🚀 MakerList #4: Don't charge for tires, charge for miles driven
👋 Here are the top five articles for this week:
1. Idea to $5,000/mo in Recurring Revenue in 5 Months
Josh Pigford shares the major lessons he learned when building Baremetrics in the early days. I particularly like his advice to target customers who aren’t price conscious—not only does this lead to more revenue, but these types of customers are likely to be more loyal and higher quality.
2. I hate MVPs. So do your customers. Make it SLC instead.
In order to validate new products, instead of building a Minimum Viable Product, Jason Cohen advocates for building a product that is Simple, Lovable, and Complete. The great thing about SLC products is that they can provide value to the customer even if you never invest further in them.
3. Metrics matter – even for tiny projects
It’s easy to think that it’s not important to optimize metrics for small projects. But trying to grow a product with a poor conversion funnel is like trying to fill up a bucket with holes in it. Dominic Monn advises you to define a north star metric, visualize your funnel, improve the leaks in the funnel, and then work on improving your north star.
4. Dear SaaS Peers, Scale Value, Not Usage (It’s Not as Simple as You Think)
If you’re selling tires, then making them last longer can actually cause customer demand to go down. It’s interesting to see how Michelin aligns incentives by changing their revenue model such that they instead charge truck fleets based on miles driven. The right pricing model links the value that the customer gets with the price that they’re paying.
5. The Next Feature Fallacy: The fallacy that the next new feature will suddenly make people use your product
Andrew Chen talks about how when people aren’t using your product, it’s tempting to think it’s because you’re missing features. However, the reality is that people are likely dropping off before they even see most of your features. In order to maximize the reach of your features, you should optimize the beginning of the customer journey, which includes properly onboarding and engaging users.
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Happy indie making 🚀