What is or was your transition from developer to founder/indie hacker like?

Before starting Indie Hackers I did remote contract work for a couple years. It was a hiatus from the grind of being a founder, which had burned me out years earlier. It was also an easy way to save up money.

I began dabbling on a side project, my previous business Taskforce. I did it more for coding practice and to learn new frameworks than anything else, and so it didn't progress much as a business. In hindsight, I did it that way because I was afraid of the business side of things.

When the last company I was contracting for went under, I took the opportunity to quit contracting cold turkey and become a full-time founder. At that point, I had just over a year of runway saved.

I burned through my first 4 months of savings doing all the wrong things. I wasn't working very hard. I didn't set firm deadlines and reduce the scope of my projects to fit. I spent a few months dabbling on Taskforce before I accepted that I wasn't ever going to be motivated to work on the growth/business side of things. The turning point was watching people launch and grow successful projects in just a few months, and realizing that I'd be more likely to do the same than to stick with my current project. Dropping Taskforce meant eating years of sunk costs. That was painful.

My next project was some app that I'd always wanted for myself. It was a bad idea. It was more of a feature than a business, and it would've taken me forever to code. About 2 months into it, I was still writing code with no end in sight, and wasting time playing around with the latest frameworks. Then I realized I had no plan for growth whatsoever. I was just doing what I'd always done. I think I was motivated by the story of the Mint guy who spent months coding in isolation, then released his product, and BOOM the rest was history. Not a good story to learn from.

(This was before Indie Hackers existed, so good stories were hard to find. 😇)

Then I decided to get serious, switch gears, and go into hardcore analysis mode. I realized that I knew the right things to do, but my challenge was finding the discipline to do them.

So I made a validation checklist of requirements that my next idea would need to hit, and #1 on that list was something like "must not be code intensive." I wanted something I could build and launch in less than a month. The rest of the list was similar. It was full of reactions to my past mistakes.

I checked my idea notebook I'd been keeping for years, and none of the 50+ ideas passed muster, so I started brainstorming from scratch. A few days later I had three ideas that scored fairly highly on my checklist. The best one by far was Indie Hackers, so I did that.

(It's worth noting that I almost chose one of the other ideas, because they involved more code and seemed more fun. Discipline is hard.)

Building Indie Hackers was relatively easy. I got distracted, I decided to build it from scratch, and I made sure to learn/play with new tech, but I still went from idea to launch in three weeks. I made my first $500 in revenue a couple weeks after that.