The founding-intention principle: why indie developers must learn to let go

Originally published on X Articles.

Lately I've noticed an interesting pattern:

Lots of people building tools start by wanting to serve everyone.

That's a dangerous thought.

If you want to serve everyone, that means you haven't stood in anyone's shoes at all.

It's a product person building in a bubble, admiring their own reflection.

The right move is to grab a small batch of users, find the pain that cuts them deep, and serve the hell out of them.

Know who among them really hurts and is in a hurry, and who would hand over money for your service today.

Let me share a principle I call the founding-intention principle.

It's about these questions:

• Why do you set out?
• Who do you set out for?
• Which problem do you actually want to solve?

What is "founding intention"

There's a passage in Standing in the Nail (置身钉内):

Founding intention (发心) is the inner motive and fundamental vow behind action — the starting point, direction, and source of energy for all work, life, practice, and cultivation. Products have founding intentions too. A product's founding intention is the most original starting point of its founder. In most cases, a good product has only one primary founding intention. When a product's intentions multiply without priority, it becomes a greedy and anxious product.

The test for founding intention: when the product's values conflict, who does it truly lean toward?

User experience and monetization conflict — who does it lean toward?

Simple and pleasant versus feature-complete — who does it lean toward?

Once the answers come out, the product's founding intention is revealed.

Meituan: the mental anchor of local-life transactions

This pattern is common among Chinese super-apps. Meituan is a textbook example.

Meituan's user mental model is local-life transactions.

You open Meituan: ordering food when hungry, booking restaurants when going out, buying movie tickets, finding hotels. Its core value is helping users complete real-life transactions faster.

But over time, Meituan has grown novels, short dramas, mini-games, video, and livestreams.

You can even, inside Meituan: "START GENSHIN!!!"

Tell me that's not ridiculous???

Games definitely have value, and sure, Genshin can start. But don't start Genshin while my stomach is growling!

Man, let me fill my belly before we talk about Genshin!!!

Users come with a task, finish it, and leave. The faster users hit their goal, the more trustworthy the product becomes.

That's the counterintuitive truth about many high-frequency tools: they make money off traffic, but their long-term value comes from restraint.

Alipay: wallet vibes fighting the content feed

Alipay is cut from the same cloth. Alipay's underlying identity is money, credit, and certainty.

You open Alipay to pay, collect, transfer, pay bills, check statements, ride the subway, scan your medical code. It's a high-trust scenario.

Users hand it their money, identity, credit, and household bills — so its product temperament is a wallet: rock-solid steady.

But now you can scroll short videos inside your wallet. Like a bank that also offers foot massages, SPA, and the full package.

Users start wondering: did I come here to take care of business, or to get taken care of?

Money scenarios need calm; content feeds are engineered to hook you.

Force the two temperaments together and you get a weird greasy feeling.

Where intention-drift is most dangerous

Many domestic apps have sprouted financial entrances. Food delivery lets you borrow money; ride-hailing lets you borrow; travel lets you borrow; shopping lets you borrow; maps and local-life apps route you to loan services too.

Stick a lending entrance into these scenarios and you might improve monetization in the short term, but long term, you change how users look at you.

You used to be a tool. Now you're a middleman.

You used to help me get one thing done. Now you take the opportunity to assess whether I'm good for another loan.

That's the most dangerous part of intention drift. It doesn't destroy the product overnight.

It slowly changes the product's temper.

Big companies doing this have their own business logic. They have massive traffic, complex organizations, monetization pressure, and many departments to feed.

We don't need to lecture them from a moral high ground.

The indie developer's advantage is being clean

As an indie developer, your product can be thoroughly clean — clean enough to look almost shabby.

That's actually an advantage.

Many indie developers start out anxious: too few features, too narrow a use case, market not big enough. But the thing early products should actually fear is "looking big."

Make the market big and users turn into an average. Averages have no expression, and they don't pay.

A genuinely valuable starting point is usually much smaller. Find a handful of people whose pain is specific enough, who want it today, who'd pay for this one feature alone, who see the product and feel "this was made for me."

That's when the product starts to have life.

For example, "a podcast editing tool" is far too broad. Change it to "for solo podcast hosts, quickly cut a one-hour interview into a few short videos" and the product instantly becomes sharp.

"An AI landing page generator for developers" is also vague. "For indie developers, quickly generate an email-capturing landing page before a product launch" — now the need is clear.

The founding-intention principle ultimately lands on "letting go"

Real strategic advantage isn't what you do — it's what you dare not to do.

That sentence is an indie developer's product mantra. An indie developer's most precious resource is attention. Every direction you add is more upkeep.

WeChat is a positive example worth studying.

WeChat is certainly complex, but its core conversation entrance has stayed stable for years. Users open WeChat and their first instinct is still: find someone, see messages, handle relationships.

Channels didn't eat the chat list. Official accounts didn't turn the message page into a content feed. Mini programs don't require users to browse an app store every time they open WeChat.

WeChat's restraint isn't about having few features. It's that it knows where the load-bearing walls are. You can add floors, renovate, remodel — but you can't tear down the load-bearing walls.

So these days I think the first thing an indie developer should write isn't a roadmap — it's a "letting-go list."

• Which people to not serve yet
• Which scenarios to not touch yet
• Which features to not add for now
• Which monetization opportunities to hold off on
• What must never go on the homepage
• What must never interrupt the main flow
• What, even if it looks valuable, must not break the core task

We don't have the traffic, the brand, or the organizational resources of big companies. The only places we can win are being more specific, cleaner, and sharper.

A product's true sharpness comes from what you're willing to cut.

Reference: Standing in the Nail