my first pre-pre-pre minimal viable product

trying to become an indie hacker

No doubt, the path laid before you is a difficult one. It’s less travelled, filled with obstacles, risks and dangers. But it’s a path filled with adventure, discovery and excitement. So what do you do? You take those first crazy steps anyway and never look back.

Part of being an indie hacker (or wanting to be one) is you need to find solutions to your own problems and be able to execute those solutions as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

What’s one problem I have? I’m an optometrist. Yes, that’s one problem, but the real problem is, though I do enjoy doing the best for patients, I internally roll my eyes when I have to write a referral letter or an eye report. Unconsciously, I try and avoid this work altogether.

Now, I know I’m not the only optometrist out there. So it’s likely this is a pain point for many others. Bingo! A problem - an idea! But dormant ideas are useless unless acted upon.

What’s the goal?

To begin, we need to validate if it’s a plausible idea. That’s why we need to build something that is not too complicated, simple to use, and also easy to get out of date.

So, give me a weekend and mediocre coding skills.

Introducing… my pre-pre-pre minimal viable product:

A tool to help my fellow optometrists.

A referral letter generator, powered by OpenAI text generation models!

It's nothing too fancy.

A basic design. A simple API deployed on a remote virtual machine that connects to OpenAI’s API. No authentication. No payment system. No authorisation.

That all comes later.

Post this on a Facebook group dedicated to optometrists from Australia and New Zealand (the potential target market) with a video demonstration and see the response.

As of writing, 2 likes and 1 comment.

Not so great when compared to previous posts:

This post on OpenAI’s ChatGPT yielded 10 likes and ~40 comments.

So you could say this didn’t go far or did it?

At the time of writing, I can’t really say I’m making mega millions just yet, but this has been a good experience for me.

Instead of agonising over small details, like the design of the page or what programming stack to use, I made something as simple as possible and pushed it out there to see what response I would get (or lack thereof).

It’s a good lesson that this apparent failure is not the opposite of success but failure is necessary to become successful, granted you stay focused, patient, learn and never give up.

Do you have the entrepreneurial, indie hacker drive in you?

Stay focused and talk soon,

Shivan

PS: Many season greetings!