Stories and questions from indie makers

Nobody reads your listing. They scan it. In the Nielsen Norman Group's research on how people read web pages, 79 percent of test users always scanned any new page and only 16 percent read word by word. Those were lab...

You can validate a micro SaaS idea without followers, an email list, or a finished app. Start by finding people who already handle the task you want to improve. Learn what happened the last time they did it, offer a...

Start with one optional question: "What is the main reason you decided to cancel?" Add a short list of reasons, an optional detail field, and a separate invitation to discuss the answer. Let customers finish canceling...

Ask a beta user for a testimonial after they have used your product for a real task. Refer to that experience, ask one specific question, and explain where you would like to publish their answer. Show them the exact...

A useful SaaS launch gives people a clear promise, a working path to their first result, and a way to tell you where the product falls short. We run RadarMakers, built by a small team of indie makers. This checklist...

Your project is live. Someone has signed up, a few visitors have looked around, and now you need to turn that initial interest into actual use. Start with the people closest to the problem. Talk to existing signups,...

When you finish building something, the next question arrives fast. Where do you put it so people actually see it? There are many launch platforms, startup directories and "submit your product" lists, and most of them...

The decoy effect is the most confidently repeated idea in SaaS pricing advice, and the evidence for it's much weaker than anybody tells you. Add a third option that's clearly worse than one of your existing two, and...

Nielsen Norman Group have been measuring this for twenty years and the answer hasn't moved. On an average page visit, people have time to read at most 28 percent of the words. Twenty percent is the likelier figure....

Somewhere between a fifth and two fifths of the customers you lose never decided to leave. Their card failed. The average subscription business loses about 9 percent of monthly recurring revenue to failed payments....

The Baymard Institute has been running checkout usability studies for over a decade, and their finding on form fields is one of those numbers that should change what you build on Monday. The average checkout shows...

The median SaaS business takes 16 months to earn back what a customer costs to acquire. The top quartile does it in under 6. The bottom quartile takes 47, which is longer than most small companies survive. That spread...

Asking for a card at the start of a free trial roughly triples your conversion rate. It also cuts your signups, and almost nobody works out where those two lines cross. Published benchmarks separate trials into...

Deloitte and Google ran the study most people cite badly. Thirty seven brands, thirty million user sessions, four weeks, and they isolated mobile page speed as the variable. A tenth of a second was worth 8.4 percent...

Annual billing is the highest return pricing change available to most small SaaS businesses, and almost everybody underprices the discount they attach to it. Here's the arithmetic that tells you how much you can...

In February 2024 Gmail and Yahoo made a set of email rules mandatory, and by late 2025 they were rejecting mail that failed them. If you send anything automated, a welcome sequence, a password reset, an invoice, this...

Your churn rate is mostly a fact about your price, not about your product. That's an uncomfortable thing to read when you've spent a quarter trying to fix retention, and the industry data is fairly blunt about it....

Everyone tells you to lead with what your product does instead of what it is. They're right. They've been right for twenty years, and that's also exactly where every article on the subject stops. What nobody tells you...

Delegation has a break-even point and it isn't where people think. It sits at the handover overhead, not at the hourly rate, and if you don't know your number you'll either hire too late or give up six weeks in. Ten...

Three of my first ten customers came from one forum answer. One came from a cold email. For about eight months I treated that as a three to one result and put my time accordingly. It isn't a result. Here's what three...