I made $8k+ revenue in first year of my indie hacking journey

Reachactory was a service I provided for sharing AI tools with 100+ directories.
It was my first individual service based business idea.

I charged $100 (one-time) / client. I worked with 30+ startups/founders to market their products. And made around $3k in total.

Working with so many startups/founders allowed me to get cracked at service based business, marketing and dealing with people.

After that, I landed some freelancing gigs (most of them came bcz ppl saw Reachactory).

I made around $5.5k with those gigs.

I saw people tweeting about making $10/20/100k per month and I got sad that I couldn’t do it.

But sometimes we have to remind ourselves that what we did is also good.
I was nowhere near where I am 1 year ago.

I keep reminding myself that making $8k+ is also a good thing. ( Atleast better than $0 )

After experimenting & dealing with service side business I learned that its such a headache to handle people/meetings/clients.

That’s why I jumped at the opportunity and built Easyui.pro -- Open Source collection of 50+ high quality templates.

In just 30 days, Easy UI crossed 16k+ views, 45k+ site events and 90+ Github stars.

Easy UI is not yet profitable yet but I am sure that I can make it profitable soon
I feel like I have learned the cycle of building, posting updates, talking with people, marketing etc .

I started with a FREE project to learn all this. I wanted to provide value so that I can learn along side providing what people can use to save their time.

I think if I start again from 0, I would def build a FREE/ open source product and launch it to learn how indie hacking works.

Building products and making profit is hard but I will anytime choose product based business over service based.

Dealing with meetings, deadlines, clients is way too much of hassle.

Ps- this was all along side a full time off-field job that too in a foreign country where I don’t have my family or anyone to support me. (Most people stop bcz of these reasons tho i believe these are just lame excuses)