What lessons have you learned while building your startup?

Hello Indie Hackers! 👋

Building startups is not as straight forward as some may think. I made a couple of mistakes myself with Testkit.

Today I'm going to share some of these mistakes and what I learned from them, and I'm looking forward to other stories from my fellow Indie Hackers as well!

Hiring too early

This one was honestly unexpected. First off, I joined an Accelerator in January 2022, and to increase development time, I though of hiring two freelancers to help with development.
What happened though, was the complete opposite. It slowed everything down. I had to define tasks thoroughly (which I am not super good at) and manage everything that comes with it, like answering questions, doing code reviews, etc. - it reached the point where I could not focus on development anymore, and because of my (too fast) decision making, the architecture was messed up and not suitable to implement what the early users requested.

Lesson: If you're a technical founder, build yourself. Don't hire until you really, really have to or your business makes enough money to support that.

Acquiring a business

In April, after I almost burned out and panicked, since I didn't have any users, not making any money, and didn't know what to do next, I found a startup that provides browser infrastructure as a service. You can basically use Cypress, Playwright, Selenium or whatever else to run your tests across multiple browsers in the cloud. You could also run manual tests with different browsers in the cloud. Nothing new, for sure, but I thought that acquiring this startup would help me go to market faster. Boy, was I wrong. The acquisition went smoothly, but updating the code and infrastructure was a big pain. It took long, I had to learn all the caveats, and in the end, I didn't even launch it. Instead, I launched another product. Run Cypress tests in the cloud across multiple browsers, but with debugging tools, like DOM inspection etc.
I've learned quickly that no one cared about it. The response I got when I was building the initial idea of Testkit vs the responses I got when I launched the Cypress tool were wildly different. I decided to shut it down, and rebuild the original Testkit from the ground up. This time, I'll think it through.

Lesson: Focus on your idea. Build it. There are no shortcuts, and acquiring businesses certainly won't help if you don't make any money.

Not thinking through the architecture

This refers to the first mistake I made with hiring too early and deciding things too quickly. Testkit is complicated. The web is complicated. If I would have sat down for one or two weeks, after I talked to potential users, and before touching even one line of code, to plan out the code architecture, the stack and write down everything that is needed, plus what might be needed in the future, I probably would have never made my second mistake, along with many others. Before you build, talk to potential users, or anyone that might use what you want to build or already uses something similar. Don't market. Don't sell them anything. Just really try to learn what they're using, why they're using it, and what their problems are. After that, don't code. Take one or two weeks where you summarize everything you learned from customers and try to transform it into a guide on how to code that product. Take it easy during that time, don't do everything on one day. Instead, live your life, but look at your plan at least twice a day and think it through. You will save yourself from having to rewrite everything from scratch at some point, and you will dramatically speed up your development.

Lesson: Before writing the code, talk to users, gain conviction, and then start planning your architecture and researching solutions for possible problems you may encounter.

What about you?

It's the first time talking about the mistakes I made with Testkit in public. It feels weird, but it's necessary. I hope you learn something from it.

Now it's your turn. We all make mistakes, don't shy away - share them so everyone can learn from them!

If you want to follow along my journey of building Testkit, feel free to follow me on Twitter - I am building in public!