> Hello, world! I'm Chris...

Hi Indie Hackers!

This is my very first post here on Indie Hackers. I have no idea why it took me so long to sign up and join the community. It's clearly one of the places I should have been looking for support and motivation from the very start. I really could have used it a couple of years back.

But hey, here I am.

Go easy on me. 😇

Me, in a Nutshell

• My name is Christian Heidorn, I'm 37 years old, married to a side-hustling wife (FTW!) and we live in Hamburg, Germany.
• I've been a creator since the age of 13, when I first got my hands on an Internet connection.
• Taught myself to code Visual Basic at 16 and learned a bunch of other languages later (Delphi/Pascal, JS, PHP).
• I love design, I love coding, I love business.
• I am literally A Master of None, but I'm pretty good at connecting the dots.
• I'm curious about so many things in life – and I tend to soak it up like a sponge.
• I spent the first 8 years of my business career in the oil industry (don't ask, haha).
• I spent a lot of time with my side hustle in print-on-demand at the time.
• I was fairly good at it and wrote an eBook – Apparel on Autopilot – about it in 2013.
• I finally quit my job in 2017 to co-found and build ThreadBasket, a design resource for the print-on-demand space.
• We didn't fail, but it's complicated. If you're interested, I wrote about it last year. It was titled "Taking Stock of Life as a Founder".
• I also started creating on Gumroad in 2018.
• Between then and now I almost gave up twice (for personal reasons).
• 2020 I was supposed to be on a year-long trip around the world with my wife. Digital Nomad style. But then Covid-19 came and I guess you know the rest.
• But by the end of 2020 I was 1 out of 179 people who grossed more than $100k on Gumroad. My proudest moment in a long time. To be honest, I had no clue. I'd share the email, but since I'm new here, IH won't let me add images nor any links.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to engaging with everyone here. I'm no longer at the beginning of my journey, but rather right smack in the middle. I've made so many mistakes, but I've also done a lot of things right.

I'm still not always sure which is which and I'm convinced there was also a lot of luck and randomness involved. But hey, for what it's worth, I plan on sharing on Indie Hackers whatever I feel might be useful to others.

I definitely wish I had had more guidance and relatable inspiration early on myself.

Actually, I'm working my first piece of proper content for Indie Hackers. It's about using affiliates to help drive your business. It's a bummer I can't add images yet. Cause it does make it a lot easier to illustrate some things 🙁

Oh well...soon.

Talk soon! 🙂