Congrats on Your MVP—Now Stop Polishing and Start Growing

You’ve shipped. The code is live, the landing page looks decent enough, and you’ve got a shiny MVP you can actually click around in. Congrats—seriously. That’s a milestone most people never reach.

But here’s the tough truth: launching is not the finish line. It’s the starting gun. The real game begins once your MVP is out in the wild. So… now what?

1. Accept That Nobody’s Waiting for You

It feels like the internet should be holding its breath, but in reality? Crickets. That’s normal. Nobody cares about your launch unless you give them a reason to. Your first job is not to scale, but to earn attention.

That means going where people already hang out—Reddit threads, Discord servers, niche Facebook groups, Indie Hackers. Don’t spam your link. Instead, show up, solve problems, and naturally drop your tool in as the answer when it actually helps.

2. Watch for Proof of Life

Forget vanity metrics. In the early days, you’re looking for signs of life:

• Did anyone try the signup form?
• Did they poke around for more than two minutes?
• Did they bother coming back a second time?

Every one of those tiny signals matters way more than “we got 500 clicks from a Hacker News post.” Your MVP isn’t about traction yet—it’s about detecting the faint heartbeat that says, someone found this valuable enough to use twice.

3. Double Down on Painkillers, Not Vitamins

If your app feels like a nice-to-have, it’ll get ghosted. If it solves an actual pain, people will tell you—even if they hate the UI.

Your next move is to interview (or just casually chat with) anyone who gave you those first signals of life. Ask them:

• What was going on before you tried this?
• What’s the most annoying part of your workflow?
• If this disappeared tomorrow, would you care?

The answers tell you whether you built a painkiller or a vitamin. Painkiller → sharpen it. Vitamin → pivot fast.

4. Run Small, Fast Experiments

Your MVP is a test bed. Treat it that way.

• Try a new headline on the landing page.
• Add a quick onboarding checklist.
• Launch on one new community this week.

Each is a bet. Track which ones actually change behavior, not just clicks. If you’re wrong? Great—cheap lesson learned. If you’re right? Double down.

5. Don’t Chase Scale Too Early

It’s tempting to think about ads, SEO, or fundraising. But early on, all that’s noise. The question isn’t “how do I grow this to 1,000 users?” It’s:

“Can I get 10 strangers to use this twice without me begging?”

If you can’t, scaling is pointless. Nail the tiny loop before you pour fuel on it.

6. Build Momentum, Not Motivation

You don’t need a perfect 12-month roadmap. You need wins. Stack small, visible progress—every week. That might be:

• A user testimonial.
• A design tweak that cuts friction.
• A blog post or tool that earns you a backlink.

Momentum compounds. It keeps you shipping long after the “launch high” wears off.

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Wrapping Up

Your MVP isn’t the end—it’s the beginning. The real challenge is turning that fragile prototype into a product that solves a real pain, for real people, repeatedly.

So if you’re staring at your dashboard and thinking, “now what?”, the answer is simple:

• Talk to people.
• Test small bets.
• Hunt for proof of life.
• Stack wins until you see momentum.

That’s how you go from shiny MVP → a real business.

👉 At Indie10k, we built a system to help indie devs focus on those exact small wins—three tasks a day, a weekly score to track progress, and a community of people chasing the same $10k MRR goal. If you’ve just shipped your MVP, come hang out—you’ll feel a lot less “what now?” and a lot more “let’s go.”