Tool List & 90-Day Action Plan
Reading without acting is the same as not reading at all. This chapter compresses the whole handbook into a tool list you can start using right now, plus a 90-day roadmap to take you from zero to your "first paying users." Not a lot — just enough to make you actually start.
Tool list (by purpose, most have a free tier)
| Purpose | Common tools / platforms |
|---|---|
| Keyword / demand research | Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, Google autocomplete and "People also ask," Ahrefs / Semrush (paid, with free tools) |
| Finding pain points / studying competitors | Reddit, vertical communities, negative reviews on App Store / G2 / Trustpilot, Hacker News, X search |
| Landing page / waitlist | Hand-coded static pages (your strength), Carrd, Framer; for forms/waitlists use Tally or roll your own |
| Payments / subscriptions | Stripe, Paddle, LemonSqueezy (the latter two handle global tax for you — great for solo founders) |
| Email / newsletter | Your own email list is a core asset: Resend, Buttondown, ConvertKit, MailerLite |
| Analytics / data | Plausible, Umami (privacy-friendly, lightweight), PostHog (product analytics, funnels, A/B) |
| Launch channels | Product Hunt, Hacker News, relevant subreddits, Indie Hackers, X |
| Hosting / deployment | Cloudflare Pages / Workers, Vercel, Netlify (especially good for static sites and programmatic SEO sites) |
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Tools aren't an excuseBeginners burn the most time on "which tool should I pick." The rule: if you already know how to do it, don't learn something new. Hand-write the landing page in HTML and deploy it to Cloudflare Pages, wire up payments with a few lines of LemonSqueezy, send email with Resend — that's enough to run the entire 90 days.
Quality sources for ongoing learning
- Indie Hackers (indiehackers.com): the indie hacker community with a ton of startup breakdowns backed by real numbers — most of this handbook's case studies come from here.
- Indie developers building in public: follow @levelsio, @marc_louvion, @tdinh_me and others on X to watch them ship products in real time.
- The classic theory in the original: Kevin Kelly's "1,000 True Fans," Christensen's JTBD/milkshake story, Dave McClure's AARRR talk (sources on the next page).
- "The Mom Test": teaches you how to run customer interviews that don't get poisoned by polite lies — required reading for the validation stage.
90-day action plan
This is a steady route of "validate first, build second, distribute third." If you already have a product, jump in at the matching stage.
Weeks 1–2 · Pick a direction + lay your audience foundation
- Using the criteria from Chapter 2, list 3 candidate niches, each written as "I solve [what] for [whom]."
- Go to the matching communities / keywords / competitor negative reviews and validate which pain point signal is strongest.
- Start building in public at the same time: clean up your X profile (or whichever platform your customers live on), start posting 1–3 things a day + writing quality replies to peers. Start growing an audience today — don't wait until the product is done.
Weeks 3–4 · Validate demand (don't write business code yet)
- Pick one niche and run 5–10 real user interviews (ask about past behavior and spending).
- Ship a landing page: spell out the value + price + CTA (you can knock this out in a day or two).
- Push the landing page to your target community and watch the sign-up / fake-door click conversion.
- Try a pre-sale or take a deposit — only move to the next step once you have the "someone is willing to pay" signal.
Weeks 5–8 · Build the MVP (do the one core thing only)
- Build only the minimal feature set that delivers the core value, and cut everything that's just nice-to-have.
- Wire up payments (LemonSqueezy/Stripe) and the most basic data tracking (activation, conversion).
- Turn the waitlist / interviewees you gathered during validation into your first seed users, and ask them to try it and give feedback.
- Nail down and optimize your "aha moment" path.
Weeks 9–12 · Launch + distribute + get paid
- Pick 1–2 channels you can stick with for the long haul (e.g. build in public + programmatic SEO/content) and start investing in them systematically.
- Do a launch backed by the audience you've already built (Product Hunt / HN / community) — treat it as an amplifier, not a starting point.
- Talk in depth with your first few paying users, watch activation and churn rates, and patch the holes in your funnel.
- Review: which channel brought real paying customers? Concentrate your time on that one and cut the ones that don't work.
✦
The only goal of the 90 daysisn't to "make $X" — it's to run one full loop: discover → validate → build → distribute → get your first real paying users. Even with just 3 paying users and a few dozen dollars a month, you've already mastered the chain most people never complete in their whole lives. The rest is repeating and scaling it.
Three principles that run through all of it
- Distribution over product: grow an audience and channels from day one — don't wait until it's "perfect" to start marketing.
- Ask for money first, scale later: get people to pay as early as possible. Paying is the only signal that doesn't lie.
- Narrow, focused, persistent: pick a narrow niche, work a single channel, and have the patience for compounding — it's the only way a solo player beats the big companies.
Closing
You already have the harder half of the skill set — building things and shipping them online. What this handbook adds is the other half: getting the right people to know it exists and to want to pay for it. Value comes from multiplying the two halves together.
Now, close this page, go write down your first "I solve [what] for [whom]," and send your first build-in-public tweet. Starting beats being perfect.