big money, PR, and teams launching beautiful products and thinking to yourself: "How could I ever do this as one person?"

Here's the thing: you don't need all that to kick off a killer project. You need to find a unique insight and build a simple product that alleviates pain for a small group of people. That does not require a large team or a huge PR budget.

Anyone can find good product ideas with the right ideation frameworks. Here are 5 of my favorite ones:

Framework 1: observe your life

In your day-to-day, many small but significant problems go unnoticed. By proactively looking for these pain points in your daily life, you can reveal many potential product ideas. This requires attention to detail and a willingness to look at mundane daily activities through a curious lens. The best product ideas often come from solving the most common frustrations. Here are a few steps you can take to uncover ideas:

• Make a habit of noting down daily annoyances, no matter how trivial they seem. Look for things that are painful, irritating, cluttered, stressful, and complicated. Over time, this list can reveal patterns and opportunities for resolving these pains.

• Analyze your typical day at work: What do you spend a lot of time and effort on? What feels inefficient? What is frustrating? What do you complain about?

• Observe the products and services you use the most in your work and life. What don’t you like about them? How could they be improved?

• Notice where you’ve come up with shortcuts, hacks, and workarounds in your life and work - many times, you can productize these.

• Figure out what could be automated or productized in your daily life, calendar, task list, or project list.

I discovered the idea for Competely through this framework. I noticed I spend a lot of time doing competitive analysis for new products, and I figured I could build something to automate some of this tedious and painful process.

Framework 2: find untapped demand

Another way to find product ideas is to look for implicit or explicit demand: people suffering from a specific pain, trying to solve a specific problem, or just looking for alternatives to existing products. Two of my favorite ways to find demand are:

• Analyze trends on platforms like Google Trends, Twitter, and YouTube to identify what captures people’s attention and what people rant about. These trends can reveal consumer interests that you could tap into.

• Conduct keyword research using tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs to discover what people search for on Google. It could be a problem they are trying to solve, a product they are looking to replace, or anything really. You want to be looking for keywords with sufficient searches (thousands per month) but a low amount of competition.

Framework 3: follow the money

You can find good market opportunities by seeing what products people already pay for:

• List all the online products that you, your family, and your friends already pay for. Which ones were built by one person or a small team? Can you pull off something better or different?

• Browse through listings on BoringCashCow to find businesses that are profitable yet unexciting to the majority of entrepreneurs. This provides insight into business ideas that are often overlooked but have a proven track record.

• Search Twitter to see which products built by other solopreneurs make money, as many are building in public. Search Indie Hackers for products that generate $1,000/mo, you can even filter by category or business model.

Here’s the important part: don’t just create a copycat or replica of other people’s products! It’s not just unethical, it’s also not a smart business move. You’ll always be a few steps behind if you’re building a copycat. Instead, focus on the underlying problem they are trying to solve and innovate a different or better way to solve that problem. There are many ways to solve any given problem.

Framework 4: leverage new enablers

Technology is advancing at a thrilling pace. New AI models, APIs, open-source libraries, and no-code tools can help you build a product that was hard or impossible to build before. Here are a few ways you can leverage what's new to create what's next:

• Immerse your life in new technologies you’re passionate about. Become an early adopter of these technologies. Try to “live in the future” and adopt these technologies before most people have the chance to.

• If you’re passionate about AI, stay on top of the latest developments with newsletters like Ben’s Bites. Between language models, video generation, and machine vision, AI technologies are improving monthly and shifting how software is built. AI drives massive changes in existing product categories and enables the creation of new products that were not possible before.

• Look for new, promising platforms to build on top of. If the platform grows to millions of users, you can often grow with it - just look at the number of small businesses built on top of the Notion ecosystem. In recent months, we’ve seen new platforms like the OpenAI GPT Store and Apple’s visionOS. However, with the good comes the bad: it’s risky to have your entire product depend on one platform, and it could even kill your product.

• Look for new open-source projects gaining traction, as they often utilize emerging technologies, and can be used to easily build products that were previously difficult to build.

• Think what is possible today that wasn't possible a year ago:
  What are some new capabilities in AI, server, and client technologies? What new data has become available? What has become cheaper, more scalable, and more performant to enable new products?

This is how I came up with the idea for Flawless. Last year, OpenAI introduced a machine vision model (GPT 4-Vision), which made it possible for AI to visually analyze your landing page, do a UX audit, and suggest improvements to your page. This wasn’t possible a few months before.

The risk with this framework is finding ideas that are “a solution looking for a problem” - cool products that no one actually needs. Particularly with this framework, it’s important to validate that your product idea is something people want.

Framework 5: think from first principles

With this framework, you take a known problem with existing products, and focus your efforts on finding a radically better or different way of solving that problem.

To innovate a product that’s ten times better, you’d need to challenge the status quo of how existing products solve a problem. By thinking from first principles, you strip away existing complexities and get down to the fundamental truths of a problem. This is challenging, but if done right, it can lead to the creation of a product that is an order of magnitude better. Here are a few steps you can take:

• Analyze existing products you know and use. What problem are they trying to solve? Is there a completely different way to solve that same problem?

• Try to reframe and redefine the problem in a different way. You can utilize the Five Whys technique to help distill the root problem that a product is trying to solve.

• Instead of imitating existing products in a market, question everything from first principles: the platform, the user experience, the necessary feature set, the business model, the go-to-market strategy.

• Brainstorm how to create a product experience that is 10x better than what's available now. This could mean a 10x faster, easier, cheaper, more efficient, or more enjoyable product that exceeds customers’ expectations.

Bonus: ideation frameworks that aren’t suitable for solopreneurs

Some frameworks are great if you want to build a large venture-backed startup, but are counterproductive for solopreneurs building a lifestyle business. Here are a few:

• Identifying industries ripe for disruption - disrupting any industry takes significant money, time, and effort, and is therefore unsuitable for solopreneurs.

• Anticipating and betting on future trends - while large startups can afford to play long games and bet on macro trends for the next 3-5 years, as a solopreneur, you’ll run out of money by then.

• Looking at which ideas get PR or funding - if you’re looking for ideas by browsing Crunchbase or The Verge for what’s hot, you’re getting yourself into markets where you’ll be met with plenty of well-funded competition.

• Interviewing enterprise customers - building products for large enterprise companies will force you to deal with things like compliance, security, integrations, and data governance that you’re not equipped to handle as a solopreneur.

Choosing the right idea

By using the 5 frameworks above, you’re likely to find many interesting product ideas within a matter of days.

However, not every good idea is worth pursuing. It’s important that you filter ideas based on criteria that fit your needs:

• Is it feasible? Am I capable of building and launching an MVP for this product in a short amount of time, with code or no-code tools?

• Does it fit my business objectives? e.g. if the product is successful, can it generate $1,000/mo? How confident am I in this idea? Does it fit my risk profile?

• Does it fit my lifestyle objectives? What kind of work does it involve to build and grow this (e.g. sales calls, email support, operations)? Am I passionate about this? Can I dedicate enough time to build and grow this product?

Even once an idea passes your criteria, you’ll want to validate it before going all in.

I hope you will utilize these 5 frameworks wisely and find your next idea in no time!

- Lior

This newsletter is 100% free. Answer 4 short questions to help me make the newsletter more relevant for you.

Here are some of my products that can help you:

1. Competely: get a competitive analysis for your product/idea within minutes with the power of AI. No tedious research needed!

2. Flawless: get AI-powered actionable suggestions to improve usability, conversion, and messaging for your homepage or landing page

3. BookAuthority: learn any skills with book recommendations by experts and thought leaders

In this post, I will share the 5 Mac apps I use to maximize my productivity, save time, and reduce clutter.

Since switching from PC to Mac a decade ago, I found that MacBooks are great for makers and entrepreneurs. I enjoy the stability, simplicity, and high-quality software. My Mac makes me more productive, and I can spend more time building my products and business.

While Macs are pretty great out-of-the-box, with the right apps, you can turn your Mac into a lean and mean productivity machine.

