You shipped it. It works. The code is clean. The architecture is solid.
And nobody cares.
You’re refreshing your analytics. Posting on Hacker News. Wondering if you should add that one feature. Maybe the landing page needs work. Maybe you should try Product Hunt again.
Here’s what’s actually happening: you’ve moved your biggest risk into the area you’re worst at.
Two Types of Hard
Every startup – every product, every side project – faces two fundamental uncertainties:
Can we build it?
Will anyone want it?
These are different problems. They require different skills. And most technical founders don’t think clearly about which one they’re actually solving.
Some products are hard because the technology is genuinely uncertain. Nobody knows if it can work. Fusion energy. AGI. A database that’s actually distributed and actually consistent and actually fast.
Other products are hard because – even though the tech is straightforward – nobody knows if customers exist, or how to reach them, or how to convince them to pay.
The first is technical risk. The second is market risk.
Here’s the thing: these are independent variables.
You can have high technical risk and low market risk. (Cure cancer? Obviously people want it. Question is whether you can do it.)
You can have low technical risk and high market risk. (Another project management tool? Easy to build. Good luck getting anyone to notice.)
You can have both. You can have neither.
Most indie hackers are building in the bottom-right quadrant: low technical risk, high market risk. The tech is solved. The distribution isn’t.
The Trap
Think about what you’re good at.
You understand systems. You can debug gnarly problems at 2am. You know the difference between a good abstraction and a leaky one. You’ve spent years – maybe decades – building this intuition.
Now you ship something. It works. It’s elegant.
And your success depends almost entirely on things you’ve never practiced:
- Convincing people they have a problem
- Reaching them at all
- Standing out from fifteen competitors building the same thing
- Pricing, positioning, messaging
- Sales calls where you handle objections from people who don’t understand what you built
These are sales and marketing problems. And unless you’re unusually good at them, you’ve just entered a competition where your core skills barely matter.
The harsh reality: a mediocre product with excellent distribution beats an excellent product with mediocre distribution. Almost every time.
The levels.io Question
Pieter Levels has built Nomad List, Remote OK, Photo AI, and a string of profitable products. He’s become the poster child for indie hacking.
Here’s what’s interesting: the tech behind his products isn’t particularly hard. Photo AI uses existing models. Nomad List is fundamentally a database with a good interface. Remote OK is a job board.
This isn’t a criticism. It’s the point.
Pieter wins at marketing. He builds in public to 500k+ Twitter followers. He’s mastered the distribution game. The tech facilitates it, but the audience – the reach – the sales motion of being Pieter Levels – that’s what creates the wins.
He’s solved the market risk problem. The technical risk was never the bottleneck.
Now ask yourself: have you solved the market risk problem?
If not, you’re bringing an excellent hammer to a job that requires a screwdriver.
What Changes When Tech Is The Hard Part
Consider what happens when you build something genuinely difficult:
Competitors can’t easily copy you. If it took you two years of hard engineering to make something work, others face the same barrier. You’re not in a feature war.
Customers come to you. When you’re the only one who can do the thing, you don’t need to convince people you’re 10% better than alternatives. You’re the only option.
Your skills remain your advantage. The thing you’re best at – building hard things – is the thing that determines success.
Sales becomes simpler. Not easy. But simpler. “Here’s what we built. Do you want it?” is a different conversation than “Let me explain why we’re slightly better than the twelve other options you’re evaluating.”
Google in 1998 wasn’t competing on marketing. PageRank was a genuine technical insight, plus the engineering to crawl the entire web. Competitors couldn’t copy it because they didn’t understand it.
Stripe in 2010 wasn’t “another payment processor.” The underlying infrastructure – fraud detection, compliance across jurisdictions, reliability at scale – was genuinely hard. Years of work to make something feel like seven lines of code.
Figma took years before they had a viable product. Real-time multiplayer design collaboration. The tech to make it feel instant and handle conflicts gracefully. Not a weekend project.
These are software companies, but they’re playing a different game. Technical risk was the primary challenge. And they were equipped to solve it.
The Honest Assessment
Pull up your current project. Ask yourself:
Could a well-funded team of competent engineers rebuild this in six months?
If yes, you’re not in hard-tech territory. You’re in a distribution war. Your technical skills are table stakes, not your competitive advantage.
If you build it perfectly, will customers obviously want it?
If you have to convince them – if “product-market fit” is an open question – then your success depends on sales and marketing. The things you probably haven’t spent years mastering.
This isn’t a moral judgment. Plenty of successful businesses exist in the market-risk quadrant. But they’re founded by people who are excellent at sales, or who’ve made themselves excellent.
Two Paths Forward
If you’re a technical founder – if building is your superpower – you have two strategic options:
Option One: Pick Harder Problems
Deliberately choose problems where the tech is the bottleneck. Where, if you solve it, customers are obvious.
Not “hard” as in “takes a long time.” Hard as in “genuine uncertainty about whether it can work.” Hard as in “most teams couldn’t do this even if they tried.”
Questions to ask:
- Is there something here that requires genuine technical insight, not just execution?
- If I nail this, do customers come to me?
- Am I competing on engineering, or will this become a marketing war?
The bar: would this still be hard for a team with more money and more engineers?
If the answer is no – if the main challenge is distribution, not technology – you’re signing up for a competition where your strengths don’t determine the outcome.
Option Two: Get Good at Sales
If you’re going to build in market-risk territory, you cannot afford to be bad at sales. Not “hire someone” or “find a co-founder.” Actually good yourself.
Why?
You’ll hire wrong. The average sales hire talks a good game and underdelivers. If you can’t evaluate what good looks like, you’ll waste months on people who sound confident but can’t close.
You’ll get played. Customers, partners, and salespeople will tell you things that serve their interests. Without the experience to smell nonsense, you’ll make bad decisions on bad information.
You’ll build wrong. Without direct customer contact, you’ll add features nobody asked for while missing the things that would actually close deals.
You won’t know what’s possible. Many technical founders assume sales is “handled” when it’s operating at 20% efficiency. They’ve never seen what good looks like.
The goal isn’t to become a natural. It’s to be good enough to do it yourself, train others, and know when someone’s underperforming.
This means taking the calls. Handling objections. Feeling the rejection. Understanding why people buy and why they don’t.
It’s uncomfortable. It doesn’t feel like “real work.”
That’s exactly why it’s a competitive advantage if you do it.
The Core Insight
Your biggest risk should be in your area of strength.
If you’re technical, and your biggest risk is market risk, you’ve handed the outcome to skills you don’t have.
Either change the game – pick problems where technical excellence determines success.
Or remove your weakness – become genuinely good at sales.
Building something easy and hoping distribution figures itself out is how talented founders watch inferior products win.
The Question
What are you actually competing on?
If it’s technology – if the hard part is making the thing work at all – you’re playing to your strengths. The engineering matters. Your years of experience matter.
If it’s distribution – if the hard part is convincing people to care – then the engineering is table stakes. You need a different edge.
Most technical founders don’t ask this question clearly. They assume the tech is the hard part because that’s what they know. They spend months polishing something that was never the bottleneck.
Meanwhile, somewhere, someone with worse code and better distribution is eating their lunch.
Your move.