4 years quiet as an IH, I started publicly speaking at the start of this year.
Hi, I'm EK
I've been here for 4 years and worked on side projects for a while.
For one reason or another, I always kept quiet with the worry that my employer might find out that I'm having side projects and might not like it, or my family/friends would find out how I'm wasting time on projects that don't make any money.
In Dec 2021 this changed.
- I quit my job
- I created a new Twitter account.
- Listed my first project RubyOnRemote on Indiehackers.
- Started speaking publicly about how I'm building Appbasics.com
Here's what I learnt.
- My friends don't give a sh*t about what I'm sharing.
- I made 125+ Twitter friends who push me on my down days.
- I'm more motivated to build something and share quickly to get feedback, which then fuels my motivation even more to keep the ball rolling.
- I've become a lot more disciplined than I would have been had I not shared in public, Now I feel like I shouldn't quit because I made a commitment to the internet. And this is working really well for me.
Stats from building in public on twitter.
- 50 new subscribers for RubyOnRemote.com
- 11 Leads on waitlist for Appbasics.com
Risky but I like it :)
I spent about 2 years planning financially for the quitting part.
Minimized the risk as much as possible. Also if I don't manage to make any money from these products I'll find another job after 1 year which is my runway.
Awesome I will follow along. Good luck!
Cool! Sounds like you’re on the right track. I’ll join you in a month or so 😄
Thank you!
This is awesome EK.
I started building in public too. Not as far as you but hopefully I will get to that stage one of these days! Cheers!
Thank you so much, all the best to you as well.
I am not as far as you might think. It's just a beginning of sharing more and engaging more online. Kind of like breaking out of my bubble which was previously made up of co-workers and friends from college 😂
I've been analyzing job boards for some time and many of them seem to be the "natural consequence" of having something like a community/popular blog, etc. Curious why you decided to do RubyOnRemote?
I created RubyOnRemote when I was job hunting in 2018.
I found myself going to many different places for finding remote jobs.
I was already curating jobs for me to apply on a trello board. So I decided to make it into a website so other Ruby developers could benefit as well.
After using RubyOnRemote for hiring at my job, I noticed there was a difference in quality of candidates who applied for a job post.
Generic job boards -> high volume, decent quality
Specialized job boards -> low volumes but higher quality of candidates.
Yep. In practice, "going indie" has more than one meaning. Most people can't relate to this lifestyle, so you often end up celebrating your wins and mourning your losses in private. Hence communities like this one!
Very true, I don't think I would have quit my job and invested weekends and nights into side projects had it not been for IH.
Seeing people take this path and share their stories makes me believe I can also give this a try.