Get customers before worrying about scalability.
Get customers before worrying about scalability.
My revenue got to $35k/mo, before I went full-time on makerpad.
That's $420k per year, for a one-person business. Who cannot code at all.
It's better to start small and be profitable than to build for scale.
When you're ready, you'll:
- understand your best customers
- know your value to them
- know what's missing
99% of #nocode tools can handle 10,000 customers very easily.
If any of that has been your excuse, you can consider that solved. Go for it.
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Agreed!! Also holy shit, did you have any costs or was that pure profit?
Also how are you guys affiliated with Zapier? I have the annual plan and it's so fucking good :D
Had some very small costs, mostly just software so less than 500/mo I think!
Well makerpad was acquired by zapier exactly one year ago today!
Nice! Were you affiliated with them prior to acquisition?
They were part of our partner program - essentially they’d pay to be listed on makerpad
I think the problem with scalability is not about how many customers you have. From a developer perspective, if you know that the product has scalability problems, you always fear it cannot scale and this can block you from promoting it. So making a simple product scalable from the beginning can be a relief for some devs (like me). And today thinking about scalability (technical scalability) from the beginning is easy with tools like serverless functions, postgres as a service and static sites
oh yeah for sure. Technical debt is non-technical debt when building with no-code tools. It still happens when you add features your customers ask for etc.
I agree: if you use no-code tools you reduce the technical debt to a minimum. if you do everything in house (development, architecture and infrastructure) the risks in scalability increase. With a serverless + DBaaS solution you have a good compromise between providing custom features and reducing the risk of bugs or technical debt enough
Scalability at the beginning is not a problem at all. Get first 10, 100 customers and then worry about 1000.
exactly
I agree. It does not make sense when a software can serve 10000 users at the same time but it has less than 10 real users. Business should come first and we can gradually improve the scalability.
yup!
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after commenting this post few days ago, I decided to expand on the comment and wrote a full post on this topic, but from the opposite angle: how to start with scalability in mind from the start, but without worrying about scalability: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/make-your-product-scalable-from-the-onset-without-worrying-about-scalability-e848d77b89
not sure this is an opposite angle - we agree that you don't have to think about infrastructure scalability before you have customers
the point is that you don't have to worry about scalability ever. but agree: not exactly the opposite
Curious, and maybe you've shared this - but if you didn't code Makerpad, did you contract out the engineering task and focus on the product/business/sales/marketing side?
I built it all myself, using no-code tools
But Makerpad had scalability built in already at that stage. You must have had around 200 members paying for premium membership in exchange for content, pre-made courses, access to community. That's a scalable system because you are not teaching courses or offering services (e.g. building nocode sites for clients).
Not all indie hackers have this model in mind. Some ideas are little more difficult to scale. The value is there in a service, but "how can I scale this?" is the core challenge.
yeah im mostly talking about the tools you're using for scalability... scaling your time as a service business or similar, is something entirely different.
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scalability is often mentioned by founders asking "can X tool handle 100k users" or something to that effect. which IMO is not necessarily the most important question to be asked at the beginning.
My point is that most tools these days already handle the scalability side of things for you. I can't think of any on the top of my head that couldn't get you 2000 customers easily.
'You' shouldn't worry about picking Carrd or Webflow or Bubble because of the scalability. Get customers first, get to when you're at 10's of thousands of users, you may need to think about the scalability.
Hope that clears it up a bit.
I feel like this is just a cynical reading of the post 🤔