Over the years, I have found a few tools that help me maximize my productivity and accomplish more in less time.

Here are the 5 Mac apps that I use to boost my productivity, I suggest you give them a try:

1. Commander One

Commander One is a file manager for Mac.

While Mac’s built-in Finder is fairly capable, it’s not easy to navigate with the keyboard, and things get even more messy when you have to open multiple Finder windows to move files around.

Commander One has a two-panel display (left and right), which lets you easily move files around. The user interface is inspired by the Norton Commander that was used in the 90’s and by Total Commander for Windows that came later on.

Some of my favorite features of Commander One include:

• Two-panel display, each pane can display a different folder and be customized

• Phenomenal keyboard navigation with configurable hotkeys to copy or move files, open a file in my favorite text editor, and more.

• Bookmarking folders you visit frequently for quick access

• The detailed display, which includes each file’s name, extension, size, and date

• Configurable theme: I set mine to have a nice dark mode, and I use the Menlo monospace font

• You can easily open a Terminal window in any folder

I use Command One daily to access my downloads, documents, and files, and it’s an essential part of my GTD Weekly Review, helping me organize the files that I pile up.

2. Bartender

I like the Mac’s menu bar. Unfortunately, many applications nowadays have a menu bar icon, making the right area of your menu bar crowded, and making it hard to find the few apps you use frequently.

Bartender for Mac allows you to hide some menu bar icons and keep others. You can always access all of your icons with a click or a hover.

It’s highly customizable. For example, I set it to hide the Battery icon when my Mac is connected to a power source, but to show it when it’s battery-powered. I also set it to hide the Time Machine icon, unless it’s currently running a backup.

Using Bartender declutters your menu bar, hiding unnecessary distractions and allowing you to focus on the apps that you actively use.

3. Moom

One thing that is severely lacking on Macs is proper window management.
It takes too much effort to place a couple of windows right next to each other, or align multiple windows in a certain way.

With Moom, you can move windows around with a keyboard shortcut or mouse click.

The best part is that you can set up custom window sizes and positions and assign them a keyboard shortcut.

I set up several custom layouts, so with a single keyboard shortcut, I can:

• Move and resize a window to fill the right half of the screen

• Move and resize a window to fill the left half of the screen

• Move a window to the top center, next to my webcam - I use this for Zoom

• Center a window onscreen and make it medium-width - optimal for reading

With Moom, I use keyboard shortcuts to resize and move windows around all day, and it’s so much easier than dragging and resizing windows with the mouse.

4. Raycast

Raycast is a launcher for Mac that helps you quickly launch and control applications, find files, and perform everyday tasks.

It aims to be a more powerful and flexible alternative to Mac’s Spotlight (Cmd+Space).

Previously, I tried to use Alfred and it didn’t stick, but with the amount of hype around Raycast, I had to check it out. I started using Raycast recently, and I love it so far.

Here are my favorite features:

• Quickly search and launch applications, files, and folders on your Mac

• 1,000+ extensions: Raycast has a store with many extensions that augment it with additional functionality. Here are some of my favorite ones:

  • ChatGPT - ask GPT anything with a few keystrokes (requires API key)

  • Spotify Player - quickly search, play, and control music

  • Google Translate - translate between languages quickly

  • Notion - search and navigate to my Notion pages with ease

  • There are extensions for many common work tools, including Gmail, Google Drive, GitHub, Visual Studio, Jura, etc.

• Clipboard history - so you never lose things you had in your clipboard

• Great emoji search and picker

• Quick built-in calculator

• Convenient keyboard navigation: just hit Enter to paste an emoji or a calculation result, hit Esc to navigate back to the previous screen

The more Raycast extensions I install, the more I use it to perform simple tasks without losing focus!

5. CleanShot X

I have a small confession: I take screenshots on a daily basis. I use screenshots for product, marketing, and design work, record-keeping, and collaboration.

I’ve tried several screenshot tools over the years, such as Skitch and Shottr. As of today, CleanShot is my favorite screenshot tool for Mac, since it packs some pretty powerful features:

• Easily annotate your screenshots with text, arrows, lines, and rectangles

• Retract sensitive data with a blur / pixelated / blackout effect

• Capture scrollable pages and do video screen recording

• Add a beautiful background to your screenshots, which is great for sharing on your social media or blog.

• Each one of the above features is fairly customizable

While there are many good screenshot tools, I found CleanShotX to be the most powerful, while still offering an intuitive user interface.

What about you? Which apps do you use to boost your productivity?
Please comment below and let me know!

Until next time,
- Lior

This newsletter is 100% free. Answer 4 short questions to help me make the newsletter more relevant for you.

Here are some of my products that can help you:

1. Competely: get a competitive analysis for your product/idea within minutes with the power of AI. No tedious research needed!

2. Flawless: get AI-powered actionable suggestions to improve usability, conversion, and messaging for your homepage or landing page

3. BookAuthority: learn any skills with book recommendations by experts and thought leaders

66% of Internet traffic is mobile, according to a SimilarWeb analysis.

Yet, most people design their sites on desktop, for desktop, and slap on a few adjustments to ensure the site doesn’t break on mobile. I know I’ve done this more than once.

Today, I’ll share my best practices for building sites that aren’t just mobile-compatible, but provide a truly great mobile experience.

This will provide a superior experience for the majority of your users, increase signups and conversions, reduce customer churn, and help you get more traffic from Google.

Unfortunately, entrepreneurs and makers often think like desktop users, which inadvertently affects how we build sites.

We plan, build, and test sites on desktop

Building dozens of sites, alone and with teams, I have noticed how our work environment makes it challenging to embrace the mindset of a mobile user:

• Code editors, no-code tools, and site builders are built for desktop use

• It’s easier to plan and design your site on desktop, since most design and collaboration tools are primarily used from the desktop

• It’s easier to test your site on desktop, since it has more powerful browsers and plenty of development and testing tools

• As knowledge workers, we’re used to working (and seeing other people work) on desktop all day, but this is not the case for most people

Luckily, there are some changes we make to shift our focus from desktop to mobile. Here are 5 things that you can start doing today:

#1: Design for mobile first

Before you start building a site or a feature, it’s crucial to plan the experience, design, and specs for mobile users first. When you decide on a list of MVP features, think about the mobile experience. When you draw wireframes and mockups, start with mobile ones. When you’re building your site, start by building the mobile version first.

Ensure your site looks and works great even on a viewport of 360x640 pixels, the equivalent of an old Google Nexus 5 phone. If you use Chrome, you can add devices to simulate different types of phones.

Once the mobile design and functionality are in place, start gradually working your way up to larger resolutions. Use your newly found screen space wisely, and add UI elements, navigation, and white space as necessary. If you’re a programmer, you can use CSS media queries, grids, and flex to accomplish that. If not, most modern website builders support different layouts for mobile, tablet, and desktop.

Building for mobile first has another benefit: it forces you to prioritize your features and UI elements, thereby ensuring that your site is clean, clear, and clutter-free.

Don’t do the opposite: once you have a desktop site, it’s harder to make it mobile-friendly later, as you’ll try to squeeze all the design elements into a small viewport, and essentially create a cramped version of the desktop site.

#2: Add it to your home screen

Opening a browser on your phone and typing in your site’s address is a hassle. We want to remove barriers so you can frequently use and test your site on mobile. My favorite trick is adding home screen icons leading to my sites:

Here’s how to do it on an iPhone:

• Open your site in Safari or Chrome

• Tap the Share button at the top-right corner (Chrome) or bottom menubar (Safari)

• Scroll down the list of options, then tap “Add to Home Screen”

• If you don’t see that option, tap “Edit Actions” at the end of the page, then tap “Add to Home Screen”

Here’s how to do it on Android:

• Open your site in Chrome

• Tap the menu icon in the top-right corner

• Tap “Add to Home screen”

If you haven’t yet, now is a great opportunity to test your site on your phone. In addition, make it a habit to test your site from the phone whenever you make changes.

