After 2 years of indie hacking, my buttcheeks unclenched

In December 2024, my buttcheeks unclenched. I reached the solopreneur escape velocity.

For the last two years, I’ve been grinding hard in fear of not surviving going solo and being forced back into some form of employment.

And in hindsight, the grind was totally justified because I just barely made it. I reached ramen profitability and ran out of savings at the same time. The end of the runway.

A look back at 2024

The Beginning

I started this year in good standing, but still without a sufficient source of reliable income:

• A couple active projects bringing a modest $1k MRR (most of it going to cover the operational costs)
• A bit of capital in terms of social media following, new useful skills, SEO traffic trickling in
• $21k about to land on my bank account from the AppSumo launch for Chatwith
• Personal savings runway lasting until the end of 2024

It seemed like after almost a year of indie hacking, I was still pretty much on level 1, but with a few good cards to play.

The Middle

I decided to aggressively spend the cash I received from AppSumo on advertising Chatwith. My goals were to:

1. Learn how to use Google Ads effectively

2. Prove there’s business and determine if I can run ads profitably

3. Flush Chatwith with traffic to A/B test landing page improvements

4. Take a gamble on something most solopreneurs in my community were afraid to do

And then I saw my capital melt. Month after month, more money going out than coming in:

In November I briefly touched $0 and couldn’t pay a Google Ads bill.

For the longest time, I wasn’t sure if what I do makes sense at all or is just a huge waste of money.

But then, things started looking up: MRR slowly increased, cost per acquisition trended down, trial conversion rate improved, churn decreased, etc. After a few months of seeing a slow up and to the right I gained more confidence in my skills and realized that I managed to create a viable business: in the long term, each $1 spent on ads brings $3 in revenue.

The End

In December 2024, my buttcheeks unclenched. I accomplished my goal I set out in February 2023: to create a sustainable solo venture before all my savings run out. Today, I own internet assets consistently bringing over $6k in revenue each month and more importantly have the confidence I did not have a year ago:

I am capable of building a viable online business.

Looking forward to 2025

My main goal for 2025 is to finally start paying myself a salary and stop living off savings.

Secretly, I had a milestone: I would invest more effort into Chatwith only if it reached $5k MRR by the end of the year. It did (thanks, Black Friday!), so now my roadmap involves a lot of new improvements for it.

I also accidentally discovered that APIs may be a lucrative business. In September I started a simple experiment on RapidAPI and it’s been consistently growing since then. I decided to turn that experiment into a new product called Supadata: a collection of scraping APIs to get content useful for creating AI products.

In broad strokes, here are my product themes for 2025:

1. Launch a new pricing for Chatwith. The current usage-based model was a move in the right direction, but I’ve found it’s not flexible enough yet. The new pricing will allow more granular cost management and will unlock customers who are my target ICP (agencies).

2. Double down on Google Ads. I have a good foundation set up, but there is a lot of space to improve. Retargeting display ads, better assets, fine tuned landing pages, new audiences… I’m looking forward to making the most of this distribution channel in 2025, for Chatwith and Supadata.

3. Up my SEO game. Something went wrong and I do not see the SEO results I hoped for. Chatwith has pretty much non-existent organic traffic (despite a good DR 45), Gistly had a great start but is trending down and my other projects stopped growing. I always wanted SEO to be one of my main distribution channels so it makes me sad to see it so grossly underperform.

4. Grow Supadata. I started liking the API business. Plenty of reasons: you can skip building the frontend (which is now harder to compete on in the AI era); APIs have moat built-in; the world is hungrier than ever for data; and they are easy for no-code or inexperienced makers to adopt.

Ideas that guide me:
😍: Extreme automation, APIs, programmatic SEO, product portfolio in one niche
🙅‍♂️: X/Twitter, indie fads (eg. boilerplates), being the reply guy, building for the sake of building

See you next time!