How to copy your way to $1M

Do not index

I run a portfolio at $1M MRR across 5 products.

None of my products are original ideas.

Short video existed before Revid.ai SEO automation existed before Outrank.so Scheduling tools existed before PostSyncer.com

I didn't find new, untouched markets.

I found crowded markets with one type of user being ignored and built something better for them.

This was the whole point.

And you can copy this to win 👇🏼

How we got wired wrong

In 2005 a book told an entire generation of founders that competing was for losers. The Blue Ocean Strategy.

Find empty markets. Invent new categories. Be the next Facebook.

The book sold over 4 million copies and produced almost no successful bootstrapped founders.

And while this is great advice to build a $10B company, this is equally bad advice if you want to build a business in general.

You don’t want to risk your entire life at a 1% chance of success.

The irony is that the only people that model actually worked for were VCs.

They need moonshots. They need billion dollar swings because one win has to cover 99 losses in their fund.

For you as a founder, if your number of attempts is limited, one loss can be dramatic.

I fell for it coming out of university.

Spent years trying to invent something nobody had ever built.

The result: years wasted, almost no money earned.

The guy who figured this out at scale

Mark Pincus launched 10 products. 8 became hits.

He never invented a new category.

FarmVille was a farm simulation game. Those existed. Words With Friends was a word game like many others.

He just asked one question every time:

What does the best possible version of this look like for the person being ignored by the current market leader?

That question is worth more than any original idea.

He calls the resistance to copying "moral arbitrage." School taught us copying is cheating. That guilt is exactly what keeps the edge available for whoever drops the ego first.

I wrote about him on X last week, worth reading if you want to get more lessons.

The framework

Before building anything, answer three questions:

1 - Who is already paying for a solution to this problem?

If nobody is paying, the problem is not painful enough. Full stop.

2 - Who is that solution not working for?

Every market leader ignores someone. They get too big, too bloated, too focused on a certain kind of client. That gap is where you live.

3 - What would make that person switch today?

Not eventually. Immediately. That's your one thing to be meaningfully better at.

Existing companies won't fix this themselves. Solving it disrupts their workflows, upsets their current customers, threatens their pricing model.

They have every incentive to leave the problem open.

You have every incentive to close it.

This pattern will show itself if you notice closely:

Notion didn't invent note-taking. Figma didn't invent design software. Slack didn't invent team communication.

But all of them are the go-to products for their category.

You can do something similar.

The category already exists, your job is to own a corner of it better than anyone else.

Reply and tell me 👇🏼

What's one product you'd love to build a better version of?

That will be your starting point.

I love to read your responses, and I read all my emails!

Life of an indie maker #07 - Training data

The latest episode of my animated series is now out:

Tweet of the week

One of the biggest reasons he’s a trillionaire today:

Until next week,

Keep building

Tibo 💻

P.S. Are you building for a 1% shot at $1B or a 50% shot at $1M? That answer defines how you should think, build, and learn.