Nikolaos Christoforakos

Are you fine connecting separate tools for auth, payments, billing, taxes, and analytics? Or do you prefer one system handling most of it? Not just because setup takes time, but because every extra service means another dashboard, integration, and possible failure. Asking this cause I think builders should spend more time shipping the product, as long as the backend stays flexible and reliable. But this brings us to another question, when does convenience become lock-in?

A funding announcement can make a company look successful, but it does not prove that customers want the product or that the business can sustain itself.

The more durable signal is often simpler: you ship something useful, generate revenue, and use the profit from product one to fund product two. Each product becomes evidence that the next one can exist without another raise.

One of the most repeated pieces of startup advice is:

Pick one problem, build one product and spend years making it successful.

This makes sense when you are building a venture-backed company and trying to create one huge outcome. But I am not sure it is the best strategy for indie hackers. The alternative is what I call the many-donkeys thesis. Instead of betting your entire career on one product becoming a unicorn, you build a portfolio.