Doing it all backwards

One could easily get the impression from reading these pages that to be an indie hacker, you need to be 23 years old, launch new AI-powered MVPs on a daily basis, from a beach in Portugal, make $1M in a month, then sell up to a ravenous capitalist, all the while broadcasting your every move.

If that's the true way, I've been doing it all backwards.

I'm 47, and I've been building something as old school as a desktop file manager (with no involvement from our new LLM overlords) on and off for the last 5 years. Launched it 3 years ago and it still only brings in some $100-$200 a month.

Fileside was born out of my frustration with trying to keep my ever-growing collection of files organised with Finder on Mac and Explorer on Windows. Not able to find a cross-platform alternative that fit the bill, I scratched my own itch and started building it.

The core idea is to let you create workspaces of tiled folders for each of your projects, collections, or workflows. The concept is surprisingly versatile, and I've ended up using it for things like kanban boards and my second brain as well.

The initial spark to start building it actually came from discovering Indie Hackers, but somehow I didn't manage to create an account here until now. I'm a behind the scenes kind of guy, not one for rushing things out and pushing them in front of people. There's always something to add, something to improve, something to fix, always some seemingly good reason to hesitate before considering that big marketing push warranted.

But enough of that! It's make or break time. To be able to scrape a living from this, I need to bump income by at least 20x, so it's time to focus on spreading the word!