An underrated skill for indie makers

An under-appreciated but highly effective skill for indie makers: boiling down a feature to its absolute core. Most product features I build nowadays take less than an hour, and I then incrementally expand and improve them based on feedback and usage — or scrap the thing altogether.

For example, I just added a drafts/publications queue to caption.cat with maybe 10 lines of code: a Post.published scope everywhere (published_at IS NOT NULL), a Post.drafts scope, and a daily cronjob to pick the oldest Post.drafts and set its published_at. No interface, no dashboard — I use the Rails console to manage posts. It works fine for now. I’ll invest in an interface when I notice I’m making mistakes or losing track of things.

When I look at other productive makers like @levelsio and @AndreyAzimov I see the same thing. Start small. Set aside the maker’s ego. Have the confidence to ship something imperfect. Improve incrementally.