Place the icon somewhere noticeable, so next time you’re trying to kill a few minutes, instead of opening Instagram or TikTok, you’ll tap your site icon and spend a few minutes playing with it.

Here’s the nice thing: when you’re far from your work environment, you step out of your maker mindset, which allows you to explore your site casually, just like a typical mobile user would.

#3: Walk through your user’s critical path

The critical path is the steps your site’s users go through to achieve their goal. It includes a sequence of events like reading content, tapping a button, signing in, typing something, and interacting with various elements. At the end of that path, users accomplish a goal they have, like generating a report, sending a message, or ordering a shirt.

Walk a mile in your user’s shoes:
Imagine you’re a site visitor with a goal in mind, and use your phone to try to accomplish that goal. Is everything fully functional and reliable? Are the messaging and user interface clear or confusing? Can you accomplish the goal with ease, or do you have to jump through hoops?

In addition, I recommend using an analytics platform that supports session recording such as PostHog or FullStory. Session recording shows you how real mobile users interact with your site from their own point-of-view, which can be very revealing.

#4: Make it thumb-friendly

We tend to forget how precise mouse and trackballs are, and how large and bulky our fingers are.

Here’s how you can ensure your site is thumb-friendly:

• Design touch targets like buttons and icons to be large enough, at least 45 pixel wide and 45 pixel tall

• Use margins to ensure they are far enough from each other to avoid accidental taps

• While different people hold their phones differently, be mindful that some areas of the screen are often harder to tap, namely the top-half and the bottom-right side. See the illustration below:

  

• With the exception of subtle visual cues, don’t use mouse-hover events for anything important like popping up a menu. These hover events are not usable on mobile

#5 Size for mobile first

Sites that aren’t mobile-friendly often fall into one of two groups:

Group A: sites that weren’t built for mobile at all. Oftentimes, the mobile browser shrinks the entire site to fit into the screen. A good example is the Berkshire Hathaway site - note how unreadable the text is and how hard it is to press the links:

Group B: mobile-compatible sites built with a desktop user in mind. A good example is an old site of mine - note how large and disproportional the icons are on mobile:

To avoid these issues, build your site for a mobile viewport first (say, 360x640 pixels), and ensure you use sensible font, image, and element sizes for that viewport. Then, you can progressively increase the font and element size for larger viewports.

You can use tools like Chrome’s DevTools to simulate the small viewport of mobile devices. On Chrome, press F12 to load DevTools, then press the Device Toggle icon:

In addition, you can use tools like BrowserStack to conveniently test across different screen sizes and browsers.

Emulators can’t replace testing on real phones

Using Chrome DevTools, BrowserStack, or downsizing your browser on a desktop is a good starting point for building mobile sites. However, these tools don’t really simulate the mobile user’s experience! There are several reasons:

1. Thumb vs cursor: using a thumb or finger to navigate on the phone is substantially different from using a mouse cursor of desktop

2. Onscreen keyboard: phone users have to use the onscreen keyboard, which isn’t as convenient, and also covers 30-50% of your site

3. Swiping: on the phone, users can’t drag the scrollbar or use a mouse wheel. Instead, users swipe, which has a completely different behavior

4. Device performance: phones are often slower than your work laptop or desktop. This means your site will be slower and less responsive

5. Internet Connectivity: phones sometimes have unstable or slower Internet connections, affecting load time and live interactions with your site

6. External Factors: screen glare, low light conditions, external interruptions (aka “the real world”), messages, calls, and notifications are likely to distract and affect users when they use your site on mobile

To ensure your site is truly mobile-friendly, you have to plan, design, and build it for mobile before desktop. Add it to your home screen, use it often, and walk through the user’s critical paths. Lastly, pay attention to sizing elements proportionally and make all interactions thumb-friendly.

I'd love to hear your thoughts - please comment below.

Until next time,
- Lior

Here are some of my products that can help you:

1. Competely: get a competitive analysis for your product/idea within minutes with the power of AI. No tedious research needed!

2. Flawless: get AI-powered actionable suggestions to improve usability, conversion, and messaging for your homepage or landing page

3. BookAuthority: learn any skills with book recommendations by experts and thought leaders

We’re all aware of the much-overused term “Serial Entrepreneur,” but have you ever heard of a “Parallel Entrepreneur”?

Instead of betting on one big idea at a time, parallel entrepreneurs build and run several products or services in parallel, creating multiple, diversified sources of income.

Last year, I made the decision to become a Parallel Entrepreneur, and have since built multiple products such as Competely, Flawless, and DreamGift.

In this post, I’ll dive into how being a Parallel Entrepreneur differs from traditional or serial entrepreneurship. I’ll share the market and technology shifts that enable everyone to become a parallel entrepreneur. Finally, I’ll provide a framework to help you decide whether you should become a Parallel Entrepreneur yourself.

Three Types of Entrepreneurs

1. The Traditional Entrepreneur

When I started my career in the late 90s, being an entrepreneur usually meant a long-term commitment to build a single company. This period was marked by entrepreneurs who invested most of their adult lives pursuing one big idea, with the goal of building a generational business. Some examples include Bill Gates, who co-founded Microsoft in 1975 and left in 2008, Carol Bartz, who led Autodesk from 1992 to 2006, and Larry Ellison, who co-founded Oracle in 1977 and is still its chairman.

2. The Serial Entrepreneur

Serial Entrepreneurs start, grow, and exit businesses (through IPO, sale, or closure) several times throughout their careers. Oftentimes, these businesses are startup companies backed by VCs and angel investors.
Some notable serial entrepreneurs include Ev Williams (Twitter, Medium), Neil Patel (Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, NP Digital), and Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook, Asana).
In the early 2000s, the rise of the Internet and early cloud technologies significantly reduced the time and money required to launch, market, and scale products. At the same time, Hollywood and the media started glorifying startup entrepreneurs, and being an entrepreneur became a normalized, even sought-after, career choice.

3. The Parallel Entrepreneur

Most recently, we’ve seen entrepreneurs who launch and manage multiple businesses in parallel, usually bootstrapping most of these businesses without external funding.

This includes people like John Rush, Sveta Bay, Marc Lou, and Tony Dinh, who have built multiple profitable online products. I’ve created a Twitter list of Parallel Entrepreneurs that you can follow.

In recent years, building and running multiple products have become easier:

• Modern AI, no-code platforms, site builders, and boilerplates allow the launching of new products within days or weeks.

• Automation in payments, support, and marketing makes it easier to create businesses that require minimal effort and no team to run.

• Social media allows entrepreneurs to build in public, grow their brand and followership, and generate compound effects every time they launch a new product.

• Millennials and Gen Z entrepreneurs grew up in a digital, hyper-connected world and are more adept at multitasking and adapting new technologies to run multiple businesses.

The aspiration for most parallel entrepreneurs is to build a set of products or services that generate a few million dollars per year, with no or little external funding, no or few employees, while allowing them some amount of freedom. This is not only a career choice but a lifestyle choice as well.

Parallel entrepreneurship typically doesn’t align with traditional VC funding, which involves aiming to build a billion-dollar company, taking more risks to reach outsized returns, hiring large teams, and having a singular focus on growing one business for many years.

Is Parallel Entrepreneurship For You?

None of the three entrepreneurial routes - traditional, serial, or parallel - is inherently better than the others. Each is viable in today's technology and market landscape, so the choice largely depends on personal preference.

