I think making a sustainable living off indie projects is difficult. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of new apps being released every week. It’s challenging to cut through the noise and make oneself seen out there.
But that’s probably not going to stop any indie hacker from doing side projects — it’s not stopping me, and I’m not even a developer. In my day job I’m a designer. But not a single day has gone by when I haven’t had an idea for a cool game or an interesting app that I wanted to do just for fun.
I didn't want to quit my day job for a side gig, burn through all of my savings, live like a pauper and put myself through a mental and physical endurance test. Previously, I had quit my job to work on my ideas; more than once. It never ended well. I figured I had to find another way to satisfy my curiosity this time.
The work I get to do in my day job is challenging and rewarding. While it has its ups and downs, I enjoy it and I plan to keep on doing it.
So why am I talking about working on part time projects, you ask? Well there are a couple of reasons for that.
- The first reason is that as much a I like designing websites and mobile apps, there are lots of other types of things I want to be doing as well.
- The second reason is creative control. While I am very lucky to have a huge amount of creative input into everything I work on, there are always going to be things I would do differently if I got to call all the shots. It’s a very different experience being in complete control of every facet of a product —from design, to programming, to marketing.
- The final reason I am trying to do part time side projects is the fact that I was doing it anyway — I just wasn’t doing it very well.
I have been making little MVPs and thinking through product ideas in my spare time for the last six months, but I never made a lot of progress with them.
I’d have an idea, work on it for a few hours or days and then leave it unfinished when something else came up, or I hit a hurdle.
Neither did I have a clear goal, nor a lot of motivation to finish them — and over time that started to really bother me, so I decided to change it.
What was getting in the way?
While I was certainly learning from researching and making all of these quick MVPs in my spare time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was just wasting a load of my time, and not getting any tangible benefit from it.
I wanted to make polished apps and release them for people to try, and as you know, there is a VERY long road from an idea to a finished product.
I identified the main reasons I would stop working on something.
- Boring details: Once I started building, I would hit a part that was a pain in the ass to work on. Sometimes I just didn’t enjoy coding up certain low level things.
- Scope: Another big problem was scope. I usually didn’t have clear goals or limitations when I started coding, so I often ended up in a situation where I would find something really fun and then realise my idea would take over a six months to actually complete.
- Interruptions: Finally, the biggest hurdle in finishing these MVPs, at least for me, was being interrupted by something else. I could never go back to them once I left them for a couple of days. Maybe a new product idea came, or I wanted to work on something else for a while. Whatever might be the reason, if I left a project unopened for over two weeks it was as good as dead.
What changed finally?
I decided to set a couple of things in order.
- Clear goal: I wanted to build and ship finished products. I wanted to make them in a short amount of time to keep the finish line in sight and my motivation high. I decided I wanted to ship my first product within 4 months of starting — which basically meant picking something I thought I could get finished in about a month since I am experienced enough to know how estimation and scope creep work.
- Work consistently: I knew I needed to work on one idea consistently, and for me that meant 2 hours a day, every day, with an extra 8 hours spread over weekends. I have traditionally been very good at making excuses for myself, so to get into the habit, I didn’t let myself skip a single day for the first 1 month of work. After that, I relaxed it a bit. But I have been sticking to this schedule pretty well for the last 2 months. 2 hours might not seem like a lot, but it was the absolute maximum I was willing to commit to. My day job can be pretty draining at times and I also wanted to make sure I still have time in the evenings to relax, enjoy myself and spend time with my girlfriend.
- Enjoy the work: This 2 hour timescale lead me to decide on another rule designed to keep my motivation up, and generally make sure that I actually enjoyed working on my ideas: No feature goes in that I can’t make in a 2 day chunk. At the end of each session, I wanted to commit a fully working version of my app and feel like I accomplished something useful. I have broken this rule a few times and regretted it every time.
- Build an app to suit this approach: The short timeline, combined with broken up work schedule, led me to design an app that was not only much smaller in scope, but also much simpler. The only goal was to make an interesting and productive app, and any features that aren’t going to achieve that, or were a pain to implement got cut. That meant no networking, no third party SDKs, no monolithic pieces of cool new tech. Not right now at least.
How has it been working so far?
So far, things are going pretty good. I estimated 4 months. From what I see, it will be done in 3 and half. Yay!
It still needs a lot of work done though. And I plan to get it ready for release by mid September. It's a habit tracking app and it solves my
very own problem of failing at consistent execution.
An important takeaway from this experience?
Ideas are worth a dime. What matters is putting in daily effort and executing consistently. If I fail to put daily effort on my side hustles, I'm consistently being a mediocre. Trying to avoid that is a great motivation.
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If you are a fellow hacker working on a side project I guess this resonates with you too. If you have any other ideas/tips to perform consistently, please do share in the comments.
Also, I don't have a lot of experience with sales and marketing. If you could share some tips on how do I go about finding the first 10-50 customers it would be awesome! Few examples of the target group would be indie hackers who want to code daily, fitness enthusiasts who want to hit the gym daily, or bloggers who want to write daily. Basically anybody who wants to form new habits and track them daily.
Apart from that, if you would be interested in trying out my app once it goes live, I'd love to hear your feedback! I've setup a frugal landing page (took just 15 minutes to build it for free) for you to put in your email address: http://mastery.strikingly.com/
Thanks a lot! Happy hacking.