Founder: Start with Pain, Not a Platform
On the Indie Hackers Podcast, the co-founder of a CI/CD startup advised founders to solve one repetitive pain point for their former team first, rather than building a broad platform. He argued that this "narrow wedge" strategy allows for rapid iteration and deep customer understanding. According to the founder, users will then pull the product into solving adjacent problems.
- HashiCorp's first product, Vagrant, was created by founder Mitchell Hashimoto to solve his own repetitive pain of setting up different development environments for various clients at a tech consultancy. This tool for building and distributing development environments became the initial "narrow wedge" for the company. - The success of Vagrant, which addressed the specific pain of managing development environments, allowed HashiCorp to later build adjacent, production-oriented tools like Packer, Terraform, and Vault. This strategy was a conscious business decision to move into the much larger production workload market. - Before finding success, HashiCorp initially bundled all its tools into a single offering called "Atlas." This broad-platform approach failed because it tried to serve individual developers and large enterprises simultaneously, leading to a confusing message. The company pivoted to offering its tools as separate, focused components. - Another example of a developer-focused company starting with a narrow wedge is Segment. Their initial product was an analytics and customer data platform designed to solve the single problem of collecting data from numerous sources and sending it to various tools for marketing, analytics, and data warehousing. - The project management tool Linear is an example of a product that deliberately avoids being a broad platform. It focuses on the core needs of engineering teams—clear issues and fast navigation—-thereby reducing clutter and respecting that attention is a developer's most valuable resource. - Plaid, a financial technology company, initially solved the single, painful problem of securely connecting user bank accounts to applications. This focused solution allowed developers to easily integrate bank data, a previously complex task, and has since expanded to a broader suite of financial APIs. - The startup Latchkey began by building an analytics tool to visualize metrics for GitHub repositories, addressing the specific pain point of GitHub's weak and fragmented analytics around build usage and cost. This focused solution later evolved into a broader AI-driven optimization platform. - The idea for the company Baton, which helps streamline post-sale implementation workflows, came directly from a pain point its founder, Alex Krug, experienced while he was an executive at Behance. Before writing any code, the team interviewed over a hundred startup executives to validate and deeply understand this specific problem.