Here’s a breakdown of the pros and cons of each route, to help you choose the right one for you:

Traditional Entrepreneur

• 👍 Pros:

  • Singular focus on one problem/market for many years builds expertise and authority

  • Opportunity to build a lasting legacy and deeply influence one industry

  • Potential for substantial long-term success and generational impact

  • Ability to create a lot of momentum and leverage through external funding, larger team, advertising, and media coverage

• 👎 Cons:

  • Spending a significant part of your adult life building a single business that might not pan out

  • Massive business goals are uncertain and may take years to reach (e.g. $10M in ARR, Market Dominance, IPO)

  • Less exposure to diverse markets, technologies, and opportunities

• 👉 Choose this path if: you're deeply passionate about a single idea and are prepared to commit to it and work hard for 10+ years, even if it doesn’t pan out

Serial Entrepreneur

• 👍 Pros:

  • Opportunity to explore several ideas and industries as an entrepreneur

  • Ability to capitalize on the business experience and networks from previous ventures

  • Higher possibility of one or more life-changing liquidity events (e.g. acquisition, merger, or IPO)

• 👎 Cons:

  • Spending several years on each endeavor, many of which might not pan out

  • Each new venture brings a fresh set of risks and challenges to overcome

  • Success in one venture doesn't guarantee success in the next

• 👉 Choose this path if: you’re okay with a long-term commitment, but enjoy the thrill of starting new ventures and are okay with starting from scratch every few years

Parallel Entrepreneur

• 👍 Pros:

  • Diversification of market, technology, and product risks

  • Potential for multiple streams of income

  • Continuous learning and exposure to new markets and technologies

  • Ability to leverage and share resources between ventures

• 👎 Cons:

  • Juggling multiple businesses and prioritizing work can be challenging 

  • Risk of losing focus and making little progress

  • High potential for burnout

  • Traditional VC funding usually isn’t an option

• 👉 Choose this path if: you thrive doing different things every week or month, have strong time management skills, and look to build a lifestyle business that suits your preferences

Why Did I Choose Parallel Entrepreneurship?

Last year, I chose to become a Parallel Entrepreneur. The primary reasons I chose this path are:

• After two decades of launching online products, I’ve become fairly good at designing, building, and launching products quickly.

• At 40 years old, my time-perspective has changed. I feel that dedicating a decade of my life to building the “next big thing” is a substantial risk if it doesn’t pan out.

• In a world that becomes more uncertain than ever, I’d rather have a diversified portfolio of products, rather than betting everything on one idea, industry, or product.

• I really enjoy the zero-to-one stage of building products from the ground up.

• I'm passionate about regularly exploring new emerging markets and technologies, particularly AI, and building new products regularly allows me to do that.

What about you? Which type of entrepreneurship is a good fit for you?
I'd love to hear your thoughts - please comment below.

Until next time,
- Lior

P.S. Here are 3 of my products that may help you:

1. Competely: get a competitive analysis for your product or idea within minutes. No tedious research is needed.

2. Flawless: get a UX audit for your landing page, with actionable suggestions to improve its usability, conversion, and messaging.

3. BookAuthority: find the most recommended books to expand your horizons and learn any skill.

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Competely is live on Product Hunt!

In the past couple of months, I spent countless hours working on Competely, my AI competitive analysis tool, with early customers.

Today, I’m officially launching it!

I’m on Product Hunt all day to answer your questions, come and show your support:

Show your support on Product Hunt!

How does Competely work?

The idea behind Competely is to help founders, product managers, and marketers quickly generate a competitive analysis for their product. This could potentially save days of work.

Once you sign up to Competely, there are three steps to create a competitive analysis:

Step 1: specify the address of your product (or describe it):

Step 2: Competely’s AI looks for competitors for your product online. You can then choose which competitors to compare to your product:

Step 3: Competely scans competitors’ sites, and our AI analyzes the differences between you and competitors across product, marketing, pricing, and more:

Lessons Learned

In the past few months, I’ve been focused on working with early customers to improve the product and prepare it for prime time.

Here are some things I’ve learned throughout this process:

Early feedback is critical

• Start (really) early: even before I even had a working product, I started gathering feedback and gauging people’s sentiments with a simple Google Form. I then emailed these users, started a conversation with them, and provided early access to the crappy beta I had built.

• Build a community: I then started a community to gather feedback from early users, as suggested by Ron Gross. This has the benefit of people knowing each other and interacting with each other, instead of just discussing individually with early users.

• Maximize the contact area with customers: working with dozens of customers to resolve their issues and answer their questions unveiled tons of insights. Adding links to send feedback everywhere really helped, as well as proactively reaching out to users.

3 business models in 3 months

• Free can be misleading: I started with a free MVP for a month. While it helped me launch faster, I quickly learned that early free users are usually curious about the product, but they aren’t always the ones with the deepest pain or the willingness to pay. Therefore, in the future, I might start charging even earlier to attract the ideal customer profile.

• Subscriptions are great, but users don’t like committing: I started with a subscription model ($19/mo), which made it hard to onboard early users who didn’t want to commit, especially with having no free trial. The fact that the subscription can be canceled anytime didn’t help.

• What I ended up with: I eventually switched to a $19 one-time payment, while limiting what users can do (up to 10 analyses) to control the burn rate. This change has reduced the friction to sign up, and increased conversion rates.

• This is not the end: I definitely see myself going back to the subscription model once the product matures and offers more value, but for the time being, it’s more important to maximize my learnings from early paying customers than to maximize revenue.

Sustainable user acquisition is challenging

• Launching is not a user acquisition strategy. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from launching dozens of products, is that launching is not a sustainable strategy for user acquisition. You get a short peak in traffic and sign-ups for a few days, but then it’s gone. This applies to Product Hunt, but also to PR (TechCrunch, New York Times, etc.)

  

• Running ads is a valuable skill: I started experimenting with acquiring users through Google Ads as a more sustainable acquisition channel. It’s been a while since I ran Google Ad campaigns and there’s some learning curve. However, I’m determined to get better at it, since it’s valuable not only for user acquisition, but also for early validation and understanding of any market.

• Positive unit economics is elusive: at this point, I aspire to get to positive unit economics, where the cost of acquiring a new paying user is lower than the customer’s lifetime value. This is elusive, especially since I charge users a one-time payment. However, I did manage to improve the campaign (and the user conversion) significantly over time, so I have hopes that positive unit economics can be reached with Competely.

User activation at scale

• Mo users, no money: after making the product paid, I noticed how most users don’t complete their signup. They register with their email, but they end up not paying.

• Trial is assumed: talking to many new users about it, a pattern emerged: everyone assumed (or expected) a free trial for the product, although at no point I mentioned there’s one. This makes sense, as free trials are fairly commonplace in smaller SaaS products. However, due to the significant cost of generating a competitive analysis, I don’t offer a free trial as this will quickly bleed me out of money…

• Post-signup emails FTW: I decided to start sending emails to users who signed up but haven’t paid. Suprisingly, a lot of people replied to these emails, and some even ended up completing their registration and paying:

  

• Start manually, then automate: for several days, I was running a database query and mailing each user individually from my Gmail, but gradually, the number of new users grew and I became the bottleneck. At this point, I built an automation to send these same emails to new users who had not completed their registration. I’m happy to report it’s still working :)

That’s it for today, folks!

Have any thoughts or questions about Competely or how I built it?
I’m on Product Hunt to answer your questions:

Come say hi on Product Hunt

Best,
Lior

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In today’s issue, I’m going to share:

1. Why you should never skip competitive analysis

2. How skipping it cost me two weeks of work

3. My research on the top tools to find competitors

4. Competely: my new AI-powered competitive analysis tool (free for a limited time)

Nobody loves doing competitive analysis

Competitive analysis is one of my least favorite parts of the product-building process.
But today, I will cover why you should never skip it, and why you should do competitive analysis early, as an integral part of the ideation stage, even if you’re a solopreneur or part of a small team.

Two weeks of work down the drain 🤦🏻

Recently, I’ve shared with you my idea to build a developer-first tool to generate Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. I was so excited by this idea, as it’s solving a personal pain point for me, that I neglected to do a proper competitive analysis before becoming invested in the idea.

After a couple of weeks of investing in the idea - exploring, designing, scoping, and talking to users, I finally decided to do some competitive research...

To my dismay, as I started to see what’s out there, I found that some existing platforms like iubenda are offering some of the “unique” features I had in mind. Even worse, the more I learned about the products in this market, the more I understood how complicated and nuanced creating Terms of Service and Privacy Policy is, and how much time and legal research was spent building these tools.

