Rule of Three: How indie developers can stop over-building and start shipping

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Many indie developers stall their side projects by over-engineering features before validating the core product, a pattern one developer described after spending six months on a project that launched to zero user interest. The author argues that solo builders often treat personal projects like enterprise software, adding polish, scale, and edge-case handling before a single user has tested the app. To counter this, they propose the 'Rule of Three': identifying only the three core actions a user needs to solve the primary problem, and shipping nothing beyond that until the core loop is proven. Clean code and complex architecture are framed as secondary concerns, with messy but functional code preferred if it accelerates real-world validation. The recommended cycle is to build the minimal core, observe five real users interacting with it without assistance, and simplify based on what is actually confusing rather than layering on tooltips or tutorials.

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