I’ve completed a freelance project I was working on for a few months, and have started saying no to new opportunities. It’s time to work on one of my own ideas again. This is part of my plan to start failing more. I’ve decided to build a business sending gift cards to Pakistan - and eventually other countries in that corner of the world. Why? A few years ago I had sent a gift card to a colleague in the UK. I found a number of very good options. They all had websites that inspired confidence, and used robust payment methods (Stripe in my example) that I could trust with my credit card. I recently had to send a gift card to a colleague in Pakistan. I was confident that I would find a bunch of great options; instead I only found one that I could think of trusting with my money. I ended up using their services and the card was delivered, but there were a number of problems I saw: No trust building around card payments. There was no clear mention of which provider they used. I did a bank transfer instead of using a CC. This meant my payment was manually verified and the card was only sent after a few hours. There was no confirmation email about my order. I was worried enough to call their helpline to confirm that my order had gone through. Once they had sent the card (which I also had to confirm via phone), I only got a confirmation email the next day. To get an invoice to expense this, I had to send them an email. I’m still waiting on an invoice. There were multiple colleagues who chipped in on this gift card. I had to collect the money from them and then pay for the card myself. In my previous experience of sending a gift card to the UK, I was able to include my colleagues in the process. They were able to add their contributions directly to the gift card I selected and a card of the total amount was sent to the recipient. Finally, there was no option for the receiver to choose which gift card they wanted. Instead I had to choose for them. There is a “Universal Gift Card” they claim works at all merchants and is the one I got, but redeeming that would be slightly more complicated. Interestingly, my colleague didn’t open the email they received with the gift card because they thought it was a spam/scam/malicious email. Only after I asked if they had received the card did they end up opening it. I know a better user experience exists. I want to bring the same to Pakistan and solve my own problem at the same time. Is there a market for this? I believe so, because: It’s a problem I’ve just faced. I’ve seen my wife having to deal with low-trust companies sending gifts to Pakistan. Gift cards are different, but eventually I could also add the option to send physical gifts to the recipient. I’ve seen my employer deal with this. Recently a baby gift basket arrived 2 months after the baby was born. 🤯 This is a recurring problem. People & companies need to send gift cards on birthdays, weddings, etc. With more companies starting to hire remotely in Pakistan, this could be a valuable service for businesses to subscribe to. Validation? I haven’t found an easy way to validate this idea. There is no community of “people sending gift cards to Pakistan” that I can tap into. That isn’t a cohort I can find in one place. I could make a list of B2B customers; companies that hire remotely in Pakistan. However, I want to start with individual customers - because I’m starting from a place of solving my own problem. It should be possible to pivot to B2B if I don’t find any interest from individual customers. Validation then involves me starting with a blog - suggesting gift cards to send to Pakistan. I’ll use SEO to bring in traffic. If I see enough visitors, I could start building a business. This also means that if/when the actual product launches, I’ll have a distribution channel already working. What if I’m wrong? There’s a very strong possibility that I’m wrong about this idea. That I’ll spend a bunch of time for it to get nowhere, or that I have picked a problem that isn’t very valuable to solve. This is my unique brand of fear of failure. I used to think I didn’t fear failing, because I had already failed many times. Instead, my fear of failure manifests as a fear of picking the wrong thing and wasting time on it. The way I am dealing with this is to realize that if I don’t pick anything - which I have frequently done in the past - I have an exactly 0% chance of succeeding. Just trying something makes that probability > 0%. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Another thing that’s helping me is to time box this idea. I will spend 6 weeks on building the blog and populating it with as much useful content as possible. After that I can spend an hour or two every week to add a few more pieces of content. I can start researching and working on a different idea after the 6 week period and wait for the SEO to have an impact before making a decision to continue or abandon this.

