Here are the basic rules:

• 📦 Products – 3 months to earn $1000
• 📝 Articles – 1 month to hit 100 shares
• 🎥 Videos – 6 weeks to reach 1000 views

To hold myself accountable, I built a simple algorithm that runs every night while I'm (hopefully) sleeping.

This site is built with Node/React/Gatsby and hosted on Netlify, but it's all AWS on the backend. I am using a few lambda functions to carry out these tasks. Here's how it works:

Products

Every product has an id in my billing system (Stripe), so the function starts by checking all revenue against my projects. If it notices any products launched 3 months ago, it will either slap a success or failed tag on it depending on the goal revenue versus actual net.

Articles

The metric used for determining article success is social reach. So similar to the product search, the algorithm crunches the FB Graph API with Twitter data for all article URLs on the site and gets the updated share counts. If it notices a month old article, it tags it success or failure based on shares.

Videos

Using the Youtube API, the script fetches the latest video data and figures out view count, share count and grades videos that are 6 weeks old.

This V1 is a start, and I hope to improve the rules over time. But as subjective as "success + failure" can be, here's how I arrived at these metrics:

• Polled the Indie Hackers commmunity and achieving a small revenue goal, also called out in some comments as "ramen profitablity", was the most popular response.
• For articles and videos, I dove into the analytics on my Youtube channel and previous blog posts and found reasonable indicators of success. As my audience grows, I'll bump up these metrics a bit.