Build the Startup You’ll Regret Not Building

It starts with a question that sounds like a joke: How do you build a store that sells everything, to everyone, everywhere?

Jeff Bezos didn’t know either. But he asked it seriously enough to leave a Wall Street job, pitch 20 investors for $50K a pop, and start packing books in a garage.

The bet wasn’t on books. It was on regret. Specifically, how to avoid it.

Bezos had a name for this: the regret minimization framework. Look forward to age 80. What do you wish you had tried? Now do that.

That’s how Amazon started. And it’s a lens indie hackers still use to quit, to ship, to gamble on weird ideas when the timing doesn’t make sense but the feeling does.

Obsession Beats Competition

Most founders look sideways. What are others building? Who’s doing it better?

Bezos didn’t care. “Competitors aren’t going to send us money,” he said. Customers will.

So Amazon didn’t optimize for margin. They optimized for trust.

They published negative reviews of the products they sold. They killed short-term revenue to earn long-term loyalty. And the bet paid off. Because when you serve people like they’ll come back tomorrow, they usually do.

That’s not strategy. That’s obsession. The healthy kind.

Start Narrow. Scale Like You Meant It.

Amazon started with books. Not because Bezos loved reading. Because books were the easiest wedge: Lightweight. Universal. Easy to catalog. Massive selection.

It wasn’t “follow your passion.” It was “find your door in.”

You see this in every indie success story. Pick a niche. Solve deeply. Earn trust. Expand slowly—on purpose.

The best startups feel small before they get big. Because they start with depth, not reach.

Frugality Isn’t Just a Vibe

Amazon’s original desks were made from old doors. Literally. Bezos wanted everyone to feel the constraint. To stay scrappy. To build things that scaled for users, not egos.

This mindset still works—especially now.

Indie hackers don’t have millions in runway. But they have clarity.

No fat. No layers. Just a direct line between you and the people you serve.

And every time you reinvest in making something better for them—cleaner UI, tighter onboarding, faster support—you’re compounding trust instead of just chasing growth.

That’s the long game. Even if it doesn’t look like it on the dashboard.

Invent What’s Missing

Most companies optimize what already works. Bezos kept looking at what didn’t exist yet.

Prime. Kindle. AWS.

None of those were obvious bets. But they solved persistent pain—shipping delays, clunky eBooks, fragile infrastructure—and rewrote expectations in the process.

That’s not vision. That’s pattern spotting.

Listen hard enough to your users, and they’ll tell you what the future needs. Even if they don’t say it directly.

The Indie Litmus Test

Bezos built the everything store by thinking like someone with nothing to lose and everything to prove. That mindset still applies—especially when you’re early and unknown.

So here’s your daily check-in:

• Am I going to regret not building this?

• Am I obsessing over my users—not my competitors?

• Am I solving one problem deeply, before I try to solve everything?

• Am I making decisions for trust—not for press, not for VCs, not for some imaginary scale?

Because the real blueprint isn’t on a keynote slide. It’s in the basement, the coffee shop, the garage.

It’s in the decision to start narrow. To build for the long-term. To keep solving even when it’s unglamorous.

Amazon didn’t become inevitable overnight. It became inevitable because someone asked a ridiculous question—and kept building until it felt normal.

That’s not just their story.

That can be yours too.