Focus on ONE feature in a validated market.

Within all the noise and hullabaloo of the startup world, people trying to build a unicorn or a startup that will hopefully grow to serve millions of users across the globe and rival WhatsApp, there are a few going a different direction.

They focus on two things:

1. Building a simple product that solves a very specific problem or focuses on making one feature that works really well.

2. Getting customers and users for this product

These products don’t have many features and the few that they have are also simply supporting the main core function.

These builders don’t try to come up with new novel ideas, they simply look at an existing market with a big product(s) and build a tool that solves a problem that users are encountering on the already existing products.

Before building they do their research and look at how the other products work and what the current users of these products complain about most, they also look at what can be done different as regards these complains.

The goal is to build a very useful tool that solves one problem well all while staying bootstrapped and profitable. Building with a lot less pressure

These tools usually appear to be in very crowded markets sometimes competing with products from established big tech companies but somehow they still get users, because they solve that one problem well. Humans are simple beings and less will always be more.

Here are a few examples of small tools that have taken a share of a big market:

Screenity – 180K Plus users

Screenity is a screen recorder that’s free, open source, private and pretty easy to use. There are more than 30 chrome extensions in the same space as Screenity, but after doing research on the other tools, Alyssa managed to build a very powerful competitor.

Tally – $100K MRR

Tally is free to use form builder that was born out of the frustration of existent form builders being quite expensive. They wanted to make a simple, yet powerful form builder that allows one to create any type of form without breaking the bank. A new type of form builder for makers and no-coders.

Tally competitors include Typeform, Jotform, Google forms, Zoho forms to mention a few

Remove bg – 44 million+ (organic monthly traffic)

This is typical Adobe Photoshop territory among other major design software players in the space, but Removebg still managed to get a piece of the pie by focusing only one function and executing on it well.

Removing backgrounds from photos with the click of a button.

On design software such as Photoshop, you would need to watch a tutorial on YouTube before you are able to do this correctly, and you would also need to have the software installed on your computer, Removebg on the other hand is mostly free and does this with the click of one button without the need of installing any software.

There are many other such tools online that are doing well, the idea is to focus on one thing that already has user validation in a large market and execute it well.

There is a bubbling Indie Hacker ecosystem that’s currently taking shape in Kenya and I hope to highlight some of the cool and useful tools and products that will originate from the ecosystem.

Less than two weeks ago a WhatsApp group for Indie makers in Kenya was started and it now has 400+ members.