At what point in your career did your ship your first product as indie hacker?
This is partially inspired by the Where are the women indie hackers? post where I became curious if experience-level is correlated with indie hacking.
Given that it's not uncommon for people to start and drop side-projects, I think it's more interesting to ask at when you were able to ship something. The only restriction is that it should be something with the intention of building some kind of business of your own. It could be a book, course, newsletter, an app or whatever.
If you need to define "shipping a product" we can define it as making it accessible to anyone who you don't personally know. For example, a closed beta that is for friends and family may not count, but a closed beta from a wait list is definitely fine.
This poll assumes a traditional education, but please try to find the closest fit based on your own path.
Please feel free the stories of your first ship or your path there!
To use myself an example:
- I did game modding (Warcraft 3, TF2) while in school, but since that wasn't with the intention of building a business. Does not count as shipping.
- In 2017, I tried to build my own startup for employee onboarding software, but that never got to the point where I had a working product. Every company I talked to wanted me to instead build something to help with hiring (a much more burning, but crowded problem); or if they were big enough that onboarding was an issue they were building something in-house for their very specific workflow. Does not count as shipping.
- In early 2020, I public launched Tendship with the intention of making into a side business. It did not succeed on the metrics that I wanted, but it was fun to build! This counts as shipping as an indie hacker and that was after ~4 years of working experience!
