#3 How Hazel is experimenting with building her own venture studio 🧪
The story of the beginning of Hazel's indie hacking journey
Hello and welcome to issue #3 of Indie Insiders ⚡️
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Today’s interview is with Hazel, a private equity aficionado from London, who’s on her way to experimenting with building her own venture studio.
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👋🏽 Hello, Hazel! Nice to meet you 😁
What’s your backstory?
My background starts with me working in the private equity industry for 10 years and that’s where I got introduced to the world of venture studios.
A venture studio is a company that works to build several different companies in rapid succession.
This typically involves identifying a potentially viable business idea, assembling a team of skilled individuals to bring the idea to fruition, and providing the necessary resources, such as funding and expertise, to help the venture succeed.
With this, I would be often invited to help companies to launch & test new products into the market, however; I just had 2 babies and wanted to do something for myself.
That’s when I stumbled upon indie startups, and I’m looking to focus my expertise on more no-code-based projects.
What inspired you to get into indie hacking?
I found myself coming up with ideas for other people and decided it was time to come up with some for myself, so I created my own mini venture studio.
The indie hacker version of the venture studio approach is the 12 startups in 12 months challenge. If only 1 in 10 startups succeed, we’d take 10 shots at it (plus 2 for good luck).
I think this is a fantastic low-risk way to think about entrepreneurship which can help a lot of people make the leap even if they are unsure.
My first startup in the studio is a newsletter. It’s about whacky business ideas to help you profit from exploding trends and it’s delivered fresh every other Friday— you can subscribe to it here 😉
How long have you been on this journey?
It’s been very recent, as I just started this past November, but I’m focusing on building my Twitter audience and meeting new people.
I do a lot of experiments and I actually ran an experiment on my Twitter bio 👇🏽
So far, I’m enjoying the process and I’m looking to meet more people to build with, invest in, or collaborate with ❤️
Who did you start following when you started?
Justin Welsh, Paul Graham, and other Y Combinator founders, along with other investors I was familiar with, were a big part of my feed in the beginning.
These are bigger accounts and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend them to everyone, as it really depends on what niche you’re getting into.
It’s better to find smaller accounts that resonate more with you and I have some strategies that I used to grow my audience from 0 to 200 followers 👇🏽
Tell us more about your newsletter 😄
Absolutely! I started it because I’ve sat in so many board meetings and seen lots of backlogs of ideas— some good, some bad.
I like to look for trends & hypes and I’d brainstorm ways to take advantage of them. We’ve validated so many ideas from my days running the venture building workshops for big corporates.
Many of these ideas don’t make the cut because they are “too small” for these guys (they want $ billion dollar ideas). But any indie hacker could make something out of it and it’d be life-changing.
That’s why What The Hype newsletter is created. To show you the plentiful opportunities there are out there for the taking.
What other ideas do you have in mind to pursue?
Well, I’ve got loads of them 😅 but due to my finance experience, a lot of startup founders and marketing teams have wanted me to manage their finances for them.
For example, I’ve seen that everyone knows how to track their conversion rate but not everyone seems to know what it means financially for their business.
So my next project for the venture studio is to build a collection of Indie Startup money models. The first one I created was the Solopreneur Runway Model— it's a super simple, guided financial calculator that is designed for you to make high-level decisions about your entrepreneurial journey.
I made this for a challenge during No Code Weekend and I can already see how it’s helping other startup founders decide whether to go all in on their businesses.
What advice would you give to someone just starting?
Always focus on what your audience wants.
This can be hard if you’ve got a small audience. So the more recent approach I am taking is to just build scrappy versions of an MVP (in public) and start talking about it everywhere. You’d never know where it leads 🚀
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product,
you've launched too late.”
How can we keep up with your journey?
I’m on both Twitter and LinkedIn!
I want to learn from more like-minded indie hackers, so feel free to reach out 😊
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