5 years of failed indie hacking

My Journey
5 years ago I joined the indie hackers community. I always wanted to be independent and use my coding skills to be a one-man business.
In these 5 years I worked sometimes more and sometimes not at all and managed to make a total of $0. I have to be honest with myself, I am a typical “wantrepreneur”. As a software developer by trade building stuff on the internet should not be an issue for me, but it is.

For me the hard things are:

• finding an idea
• put consistent effort in
• finding motivation

2017 my first son was born, while my wife had to stay in the hospital with my newborn I worked whole nights on my first App project. My motivation was to make additional income to provide for my family. But the initial motivation faded fast as no one seemed to be interested in the stuff I built. And so began a cycle that repeated itself for the next 5 years:

My very suboptimal cycle:

Having an idea -> work hard on it for a month -> seeing no results -> stopping for a few months.

Seeing no results is the motivation killer for me, but building alone is not enough. You also need to market your product, that's something I want to improve on.

Financial situation

2019 my second son was born and as any father of two kids can probably agree on, there's not much free time between working fulltime and spending time with your kids and wife. Or atleast i am bad at making time for the stuff that brings me forward in life.

To complicate things even further we bought a house before the pandemic, we wanted to have more space for our family as we planned on having a third kid. A few unexpected expenses with the house and having to pay for a funeral as well as increasing energy costs and we are now stuck living paycheck to paycheck. Our dream of blessing our family with a third kid is now on hold.

My wife grew up with a single mother, money was always not enough, electricity was turned off at times cause her mother could not afford the bills.

I feel like I failed on my promise to provide for my family, I don't want my wife to worry about money anymore. I am now in a situation where I have to make some extra money.
Money doesn't make you happy, but having money problems surely makes you depressed.

My Goals

As I reflect on the last 5 years, consistency seems to be the major issue for me.
Putting in consistent hours, doing the work that is necessary, learning along the way.
After reading all kinds of business and self-help books I feel that I have all the information necessary to make my first dollar on the internet. In my mind i always have this strong belief that i can do it and that i will be successful eventually. The next step is to take consistent action towards my goals.

But what are my goals?

• In the short term I want to finally make my first dollar on the side, this has to be possible even for an ordinary guy like me.
• Mid term I want to figure out how to make a consistent 500$ on the side, this alone would make my financial situation much easier.
• Long term i want to replace the income from my job by working on my own products and projects, but that's a long way far in the future

Inspiration

Scott delong wrote on this blog (https://www.scottdelong.com) that you don't need to be an expert to provide value, you can share what you learn and provide value that way. That really resonated with me.

I remember reading every blog post from jordans blog (https://jdnoc.com/blog/) and it was an intimate view into his thoughts, i also want to do something like that. Jordans writings are relatable to me, he is a father and husband just like me and worked hard to get to where he is now.

The Future

I am not a writer and as an introvert it's not easy for me to write about my feelings, failures and so on. But I believe it's a necessary step to keep me accountable.

From now on I want to share my failures and the things I learn along the way in public.
Sharing and connecting with other indie hackers, instead of working alone in the dark.
Hope i don't come off like I am all about money. Money is nice but the freedom and self fulfillment of achieving my goals will be even nicer.

So I set up a new twitter account and an email newsletter, twitter will be used for more regular updates and in the newsletter I will try to provide you with my learnings and updates on my journey for this month. I am also working on setting up a blog to document my journey and learnings.

Sorry for my long ramblings, I tried to be as open as possible.

TLDR:

• In the last 5 years I have made no money on the internet.
• From now on I will build and share my journey in public.
• I want to be helpful and relatable for the ordinary guy or girl that also struggles on their IH journey.
• Money is nice, freedom and achieving your goals is even better.

Please let me know what you think. I want to connect and walk this journey together.

Also you can be my first newsletter subscriber: https://buttondown.email/Stormdev
Or connect on twitter: https://twitter.com/TheStormDev

Thank you,
Martin