As a result, I decided not to pursue this idea since it’s too large in scope for an indie hacking project, and requires significant legal knowledge, which I do not possess and would take months to learn and integrate.

Unfortunately, I wasted two weeks of work - this could have been prevented if I had done competitive research earlier.

Why is competitive analysis important?

In the same way talking to potential customers is important, doing at least a basic competitive analysis is critical - one hour of competitive analysis can save you days or weeks in product development and iteration.

Competitive analysis helps you with:

• Validation: ensuring that there’s real problem that people are trying to solve.

• Positioning: understanding the competition and finding your unique offering and positioning within that market, so you can focus your efforts.

• Defining Scope: which features are table stakes and required to launch an MVP? Which are nice to have and could be added later?

• Inspiration: seeing how different companies solve the same problem can inspire you. While I don’t advocate for creating copycats, getting inspired by how others solved the problem can provide insights and inspiration for designing your own product.

• Identifying Unknowns: helping you identify gaps in your idea, as well as your perception of the market. While you’ve spent a few days thinking about this idea, other companies spent years, and there are a lot of unknown-unknowns that could be learned by looking at potential competitors.

Why do people skip competitive analysis, then?

I found there are a few reasons why competitive analysis is skipped, especially within smaller startups or projects:

• Time-consuming - doing competitive research could take hours or even days, depending on how deep you go. Other things like designing, building, and marketing feel more pressing.

• Tedious - let’s face it, competitive research tends to be manual, tedious, and largely boring. Doing other things is more fun, so we procrastinate on competitive analysis.

• Dreading the truth - sometimes we’re just dreading what we’re going to find, so to “protect” the idea that we fell in love with, we avoid doing the thing that might invalidate it or require significant changes.

Top tools for competitive analysis

Doing my own market research and surveying 50 professionals, I found that entrepreneurs, PMs, and marketers mostly use the following for competitive analysis:

• Google

• Digital Marketing Research Tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, and SimilarWeb to find competitors and track the amount of traffic they get.

• Product Review Sites like G2, Capterra, GetApp and AlternativeTo to identify competing products, and compare feature sets and user sentiment.

• Company Databases such as Crunchbase, PitchBook, and CB Insights to get more information about specific companies.

• Realtime Intelligence Tools like Contify, Crayon, Owler and Kompote to get real time intelligence and win more deals.

• Market research firms like Gartner, Nielsen, and Forrester.

• Most recently, AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard.

It’s not ideal for everyone

While some of these solutions are extremely powerful and data-rich, you have to work with several of them in tandem to get a complete picture (and most of them are fairly expensive).

You’d have to create a competitive analysis spreadsheet to organize the information and get a bird's eye view of the market. This still means days of research and manual work.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything that would allow an entrepreneur / indie-hacker like myself to perform a quick competitive analysis without spending days of manual work.

Introducing Competely: AI-powered competitive analysis

Based on my learnings throughout this journey, I figured there’s an opportunity to use AI to help with competitive research, and save entrepreneurs, PMs and marketers days of work.

I build Competely, a tool that creates a competitive analysis within minutes with the power of AI. It’s currently free and will become paid over the next week or two.

The idea is not to create an all-inclusive competitive analysis with days of work, but create a great starting point for competitive analysis within a few minutes, which you can then use to dig deeper if you want to.

How to use Competely

Step 1: go to Competely.ai and specify the URL of your product. It currently works best for B2B and B2C software, but feel free to try other types of products.
If you haven’t built your product yet, instead of a URL, you can describe it in a few sentences.

Step 2: Competely looks for competitors for your product, which would take 30-60 seconds. It then suggests a few competitors that you can add in one click, or you can add competitors manually by specifying a URL. I recommend choosing up to 5 top competitors to keep the entire process speedy.

Step 3: Competely does the online research and starts filling up a competitive analysis table, which includes data about the product, marketing, sales, audience, sentiment, and more.
This will take 1 to 10 minutes, depending on the number of competitors you’ve chosen.
Occasionally, some data will be missing. The idea is not to get all the answers (likely impossible), but rather a good overview of your competition, which you can then extend.

What do you think?

Competely is still in early beta, so your feedback will greatly help improve it.
Give Competely a spin and let me know your experience - the good, the bad, and the ugly (send me screenshots too)

Start a Competitive Analysis

Looking forward to hear from you,
- Lior

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In today’s issue, I’m going to share:

• What I’m working on: easy Terms of Service and Privacy Policy for developers

• How to supercharge your inbox for business with Google Groups

Terms and Privacy Policy for Developers

Having built dozens of websites, one thing that comes up over and over is the need to have Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

The options for creating terms and privacy range from paying lawyers thousands of dollars, to downloading a free generic template, or using GPT to generate one.

If you’re a developer or a small business owner, I feel like the same problems come up every time:

Problem 1: it takes away time and focus from building the product

As a small maker, you’d like to spend your time building your app, not working on legal matters. On the other hand, if you use a generic privacy policy or terms, you risk misrepresenting what your website does, and you open yourself up to liability.

Problem 2: Word documents don’t integrate easily with your website

Most lawyers, online generators, and templates provide you with a Word document. Whether you use React, Next.js, Vue.js, or Vanilla HTML and CSS, this means spending a few hours tinkering with code and design to embed that document properly into your website.

Problem 3: your product keeps evolving, but your terms/privacy don’t

As you work on your product, you change what it does, how it makes money, and how it handles user data. You add new authentication methods, payment providers, analytics tools, and data processing. The law also changes over the years. Unfortunately, your terms and privacy policy don’t update, and soon become out of date.

Easy Terms of Service for developers?

I’m exploring whether I can create a better solution for developers and small businesses:

• Auto-generating terms on the spot, without long questionnaires, by analyzing your website content (GPT can help) and the technologies it uses.

• Allowing you to embed terms and privacy in your website by simply pasting a few lines of code.

• Keeping your policies up-to-date, even as your site, business, or the law evolves.

What do you think about that concept? Please reply or leave a comment.

Leave a comment

Supercharge your business inbox with Google Groups

Today, I’m going to share how you can use Google Groups to declutter your email, keep things organized, and make your business more scalable.

Gmail doesn’t scale well with business

While Gmail is a fairly powerful product, it does not scale well when you run a business, even a small one:

• Your inbox gets all the emails, all the time, creating constant context switching: you get invoices for expenses, customer payments, user support and feedback, sales requests, uptime alerts, analytics, reports, and more.

• Things get lost - it’s harder to track things like expenses or customer payments.

• It’s harder to delegate and collaborate - say you hire someone to handle customer support, bookkeeping, or admin. How do you ensure relevant emails are accessible to them, and more importantly, don’t bloat your inbox?

Google Groups to the rescue

Most people know Google Groups as a mailing list platform, where you join groups of people who post about certain topics regularly via email.

However, if you have a Google Workspace account (previously known as G-Suite), you can use Google Groups to set up the flow of email and information within your business. It allows you to:

• Create multiple groups like support@company.com or sales@company.com without having to create a separate user for each one.

• For each group, you can define who has access (you, teammates, outside contractors): who can read emails, who can send emails, and who receives emails to their inbox. This allows you to delegate and also cleans up your inbox.

• Browse and search all messages to a particular address (expenses, support, sales) in one place.

• Look like a legit business - support@company.com usually looks better than yourname@company.com

Step 1: Set up a Google Workspace

1. If you don’t have one, buy a domain name for your business. I currently recommend using Namecheap for that. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say your domain is company.com.

2. If you don’t have a Google Workspace account for your business, you can sign up here. Their Business Starter plan is enough for most users and currently costs only $6/mo per user.

3. Set up the first Workspace user, e.g. yourname@company.com, and connect Workspace to your domain.

Step 2: Choose which Google Groups to create

Each Google Group will have its own email address (e.g. contact@company.com or support@company.com), and creating groups is free.

