Sales tips for indie hackers

A few indie hackers asked me about pricing products.  It's good to share sales tips publicly so more entrepreneurs can learn and make money online.

When to charge?

As early as possible! How else do you know if it's a viable business?! This isn't VC land. Indie hackers need money FAST! I got my first newsletter sponsor for No CS Degree after 50 subscribers - don't wait until 10,000 please!

Why charge?

Can you imagine a cafe owner saying "Oh, I only want to charge when we are REALLY good at making coffee" They'd die in a week. Yet a maker on here said they didn't want to charge yet as they didn't think they had value. Only one way to find out!

I used to DJ and a friend once said: "I'll start playing gigs when I'm good" That's ass backwards. You get good BY playing gigs. One of my DJ idols used to trainwreck every mix when he started playing (vinyl users know what I mean...)

How to charge

OK, you've decided to charge money - great! But how? Well you can just cold email/ DM people and ask them to pay for something. Use Paypal, gumroad, Stripe or whatever tool is available in your country. Use a carrd site with stripe if you are an indie hacker that can't code. Or just use your bank account if you are in the same country.

What to charge

Ok, magic question time - how much should you charge? That all depends on supply and demand.

Do lots of people want what you have and no competition? Charge lots.

Are you in a competitive market? Charge less to get market share.

Somewhere in between? Try and find out what your competitors charge.

• Charge customer A $10.
• Then increase prices to $20.
• What happens? If customer B pays $20 then that's awesome.
• If not, offer Customer C $10 or $15

Basically make your pricing dynamic. It relates to demand. It might piss people off as there is no standard price. Everyone hates Uber for this. But everyone still uses Uber.

Pieter Levels changes his job board prices according to demand. I was super stubborn and wouldn't do this for the longest time. I totally ignored his expert sales tips. But at the weekend I reduced the prices for my job board for software developers without degrees to $50 and got a sale yesterday.

Conclusion

Ok, that's my thoughts on pricing! Please charge money! I see loads of people making things like job boards. These are super easy to build. Building is easy. Making a business is the hard part. GET SELLING!

If you want to send me DMs for more sales tips I can share answers here without mentioning you if you want