Celebrating 1 week as an Entrepreneur
Here I am 1 week in.
I took a leave-of-absence from my job to focus full-time on my side project https://raaft.io . It's not that it wasn't a good job. It's just that I have this itch that I need to scratch.
At this point, I'm mostly just writing code, but since I'm doing for myself, it feels great! I'm laser focused on launching in 5 weeks!
Oh wait, I'm not just writing code, I'm meeting with copy writers, reviewing specs with designers, writing ad copy, monitoring web analytics, analyzing keywords, evaluating competition... and on and on.
What I'm NOT doing, is punching the clock. I've noticed that now that I'm "working for myself", I want to make every moment count, maximize every hour, leverage every advantage.
Anyway, thanks Indie Hackers for giving me the inspiration!
That sounds great Luke - congrats on the progress so far!
A word of advice I wish I could give myself back when I started my first company:
Spend less time coding and more time talking/selling to customers directly. It's easy to change what your product does, to reflect what your customers need - but it's impossible to change what your customers need, to reflect what your product does.
I just thought I'd chime in with my $0.02, as you didn't mention talking to users/customers anywhere on your list of important things to do :)
Good luck!
I love this.
Thanks for the reminder! I've spent a lot of time talking to customers already... that was the pre-requisite to making the leap: feeling that I had a sense strong sense of what customers needed. A great reminder to not lose touch with the customers as I proceed, nonetheless!
That's awesome, congrats! I second @lousswiss' advice. See if you can make some sales before your product is even done. The reasons why people tell you "yes" or "no" will be insightful, and shape the code that you decide to write.
Awesome :) So it's not just me that did that haha. Did you take 5 weeks off or something? I only took a week :/ We're about a month an a half into building something and I just wanted to speed it up a tonne, so I took a week off to focus on it full-time and it was pretty incredible what we got done.
I just finished editing a vlog about my week of indie hacking - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VkkZOiIL10
I'm back at work this week and it's seriously hard to not just take the leap and go full-time on it now that I have tasted it.
Hit us up again when you are at 1 year :)
Hi Luke, super nice idea ! keep it up
Respect @coolhand79 for taking the leap!
It's a good idea, I can see it's market/application. How do you plan on financing it/yourself, before it starts generating any revenue?
Best of luck!
Keep up the great work Luke!
Looking forward to your next projects!
Well done man. Good luck in your venture.
This looks like a very useful product! Congrats on taking the leap and good luck!
Thanks!
Great product so far !! best of luck ;)
Nice work, your product looks pretty interesting!