Which groups you choose to create largely depends on your business and the kind of emails you send and receive. You can also create aliases so several addresses lead to the same group. Here are some suggestions for groups you may create:

• income - payment alerts from Stripe, PayPal, Amazon, Shopify

• expenses - invoices/receipts for expenses incurred by you

• support - customer support and feedback

• sales - inbound and outbound sales

• marketing - marketing ops, advertising, SEO/SEM, media inquiries

• product - product analytics and reports

• development - software development notifications, e.g. GitHub or Asana

• reliability - downtime and site reliability alerts

• legal - legal notices and correspondence

• finance - banks, credit cards, tax, and accounting

• operations - office, insurance, government, virtual postal mail

• catchall - you can redirect all emails sent to non-existing addresses on your domain to catchall@company.com. See this guide.

Step 3: Create the Google Groups

Here’s the process for creating a single group, you can do this for as many groups as you want:

1. Go to your Google Workspace Admin Console → choose “Directory” on the sidebar → navigate to Groups.

2. Hit the “Create group” button. Fill in the name and email, and add yourself as a group owner, then hit “Next”

3. On the following screen, you set up the access permissions for the group.
   Be mindful to set the proper access permissions for your needs.
   
   Personally, I’m usually making the following changes to the default (see screenshot below):

• Who can view conversations: changing it from “Entire Organization” to “Group Members” so only members can read emails from/to this address

• Who can post: changing it from “Entire Organization” to “External.” This is necessary so people outside your organization can send emails to this address.

• Who can join the group: changing it from “Anyone in the organization” to “Only invited users” - since you usually don’t want everyone in the organization to have access to these emails.

4. Go to Google Groups (it’s separate from the Admin Console) → select All groups in the sidebar

5. Choose your newly-created group from the list of Groups.
   Then select “Group settings” on the sidebar:

6. Under “Posting policies,” consider changing “Who can post as group” to “Group members.” This allows group members like yourself to send outbound emails from the address expenses@company.com.

7. If you don’t want your group to filter suspected spam for you and send you a “Moderator’s spam report” every few days, you may want to change “Spam message handling” to “Post suspicious messages to the group”

   

8. After creating a group - it’s a good idea to test if emails go through:

   1. Send a test email from an external email to your new group and see if you receive it.

   2. If you’re interested in sending emails from this new email address, first add it as a sender, then send a test email to an external address and see if it’s received.

Step 4: update your email address for various services

You can now benefit by updating your email address on services that you use, for example:

• Analytics platform: use product@company.com

• CRM: use sales@company.com

• Error reporting: use reliability@company.com

• Many services let you specify a separate “Billing Email” - use expenses@company.com as a Billing Email to get all business invoices in one place.

Voila!

You now have multiple addresses for each major aspect of your business.
You can define which addresses get to your inbox and how, you can make emails accessible to employees or contractors, and you can create filters to move all expenses or support emails into a dedicated folder.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of the newsletter.
Do you have any thoughts or questions? Please reply and let me know.

Best,
Lior

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In today’s issue, I’m going to share:

• How to launch earlier (and why we avoid launching)

• Learnings and numbers from the Wisely launch

• DreamGift surprise media coverage

• Survey to help shape the future of this newsletter

HACKER INSIGHTS

How to launch earlier

One thing I see a lot of entrepreneurs struggling with is launching, or rather, not launching. Let’s break that down.

Why do we delay launching our product?

While launching may sound like a fairly administrative task, there’s a huge psychological barrier behind launching a product to the market.

While a lot of product launches are being delayed due to practical reasons, such as development taking longer than expected, or a last-moment showstopper, I found that delaying launch often has to do with founder psychology.

Here are a few examples of why we might delay launching:

• Fear of failure - what happens if the product launch fails and no one is interested in our product? We fear that outcome, so we try to delay it.

• Perfectionism or pride - there’s this notion that there this one more bug that we need to fix, or one more feature that we need to develop, in order to make this launch (and product) successful. This leads to feature creep and weeks/months of additional work.

• Lack of clarity - oftentimes, there isn’t a clear step-by-step plan in place for everything that needs to be done with clear goals and deadlines. This means new tasks keep piling up every week, with no end in sight. This is both overwhelming and impossible to prioritize and orchestrate.

• No accountability - In the case of solopreneurs and indie creators, there’s often no accountability to employees, partners, and investors. You can take your time with the launch, and therefore you will.

• Discomfort - for most technical founders, building is within their comfort zone, while launching or marketing is out of their comfort zones, and therefore they consciously or unconsciously try to stay in “build mode” and avoid marketing:

Launching ASAP is usually the right choice

When you’re dealing with people’s money, health, or safety, there’s merit in deferring launch until the product is complete, reliable, and well-tested. There’s very little room for failure.

However, with most B2C and B2B software, the cost of failure is significantly lower than the cost of not launching.

Launching is where the rubber hits the road. It’s when you finally start getting some real market traction for the product or service that you’ve built, and it has many benefits:

• Getting feedback and usage insights from real users

• Stress testing your product (functionality and usability), marketing (positioning, selling proposition), and business (bizmodel, pricing)

• Getting your first real customers

• Forcing function to accelerate your timelines and make sure you focus on what matters

What steps can you take to launch earlier?

1. Design your launch in 2 tranches: soft launch and hard launch. Start with a soft launch since it’s less intimidating to let a few friends and early customers in. It also allows you to flesh out significant bugs and usability issues. Soon thereafter, you can publicly launch it to the world (“hard launch”).

2. Define a finite scope: it’s critical to define a scope for the soft launch and hard launch ahead of time. If you don’t commit to any particular scope in advance, it’s likely that new features and requirements will start creeping in every week, delaying the launch.

3. Build a launch checklist: in order to assess the amount of work prior to launch and ensure you don’t miss any important tasks, write a detailed launch checklist. It may take a few hours to write one now, but it’ll save you from weeks of delays and blunders later.

4. Remove bottlenecks: there are often 1-2 things that need to be done well in advance and cannot wait until the last day. For example: submitting an app to the App Store, building a waitlist, setting up a new domain, or reaching out to bloggers. Make sure you identify these tasks and do them well ahead of the launch date.

5. Define deadlines: based on the launch checklist, define realistic deadlines for both the soft launch and hard launch. It’s okay to be aggressive with deadlines, but make sure they are actually feasible so you do not set yourself up for failure.

6. Build accountability: once the deadlines have been established, build accountability by communicating the deadlines to anyone who makes sense: your customers, team, partners, investors, friends and family, followers, etc. Be mindful that this will create a lot of pressure, but it’ll drive you to do whatever it takes to launch on the dates you committed to.

7. Launch: launch day, as well as the day before and after, tend to be packed and stressful. Make sure to clear your calendar of any meetings or obligations. Also, make sure to have the checklist in front of you, so you’re on top of everything that needs to be done.

8. Celebrate: few days after the launch, you usually start thinking about your next business goal. Take some time to celebrate the launch and give yourself a pat on the back 🎉

Did you find this guide useful? please reply and let me know your thoughts.

WHAT’S COOKING?

Wisely Launch

As you may remember, last week, I publicly launched Wisely, an AI shopping assistant for Amazon.

The product got 160 upvotes on Product Hunt (#16 product of the day).
It also got featured in The Rundown AI (250K+ readers), Superpower Daily, Robot Pigeon, and ThePrompt - I didn’t do any bloggers outreach, so none of these were solicited.
766 people visited our Chrome Web Store page, and about 165 users installed it during the launch (240 active users as of today).

My plans for monetization are a freemium model (with the Pro version costing something like $2.99/mo). However, this would only make sense when we have thousands of active users, so further growing the number of users who install and use the extension is the next goal for Wisely.

I received quite a lot of feedback that the extension is really useful for Amazon shopping, which implies a basic problem-solution fit. Not enough for growth or WOM, but enough to make people happy and keep the extension active!

Angry Users

I also immediately received multiple user complaints about the extension only working on Amazon.com, and not working on other stores such as Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.es, and Amazon.in. This is by design, as I wanted to keep a narrow product scope for launch.

