The founder of Tiiny.host argues that indie hackers often fail by spreading themselves thin. Instead of launching many apps quickly, he achieved major success by diving deep into a single problem space for over five years. This long-term focus allowed him to learn, navigate, and eventually find significant product-market fit.
At Bell Labs, many brilliant scientists deliberately avoided their field's most crucial problems due to the high odds of failure, opting for safer projects. The Nobel winners, however, were those who took big swings at hard problems, understanding this was the only path to a major breakthrough.
The output gap between productive people doesn't add up; it multiplies. Due to compounding effects on knowledge and productivity, someone who works just 10% harder over a career can produce twice as much as a peer. This outsized success gap develops silently over many years.
Pro athletes like Steph Curry develop an intuition so refined they can feel minuscule environmental changes. Similarly, successful founders gain an expert 'feel' for business bottlenecks by repeatedly tackling uncomfortable and uncertain areas. This intuition isn't magic; it's a trained expertise born from repetition and deliberate practice.
When their SaaS lacked product-market fit, Blinkmetrics sold high-ticket custom dashboards. This provided immediate revenue and, more importantly, served as deep customer development to find common needs to productize. This pivot to a hybrid model kept the company alive while validating a new path forward.
Scientists at Bell Labs who kept their office doors open were interrupted constantly but absorbed more new ideas. While closed-door peers were more productive daily, the open-door scientists solved more significant problems over their careers by working on ideas their counterparts didn't even know existed.