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Building MVP, looking for a sparring partner/accountability buddy

(My first post on Indie Hackers, thanks for having me!)

Being a solo founder is hard for many reasons, but I appreciate its advantages as well. So while I’m rather determined to keep flying solo for the moment, I thought about how I could mitigate some downsides — which led me to write this post.

I’m not looking for a co-founder (yet), but rather someone who would be up for checking in with each other from time to time to compare notes, share progress, discuss ideas or problems and challenge each other. Sure, that is what’s happening here in the Indie Hackers community all the time. Still, I realized that I miss the 1:1 exchanges and continuous relationships of working in a team, and I think this should, in part, be replicable even without working together. You could say that instead of searching for someone to work together with, I’m more interested in working „alongside“ each other. This could be in the form of sharing a Discord channel to ping each other from time to time, as well as having regular (or even spontaneous) Zoom check-ins to meet for coffee and to talk business ;)

To give you some background about me and what currently keeps me up at night (not literally, I need 8 hours of sleep to function properly):

I started as a web developer while studying business administration and worked in consulting and technical sales for IBM, Accenture, and Salesforce. Currently, I’m on parental leave and try to balance being a full-time dad and working on my MVP, building a mobile app, web page, and infrastructure. While there is certainly no need to be on the same stack to compare notes, it’s still beneficial if there is a certain overlap. For that reason, I thought it’d be useful to give a quick overview of my current stack:

Almost everything I code is in TypeScript. I’m building the front end using React, React Native (Expo), Relay, Next.js. The back end is mostly serverless on AWS, using services like AppSync, DynamoDB, Cognito. All AWS infrastructure is defined in code via CDK and deployed using CodePipeline.

Apart from all this coding, I like coffee and good food and getting to know different cultures (I recently moved to Singapore). I'm also constantly learning — right now, I'm trying to acquire some Mandarin and dabbling with building smart contracts on Ethereum.

So if you’re interested in having semi-regular exchanges about how it’s going over a virtual coffee, bouncing ideas back and forth, discussing the awesomeness of the newest Expo release, or ranting about the utter lack of proper Amazon Cognito documentation, I’d be delighted to hear from you. You can either contact me via my Indie Hackers profile or — to make things simple — put a 15-minute coffee chat into my calendar, so we can get to know each other: https://calendly.com/bndkt/coffee-chat

  1. 3

    It's amazing that you're up with a positive attitude :) Being a solo founder, I realize how lonely it can be at times.

    You can also look up at https://www.astramind.io We're some SaaS founders building in public & maintaining accountability

  2. 2

    Hi! I'm building a platform for entrepreneurial people to find an accountability buddy! You can check it out at ambimate.com 😉

  3. 2

    @benedikt I highly recommend joining foundersCafe.io. we're a small community of founders that have daily meetups and keep each other accountable over discord. It really helped me alot.

  4. 2

    Hi Benedikt. I'm coming from the marketing side of business. Would be great taking a coffee with you. I can't provide any thoughts related to topics like Expo release or Amazon Gognito documentation :) On the other hand, I've got a great interest in user onboarding, user acquisition strategies, and the overall marketing side of building a product. At the moment I'm building a web app through Bubble as a side project (yep, I'm a no-coder at the moment). The reason – I want to validate product ideas before building the real product.

    Anyways, please reply me if you would like to talk about these topics. If this isn't right for you - no hard feelings 😊

  5. 1

    Hi @bndkt, I'm interested. I've sent you a DM on twitter.

  6. 1

    Nice! welcome to Singapore and cool coffee chat link you have.
    https://t.me/lioncitymakers let's go

  7. 1

    Hey,

    I would love to talk as well. However the timezone makes it a bit complicated. Where are you based?

  8. 1

    I like your idea so much that I think I will try myself as well as I need to build a network of founders, and growth mindset people, not just freeelancers/survivors.

    Being in Europe the times you post are really early to me, I will try Thursday the latest but if there is traffic on the way to the office I may miss it, hope it works.

  9. 1

    Really interesting, I looked at your calendly, but I am in Europe, and the times you have available are too early for me.

  10. 1

    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

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