I actually saw this as an opportunity, because it means people care enough to complain, and they actually want to use the extension. Here’s what I did:

1. Changed the texts everywhere (Chrome Web Store, Thank You page, Uninstall page) to set clear expectations that the extension currently only works on Amazon.com.

2. Replied to a couple of negative user reviews, explaining the situation, and asking them to reconsider their rating.

3. Gave international users a positive outlet for their frustration - a sign-up page for other Amazon regions via a Google Form. This has several benefits:

   1. Bringing home the point of only Amazon.com being supported for now.

   2. Showing these users that they might be able to use Wisely in the future and build a positive expectation.

   3. Driving our expansion plans based on actual demand.

   4. Building a waiting list and notifying these users when Wisely launches in their region. So far, 20 people have filled out that form:

DreamGift on The New York Times

Last week, I learned that DreamGift was featured in The New York Times:

I don’t do any PR currently, nor do I have any PR agency, so it’s great to see how small products from indie creators can get PR from major publications like the NYT.

It’s now time to include the mandatory “As seen on” on the homepage:

JOIN THE JOURNEY

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Until next time,
- Lior

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to share the art and science of not getting stuck while building your product.

Getting unstuck

One of the hardest things in building and launching a product in six days is not getting stuck.

There was a game plan for launching the product in six days, but the deadlines were super tight, so often I couldn’t afford to spend a day, or even an hour, on one singular task.

As a maker, and especially as a developer, it’s really easy to obsess over things that aren’t working.

Here are a few examples, just from the past week:

• I wasn’t completely happy with the domain names I found, so I wanted to spend more time finding better domains. I had to snap out of it because, well… who has time.

• I tried to integrate Mixpanel to collect analytics for the launch, and spent an hour trying to find documentation and tutorials on how to do this with my tech stack. After an hour, I had to snap out of it, and just go with the (horrible) Google Analytics 4. I had to defer this task and put it on the roadmap for later.

• I found that the labels in the “Ratings Breakdown” aren’t always positioned in an ideal way. I tried to solve it using one strategy and it caused overlapping texts. I hit reset and tried a different strategy, which worked really well for low resolutions, but not so great for high resolutions. I started obsessing about this specific problem, and had to exert some willpower to snap out of it. In the grand scheme of things, it has very little impact on the launch.

  

Getting unstuck is not unique to indie hacking or software development. I found that it’s a useful skill in general, in my personal and professional life.

When you’re stuck, you’re obsessing over a single problem to the point where it doesn’t make sense anymore.

The right move could be giving it some rest and distance, then zooming out and looking at the big picture: is this something that you actually have to solve? and if you do, is this the right way to go about it?

Getting some distance often allows you to either reprioritize, think about the problem from first principles, or find a different angle for a solution.

I found that getting unstuck usually requires three things:

1. Clarity of context - the context and constraints under which you operate matter. It’s one thing if you’re working on a big project that spans months. It’s another thing if there’s an immediate business need and a deadline to meet. It’s important to be clear about what your deadlines are, and how long you can work on any individual tasks or project. As a teammate, you’d usually want to over-communicate and discuss this with your boss and coworkers. As an indie-hacker, you’d negotiate these constraints with yourself.

2. Awareness - the awareness of realizing when you’re stuck is critical. If you don’t know you’re stuck, you won’t try to dig yourself out. It’s easy to spend hours or even days on a problem, obsessing over it, with no resolution in sight. As time goes by, you become more agitated by the problem, then you get even more obsessed and start to develop tunnel vision. The solution is to build that habit of “checking in” with yourself frequently and asking yourself whether what you’re doing is still effective, or whether it’s time to take a break and zoom out.

3. Discipline - you might realize you’re stuck, but it’s really hard to let go of a problem that you’re busy solving. It’s hard intellectually, because you won’t get the answers you were pursuing. and it’s hard emotionally, because you’re already invested time and effort in this problem and you don’t want to lose that. It can also feel like defeat, and who likes to lose?
   The thing to remember is that this particular task or problem often doesn’t really matter, what matters are your goals and objectives, so letting go of some problems (or solutions) in order to accomplish your goals is a good tradeoff, definitely not a defeat.
   Also, using discipline and exerting willpower is difficult, but you can build up that muscle by doing that over and over again, it does get easier over time.

Have you been stuck trying to solve a particular problem? Let me know your thoughts.

Introducing… Wisely!

As I shared with you in the previous newsletter, I spent the past week racing to launch an AI shopping assistant and launch it by Prime Day (July 10-11)

I’m happy to say - mission accomplished - today I’m launching Wisely on Product Hunt!

As an indie maker, I don’t have the resources to pull off a huge launch event, so If you have a second, I’d really appreciate your support:

Show your support on Product Hunt

It has come a long way

I still can’t believe how far the extension has come within a week.

Honestly, this week feels like a blur in hindsight, so it’s good thing I took some screenshots along the way (before → after):

Back then, it was just code name “SmartBuy”, and it has since been rebranded to “Wisely”.

I spent a couple of hours defining the brand essence and identity, honing on a name, and of course, finding an available domain (shopwisely.ai is the best I could find).

The extension currently offers:

• A concise summary of pros & cons based on customer reviews

• Visual breakdown of user ratings

• List of Notable product features

• Things to look out for, such as product limitations and shortcomings

• Unhealthy ingredients in any food or snack

If this proves to be successful, expect more goodies to come - I’m happy to hear your suggestions!

What’s next?

I hope the launch today on Product Hunt goes well - your support is appreciated!

Whether it goes well or not, this goal of trying to build and launch something in six days taught me a lot. It’s been challenging, but it’s been a lot of fun. Highly recommended!

Different products require different levels of effort, so I’ll probably still try to hit an average of one product per month, where some products will take more time to develop, and some products will take less.

I’m going to take next week to regroup, do much-needed maintenance to the rest of my apps so they are set up for success, and start thinking about the next product.

Please reply and let me know your thoughts!

- Lior

This is Lior, and in today’s issue of the newsletter, I’m going to cover my decision to build an AI Shopping Assistant for Amazon and launch it within six work days. Stay tuned for the inside story.

The previous launch

A couple of weeks ago, I launched DreamGift, an AI assistant that helps you find the perfect give for every person in your life.
The launch on Product Hunt did not go as well as I had hoped, as I didn’t make it to the Top 10 products that day. To my surprise, though, the actual outcomes were good:

• DreamGift received 135 votes on Product Hunt on launch day and landed as the #15 product of the day. I aspire to get to the top 10 because every morning, Product Hunt emails the Top 10 Products to hundreds of thousands of subscribers, which provides a nice push in terms of exposure and traffic. Historically, whenever I reached the top 3 on Product Hunt, I witnessed thousands of visitors in one day, the equivalent of a TechCrunch PR.

• I didn’t do any media outreach, but DreamGift was organically featured on Ben’s Bites (an AI newsletter with 50K followers) and got a feature article in SAPO in Portuguese. That was a delightful surprise.

• On launch day and the following week - 990 users visited the DreamGift site, about 268 from Ben's Bites, 206 from Product Hunt, and 127 from SAPO.

• There were 300 clicks to Amazon and two items ordered. Not surprising since users from Product Hunt come to check out the product and not necessarily with the intention of buying someone a gift.

• Since any product launch usually involves a large spike in traffic which declines after a few days, I was looking for a sustainable distribution model. For DreamGift, I believe that might be SEO, so my #1 goal for the launch was getting 20 organic referring domains so the site can rank on long-tail uncompetitive keywords.
  Again, to my surprise, the launch did deliver: the site grew from 5 referring domains before the launch, to 26 referring domains after. Not bad.

• As with any launch, I got additional feedback from users, which is always invaluable!

Do I wish it made it to the top 10? Of course I do. But at the same time, the launch accomplished my main goal of getting good organic backlinks, which should kickstart its growth. It’s important to note that it might take months until the site starts ranking on key terms on Google.

