01

Four months ago, I had just started indie development. After a few days of brainstorming with Claude, I put together a comprehensive "demand validation" framework and planned to follow it strictly.

But a few days ago, I noticed something strange — some needs I clearly felt "should exist" just couldn't be validated using this method.

At first I thought I was doing it wrong. Later I realized it wasn't an execution problem — the whole direction didn't fit.

02

The course methodology's logic was "validate first, then build" — use search data, analytics, and interviews to confirm whether a need exists.

The core assumption was: "If a need is real, someone in the market must already be expressing it."

But when I applied this framework, something always felt off.

I searched for "how to encapsulate payments" and "how to abstract consumption logic." The results were sparse — nothing remotely close to a "viral comment." By the course's standards, this path should have been abandoned.

But deep down, I knew the need was real. Just look at the data.

Every article performed better than expected. The readers were fellow developers — they'd share it with friends after reading.

That's what this pool actually looks like. It's not in social media comment sections. It's in every indie developer's commit history.

I eventually figured it out — that course was essentially designed for "commodity opportunities," the kind you can validate through external signals and execute step by step.

You spot people complaining in a market, and you build a better solution to capture that demand.

03

But there's another type of opportunity — "insight-driven opportunities." This is when you're already immersed in the space every day. You know where it hurts, where people pretend it doesn't hurt but it actually does, and where existing solutions are half-baked.

ShipFast's Marc Lou took this exact path.

He didn't do demand validation. He built several SaaS products, got frustrated writing the same code every time, and created ShipFast.

When Pieter Levels built Nomad List, nobody was searching for "digital nomad city recommendations." He wanted one himself, so he built it.

The common thread in these paths is — when you're already in the pool, you are the validation.

Searching for comments to validate something you experience every day is like a doctor checking someone else's social media to diagnose their own illness.

So I chose the "insight-driven opportunity" path.

Instead of doing searches and user interviews, I found problems directly from my own work and solved them. That's why I built Pay4SaaS, and wrote solutions for payment and consumption logic.

Things like reusable payment wrappers, and preventing infinite trial loops.

This path has its costs —

Heavy upfront investment, no external signals for reassurance, and no way to know if anyone would buy before it was finished. But some early signs helped me hold steady — not just likes, but people directly forwarding it to friends, and even someone asking if there was a demo. That's when I suddenly realized this might have already shifted from "people glancing at it" to "people seriously considering using it."

04

There's a saying that goes — if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

That course was my hammer when I first started indie development. But sometimes what you're working on isn't a nail — it's something else entirely, and you need to be flexible and use a different framework.

Tools aren't ranked by quality. They're ranked by context.

If you've been deep in something for a long time, trust your own judgment first.