I have failed, and that is exactly what I had hoped for a few months ago in this blog post. This is a good failure. It has taught me things, lessons I can use in the future to avoid failing this way again. But first a bit of context. What did I fail at? In February of 2024 I decide to try my hands on my first “Indie Hacker” hustle, something that would make me money on the internet without having to trade my time for it. A product instead of consultancy services that I usually provide. I had seen a number of people on Twitter (X) rave about how well their bootstrap templates were doing; and I had just gotten out of a consultancy project where I needed to connect a Next.js frontend to a Django backend. I thought it was the perfect project to start my indie hacking journey. I put up a launch post and started working, updating a build log as I went along. I gave myself until 28th March 2024 to finish it. That of course did not happen. Let’s talk about why I failed and what I learned. Episode 1: The one where I don’t understand the meaning of MVP My initial plan was to build a Django+Next.js boilerplate template the provided all of these: the base template that provided a Django backend & Next.js frontend working authentication b/w the backend & frontend Dockerfile that would create the backend & frontend containers for deployment Terraform scripts to setup an infrastructure on AWS Celery + Redis for background task processing TailwindCSS for the frontend (comes mostly for free with Next.js) social auth This looks like something achievable in a week or two of work - but only if you’re working full time on this. I failed to consider that I have a day job and a life. I was barely able to tick of the first two of these deliverables by the time my 6 week deadline came up. As a good friend told me later, I should have focused on the minimum amount of value I could deliver. Just having the first two things on my list be done would have been enough. I couldn’t charge the $20 I had planned for, but I could have charged $1-$5 for just that. And if no one was interested in spending the cost of a coffee on the MVP of the template, that would have been a good signal that this wasn’t going anywhere in it’s current shape. Instead, by focusing on building something much bigger, I robbed myself of the ability to validate the idea quickly. I spent all my available time coding the template instead of trying to talk to potential customers about it. Lesson 1: Scope down aggressively. Episode 2: Where I jumped on the hype-wagon I settled on building a boilerplate template because that’s what I had seen a lot of people on Twitter/X doing lately; I’m chalking this down to recency bias. I had no personal interest in a boilerplate template. It’s also not a product that I would personally use. I have so far made one project that uses this tech stack. Most of my other projects are Django, and Ruby on Rails. The most successful boilerplate templates I come across are from people who made a bunch of projects in 1 tech stack then realized they needed to do the same thing over-and-over again; which they then packaged into a template they could use. Selling to others was a bonus at first I guess. I was very enthusiastic about the project at the start, but as time went on I had to force myself to work on it. My lack of interest in this type of project was a big factor. Another factor was there being no way to see the fruits of my labor. I am currently working on an analytics dashboard for another client (a RoR project) and every time I build a feature, I love to play around with it in my free time. I test how it works, make sure the UX is a good one, and just play around and admire the app I’ve made. Without me using my template to build new projects, I lacked that feedback loop. Without the loop, I quickly lost interest. Lesson 2: Build something I can use myself. This isn’t a job I’m getting paid for, so the only motivation I have initially until it starts generating money is to build something interesting for myself. Episode 3: Where I had nothing for potential customers to play around with This is related to the 1st lesson. Because I didn’t have a path to quickly get something out there, there was no way for me to get my “product” into the hands of people who could test and provide feedback. I think the problem with a boilerplate template style of product is that you can’t give people a half-backed thing and ask them to test it. Unlike other SaaS apps, there’s no mid-way version of a template. Customers have to “buy-in” to use your template with any project they are starting. With SaaS, users can sign up and test, and then leave if they don’t like it. There’s no easy way of testing with a template. Lesson 3: Build something that can be tested by potential customers easily. For now, I’m going to stick with SaaS style web apps. Conclusion Moving forward: I’ll be working on web app products that users can sign up for and test very quickly. My next few experiments/products will be things that I can use myself as well. I’ll post what I’m going to work on next when I decide and have some time away from my job & freelance projects that are currently in progress.