The eureka moment

I spent the week following the DreamGift launch in ideation mode, assessing some of my existing product ideas, and looking at new ones at well.

Since I already have several products that rely on SEO for distribution, and on Amazon Affiliates as a business model - I decided I want the next product to utilize a different distribution model and business model. Just like managing a portfolio of stocks, bonds, and other financial assets - I’d like to have a more diversified portfolio of products.

I was still debating between several ideas and was about to go into market research to determine the feasibility of these ideas.
But then, last Sunday, I had this Eureka moment.
Amazon Prime Day is coming up (July 11-12), and it’s a GREAT opportunity to launch a product related to shopping since many people are in a shopping mindset during Black Friday, Prime Day, etc.
Luckily - one of the ideas I was considering is an AI Shopping Assistant extension for Amazon!

Sometimes you have to say “fu** it” and just do it.
While analyzing and optimizing for the right decision is something that I love greatly, sometimes being decisive and seizing the right opportunity in front of you is the better move.
As an indie hacker, there’s something to be said for a propensity toward action and speed.
Who knows - this might have been the right decision, or the wrong one, but since I’m going to launch one product per month, there’s very limited downside to just going for it.

Working under extreme time constants

There was just one, tiny problem:
That Sunday was July 2nd, and Prime Day is July 11-12.

That’s six work days to design it, build it, test it, get it approved in Chrome Web Store, brand it, prepare marketing collateral, and launch a product on Product Hunt.
I decided to use that as a forcing function and take that chance - if I’m going to make it, then great! If not, at least I’ve built up great momentum, and I can launch it the following week.
The jury is still out, but today is day #3 and I’m optimistic - I’ll keep you posted next week, closer to Prime Day.

Where do I start?

It was clear that starting from scratch to launching a product in 6 days is very tight.
My #1 concern was the external risk: any Chrome extension must be uploaded to the Chrome Web Store and reviewed. This may take a few days, or sometimes even more, and the extension could get rejected, which means waiting for a few additional days, which I don’t have with this timeline.

So - I set a goal to upload SOMETHING to the Chrome Web Store within the first couple of days, so we can get the ball rolling. Once the extension is approved, it’s live, and I can optionally upload an updated version.

Also, I build the app in a way that most of the logic and UI for the Assistant is on my servers, and not inside the browse extension. The extension essentially loads the assistant in an isolated frame within the Amazon site and sends it only the relevant data. This approach has two benefits:

1. Keeping the extension code extremely simple and minimalist (one JavaScript file, one CSS file), which potentially means faster review times and fewer reasons to be rejected.

2. This allows me to push quick fixes and improvements before the launch, without needing to wait for another review and approval.

The first couple of days

On day #1, I was busy building the fundamentals:

• A Chrome Extension that recognizes Amazon product pages, and is able to inject a frame into the product page, and relay any necessary data from the product page into the frame.

• A web application that serves that frame, builds a GPT prompt, queries the OpenAI API, and shows the result.

As you can witness, day 1 version was extremely ugly, but it was a proof-of-concept:

On day #2, I made sure the frame loads immediately upon page load, and built a more reasonable look and feel. I had to improve the extension to relay all the relevant data and fix various bugs and issues (the result of building a product in one day).

That same day, for the first time, I set up a cloud environment on Vercel to host the application, and made sure the extension can work both locally and with the production (cloud) environment.

Finally, on the night of day #2, I got to the point where the extension and web app were reasonable enough, so I can upload the extension to the Chrome Web Store for review:

Now we play the waiting game…

Good morning!

Today, I woke up to the greatest email:

To my delight, the extension was reviewed and approved overnight!

It’s now LIVE on the Chrome Web Store, with zero users, and zero reviews!

Once you install it, you can visit any product page on Amazon.com and get an immediate summary of user reviews - as a concise list of pros and cons.

If you’re feeling adventurous today, here’s early access to the extension, a week before it’s officially launched:

Try The Extension

Take the extension for a ride on your favorite products on Amazon.com, and let me know your thoughts.

• What other AI insights would be useful for you on Amazon?

• How could the extension be improved?

• What would be a good name for the extension (SmartBuy sounds like something from the 90’s)

Reply to this email and let me know your thoughts 🙏

- Lior

I’d like to start by thanking you for being one of the first subscribers to this newsletter. I hope to share interesting insights and give you an insider’s view of everything I’m working on. Let me know if there’s anything in particular you’d like me to share.

Before we dive in, I have one ask: I’m launching a new product today - if you can, please show your support on Product Hunt!

Life update

I’ve spent the past 12 years or so as an entrepreneur - not necessarily the sanest of choices, but what can I say - I just love it.

I’ve worked on various projects over the years - some succeeded and grew, others failed, and some are still TBD.

I was the CEO of Touchbase in 2012, CEO of Wikiwand in 2013, then I have built products like BookAuthority, Darkness, The Master List, and others.

Since 2019, I’ve been the CEO of a startup called Openbase. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to grow it into a large successful business, and I shut it down earlier this year, which was a very tough decision.

Indie hacking, once again

After considerable thought, I made the decision to dedicate myself to indie hacking once again. While this may not have the same leverage, velocity, or fame that comes with raising money from top investors and leading a talented team, it’s a better fit for the lifestyle I’m looking for right now.

After four years of running a startup (which has been a challenging but amazing experience), I’m looking forward to spending more time in “build mode” vs. “manage mode”, spending more time in a state of flow, and having fewer responsibilities, just hacking away.

I decided to focus mostly on building products that utilize AI - the recent wave of AI capabilities is mind-blowing and unlocks so many opportunities to improve our lives and work. In talking to other makers, I can’t recall seeing such excitement about any other technology in the past couple of decades.

Time is the enemy

My goal now is to test one product idea per month. Most of which will fail, I’m sure, but there’s a power law at play, and some would eventually succeed. I’ll then do my best to double down on these ideas that show early signs of success.

Previously, I’d typically spend up to 3 months building and launching a single product, so launching a product every month means I’ll have to be more diligent and disciplined about cutting scope, as well as try to validate new ideas before even fully building the product.

Honestly, I’m not sure I’ll be able to consistently succeed in that goal, but I do want to give it a try!

The reasoning is simple: Parkingson’s law. Generally, the more time I give myself to launch a product, the more work is going to “show up”. There will always be one more feature to squeeze in, one more marketing campaign, one more thing to fix. Deciding to launch anything within a month is a strong forcing function to make sure I focus only on the most important things.

On the long term, I expect that building in public and releasing early and often, will help validate, invalidate, or refine ideas based on real feedback from the market.

Launch day!

In the past month, I’ve worked on DreamGift. An AI-powered site to help you find personalized gifts for every occasion or person.

Bliss, a friendly (and sassy) AI shopper, will ask you a few questions, then suggest personalized gifts for the occasion. Behind the scenes, DreamGift is powered by the OpenAI GPT API, and we search for matching products and data through the Amazon Product Advertising API.

While I feel there’s a lot of room for improvement, I promised myself to launch early and often, so today, I’m launching it on Product Hunt to get more market feedback.

Show your support on Product Hunt

While I could wait another week or two, there are many benefits to launching DreamGift early on:

• Stress testing the product in terms of functionality and usability. I’ve done some of this, but this was at a small scale with a dozen users.

• Getting feedback from potential users.

• Creating early brand awareness.

• Getting the first few backlinks to the product, which is good to get the SEO ball rolling.

• Forcing function to make sure the product is ready (as it could be) by the launch date.

In the next issue…

In the news issue of this newsletter, I’m going to share my learnings from launching DreamGift on Product Hunt, and share some best practices as well. DreamGift would be my 9th launch on Product Hunt - some launches were amazing and top-rated, while I managed to botch some others, so there are some hard lessons learned here…

Please reply and let me know what else you want me to share about my product ideation, building, and launch methodology.

Best,
Lior
@liorgrossman

I have built various profitable products with millions of users, including BookAuthority, Darkness, Wikiwand, Openbase, DreamGift, and others.

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