The author (who is a frequent commenter here) started a company called Appointment Reminder after writing this, which for years was my favorite example of an independent small company that identified a niche, served it well, and then went on to be acquired.

There's an interview with him on the subject that is sadly behind a paywall now: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-my-appointment-...

The world has changed a lot since then. The days where 37 Signals could build an empire out of simple web form apps and individuals could build and sell a SaaS that sends reminder texts are long gone. Most of the low hanging fruit was mined out long ago and most simple services have seen 100 different startups try to serve them already.

As much as Appointment Reminder was my prime example of a successful indie SaaS, the author's second startup has (with all due respect) become one of my prime examples of not validating product-market fit before building your product. They went on to build Starfighter, a company that was supposed to be a candidate vetting platform where people could do complex coding challenges and then get matched up with companies wanting to hire people. It was built partially in the open through their newsletter and in Hacker News posts.

If you thought doing LeetCode problems to get interviews was annoying, imagine having to spend hours or days going through a CTF where you hack multi-core CPUs to do something complex with a simulated stock market. I can't even remember the entire premise, but every time I read something about the company it was getting more and more complex. At the same time I was on other forums where candidates were going the opposite direction: becoming frustrated with the proliferation of coding interviews and refusing to do interview challenges that would take hours of their time.

I remember through the entire process thinking that it seemed like a questionable business plan that wouldn't really appeal to companies or to candidates. Even the Hacker News comments were full of (surprisingly polite) feedback saying that investing a lot of hours into solving programming puzzles to maybe get some recruiter interest wasn't appealing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10480390

Some amazing foreshadowing in that thread from one of the co-founders (not Patrick McKenzie):

> I literally lack the ability to form coherent sentences about our business that don't somehow involve how to render a graph of AVR basic blocks in a React web app, is how little we're thinking about how the game interacts with recruiting right now.

> We are going to get the CTF right, and then work from there to a sustainable recruiting business. We should have done it the other way around, but we didn't. :)

As you might have guessed, it didn't work out at all. It was weird for me to follow one of my indie startup heroes on their journey into their second business that skipped all of the normal startup advice and then reached the exact conclusion that advice was warning against.

It was enlightening to follow along and I'm glad they tried something different and shared it along the way, but watching it happen was a turning point for me in how I approach advice from any one individual author, blogger, writer, or influencer.