Links: Gumroad page Build Log My accidental new years resolution was to work on the 1 problem that has plagued me for my entire adult life; failure to commit and focus. I decided to work in 6 week “sprints” (inspired by Shape Up) and complete the projects I start - for some known definition of complete. This is the 1st project I have decided to work on. I’ll work on this from today (15th Feb 2024) to (28th Mar 2024). I’ll follow-up then with another post talking about how it went. The project The goal is to make & sell a Django + NextJS boilerplate template. What’s a boilerplate template? It’s the source code for a project that’s already setup with many things that are needed in a new project; for example: Stripe subscriptions functionality Background jobs CSS framework User/team management A great example is Saas Pegasus, which seems like an amazing boilerplate loved by many people. My boilerplate is going to be much simpler - and also much cheaper. SaaS Pegasus comes with so many features that it’s worth the $249 starting price. I’m aiming for $5-$10. Goals My goal is to sell this boilerplate to at least 10 people - and have them be happy using it. This means: talking to prospective customers and seeing if this can be useful to them. People will have the option of scheduling a 15 minute pre-purchase call with me for $5 to see if this would be useful to them. The payment is purely to make sure that I only spend time talking to people who are somewhat serious about purchasing. providing excellent after sales support. I’ll include a 60 minute setup call with me for any purchase. While a 60 minute call for a $10 sale isn’t scalable, it’s a great way for me to talk to customers at the start. having a no questions asked refund policy. My experiences with running an e-commerce store in the past tell me this is an amazing way to build trust. provide on-going support, updates, and fixes over email. build a mailing list of people interested in my work who I can email when I launch my future projects. The deliverable The boilerplate will allow developers to quickly start a project that uses Django for the backend and NextJS for the frontend. My recent experiences with another project in this tech stack required me to spend significant time on: figuring out how to setup authentication b/w Django & NextJS (this took the most time & effort) setting up Django Rest Framework so I could write APIs that would be used by the frontend writing Docker files that would build 2 containers - backend & frontend writing Terraform scripts to deploy those containers to AWS ECS writing config & scripts to run the project on Gitpod so it could be easily worked on by my team members My plan is to build a boilerplate that already has most those features built in, plus a few extras: Celery with Redis for background task processing Tailwind CSS for the frontend (in my project I used ChakraUI but Tailwind would be a better option for a boilerplate) If there’s demand for it, a stretch goal is to include social auth (sign-in with Google/Apple/etc) Once complete, I’ll put this on Gumroad and create a landing page there. From then on, it’s all about marketing it; that’s the part which I have no experience with and hope to learn the most from. The marketing plan This is the area where I lack any experience; so I’m not sure how I’m going to market this. Some ideas I have: build it in public on Twitter. I have a tiny Twitter following (312 followers) so not sure how useful this could be. But I have to try something. share it with people asking how to setup Django & NextJS on forums like Reddit, Stackoverflow, and others. maybe write a blog post on how to setup Django & NextJS and then link to the boilerplate from there. The blog post would provider all the steps necessary for the basic setup and the boilerplate would go beyond that with something that’s ready to use. The build log I’d also like to create a build log with this project. This will be a daily note of what I did for this project. I’ll keep it in my notes app Reflect and periodically put it here in this blog post. These daily notes might also serve as content for my build-in-public marketing strategy.

I was recently listening through the How to succeed at failing series on the Freakonomics podcast and started to think about how often I had failed in the past few years. The first answer was - not too much. I couldn’t think of too many instances of where I had “failed”. This was not a good thing. It was very much a sad thing that I couldn’t quickly think of many things I had failed at. Why is not failing bad? I realized I didn’t fail a lot because - I didn’t try a lot. I didn’t fail because I didn’t have good goals. Sure, I have a folder full of projects I thought of, researched, some that I even started working on; that I gave up on pretty soon after starting. But those don’t count as failures right? I was just playing around, not really aiming for anything. It was just a fun side project. That’s why I didn’t fail a lot, and that’s also why it’s not a good thing. I need to fail more Which means that I need to set goals and work towards them. Without goals to aim for, I keep spending my time in the same unproductive loop. Think of a shiny new project. Play around a bit, maybe learn a few things. Give up when things get hard or boring. Repeat While I do learn some things, I don’t really learn new things. Picking up another web backend framework when I’m very good at 1 already (Django if you’re looking to get something built 🙂) is very small incremental progress. I should be learning about running a business, marketing, sales, how to talk to people, cold calling, etc. Instead I’m playing around with NextJS/Remix because it’s easier to do and there’s very little chance of me failing at it. What I’m planning to do Any new project that I start, I will have an achievable goal for it. Something that can be called “done”. Achievable is different for everyone. Creating a small SaaS and have 5 people pay for it might be childs play for some, it’s my Everest for now. The plan is to aim for things just outside of my reach – to work towards those and grow in the process. Have a deadline. For now I’m starting with 6 week cycles of project work. In order meet deadlines, I need to have a clear picture of the goal. Goes back to the first thing on this list. Having a clear definition of “done” is important. But being able to cut scope to achieve some version of the goal is also important. - I’ve just finished reading Shape Up by Jason Fried and I like the Basecamp approach of deciding on an appetite (time commitment) to a project and cutting scope to meet that appetite. - That’s my plan moving forward. Each project I work on will be “shapped” into an achievable outcome and will have an allocated appetite - when I want to launch it or decide to abandon it. Continuing it for the next 6 week cycle will be another option but should be done sparingly. This approach of timeboxing projects and having an achievable goal is also discussed by Zack Freedman in this video Here’s what’s preventing you from finishing projects. See it when you get the chance. This wasn’t supposed to be a new years resolution I started thinking about this over 2 months ago and have been planning to write a post on it. Today seemed like a good day for it. So I guess this is my new year’s resolution. Fail more, fail better.