A makers guide in 7 quotes
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On creating good ideas, distribution, and value for your users
Traf is a designer, Golden Kitty Winner, and half of the duo behind Super, a website builder for Notion. He moved from freelancing for companies like Nike and Sonder to being a full-time maker after realizing his efforts weren’t compounding or paying off in the long run. In just a year, he’s grown Super to $40K in monthly recurring revenue. He's also sold $400k from his collective builds, focusing on products he can build once and sell repeatedly.
Traf hosted an Ask Me Anything discussion to share what he’s learned with the community. We boiled down a handful of his prevailing ideas into a short, thought-provoking guide.
First...
“Make something people want”
How?
"Good ideas for me sit at the intersection of:
- Something I want to use myself
- Something I'm uniquely suited to build
- Something I wish I would have had when learning x"
Don’t get stuck on...
“Design work can help visualize & formalize an idea, but really 99% of progress only happens after publishing it into a workable or sellable product. That said, try and spend as little time as you can on the design since you can really just iterate on that forever. Focus on getting it out and iterating on something that's live, since you can't really optimize zero.”
For who?
“Building products based on your own desires… is a great way to guarantee your first customer — yourself.”
And beyond that...
"Having an audience to launch is indispensable, no matter what you're launching. One of the best ways I've seen to build an audience is through the permissionless building, which is making things for other people that make them look good and that they're likely to share... Once you build distribution, you can build anything you want and have an audience to launch & sell to. Definitely something I'll keep doubling down on."
Where?
"Use every social channel you can. Keep creating a ton of content related to the products you're building. One product can usually be turned into thousands of individual pieces of content that you can keep pushing out to as many places as you can around the web."
Just make sure…
"You're actually doing any one of these 5 things for people:
- Saving them time
- Saving them money
- Making them look/feel good
- Helping them make money
- Entertaining them"
Comments (11)
Ramy Wafaa@ramywafaa
Vectopus
Amazing read, thanks for sharing this!
Share
Great summary in a simple and elegant form!
Truffle
The Venn diagram says it all, very reassuring!
Truepush for Shopify
I totally loved the last few points.
Make sure…
"You're actually doing any one of these 5 things for people:
Saving them time
Saving them money
Making them look/feel good
Helping them make money
Entertaining them"
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