Behind the Scenes: Indie10K's MVP v3 (TenK 6 System)

I had a vision. Users would open Indie10k, see 3 daily todos, smash through them like Mario stomping Goombas, and boom — compounding growth.

Except… that didn’t happen.

What actually happened? Crickets. Half-finished cards. People ghosting me after day one.

Turns out, asking indie hackers to juggle three todos a day is like asking a toddler to eat three different vegetables at dinner. Sure, technically possible — but you’ll be cleaning peas off the floor.

Two Terrible Ideas

So I started spinning “solutions” in my head:

1. Weekly-long guided track. Like a personal coach whispering, “This week, young padawan, we shall do outreach.” But the more I mapped it, the more it morphed into a glorified habit tracker. I don’t want Indie10k to be a coach counting your push-ups.

2. Playbooks from other founders. Copy-paste the paths that worked for them. Except — indie projects aren’t Ikea furniture. You can’t just follow the manual. Everyone hacks, tweaks, rips out pages, and rebuilds the shelf into a desk anyway. Also… building a library of playbooks would take forever.

Both paths smelled wrong.

And I had to admit it: I wasn’t smart enough to untangle this.

Enter the Gold Prompt

In desperation, I threw the simplest prompt I could at ChatGPT:

“Use first principle, think down to the bottom and provide a simple, lean solution.”

And boom. Lightning.

The TenK 6 Is Born

What came back was so clear, so right, I had that rare adrenaline rush. Like: This. This is the thing*.*

Here’s the recipe ChatGPT laid out (which I’ve since named TenK 6):

What Are We Optimizing?

Meaningful experiments per week (that actually touch signups, replies, or dollars).

Low cognitive load (so you act today, not plan forever).

Tight feedback loops (so tomorrow adapts to what you did today).

Constraints

Indie projects = messy. Avoid rigid playbooks.

Early stage = don’t pile on authoring overhead.

Users vary = need a universal system, not a catalog.

Simple, Lean Solution:

“Weekly North Star → One Daily Next Step.”

A. Weekly North Star (WN)

You pick one track (Validate / Distribute / Retain / Monetize). Then set a single outcome sentence: “By Sunday, I’ll have X evidence that Y hypothesis is true/false.”

B. Daily Next Best Step (NBS)

One card a day. No more. No less. Drawn from six universal step types:

List 5 (options, channels, assumptions)

Pick 1 (commit)

Ship 1 (publish, outreach, change live)

Ask 3 (DMs, emails, calls)

Measure 1 (screenshot a metric)

Share 1 (public update)

Each card includes a fallback (“shrink it to 10 min”) and a swap option.

C. Micro-Arcs

Not 30-day courses. Just 3–5 step bundles auto-generated from the six primitives.

Example:

Validate arc: List 5 riskiest assumptions → Ask 3 strangers → Summarize evidence.

Distribute arc: List 5 channels → Pick 1 → Ship 1 post → Measure 1 metric.

Feels like a playbook. But it’s built on Lego blocks, not hand-written curricula.

Why It Works

Because it’s light, flexible, universal. Because you can’t skip to day 14 — you unlock step by step, like a quest. Because it forces you to ship evidence, not polish todo lists.

It’s Lean Startup + Agile + Build in Public… smashed into six repeatable atomic moves.

And nobody else has published this exact synthesis. It’s ours.

Shipping It Fast

I immediately named it TenK 6 (fits Indie10k’s brand, rolls off the tongue).

Then, in true boring builder fashion, I wrote a PRD, tossed it to Claude Code, and while I was writing this post, the prototype basically came alive. Weekly screen → daily card → retro update. That’s all it takes to start.

Dogfooding

The second it worked, I used it on myself.

And… it just felt right. Like sliding into the correct lane on a highway. Smooth. No friction.

Instead of staring at a list of todos (half of which I secretly didn’t want to do), I had one card. Clear, doable, connected to my weekly North Star. By the end of the day I had a small artifact — a metric, a DM, a post, whatever.

It wasn’t productivity theater. It was progress.

Reflections

Looking back, the lesson isn’t just product design — it’s philosophy for indie devs:

Observe behaviors, not ideals. If people aren’t finishing, that’s feedback. Don’t force it.

Lean over complex. Complexity feels smart but kills momentum. Six primitives beat sixty tactics.

Evidence beats intention. A quote, a metric screenshot, a shipped link — those artifacts matter more than “I thought about it.”

Constraints drive clarity. One North Star, one step a day. You’d think it’s too little. It’s not. It’s freedom.

Don’t copy the whole playbook. Most paths aren’t transferable. But the primitives are. Share building blocks, not scripts.

Build what you’ll use. Dogfooding isn’t a checkbox; it’s the compass. If it doesn’t feel right in your hands, it won’t in theirs either.

Indie10k isn’t about tracking todos. It’s about nudging you into one small, meaningful experiment a day — so momentum snowballs without crushing your brain.

That’s the spirit of TenK 6.