I always knew there was a difference between building a product and building a business. If you are active in indie builder communities on Twitter, you keep hearing the phrase “Building is the easy part” almost every other day. Although I had heard this many times before, I didn’t truly understand the magnitude of that difference until I dove in head first. Before I started, my mental model was simple and, honestly, quite reasonable. I assumed it would be roughly a 50–50 split. Half my time would go into building, and the other half into everything else: marketing, distribution, talking to users, selling, and learning how to package the product properly. I was prepared for that trade-off.