I quit freelancing to do an IndieBootcamp: Launching 6 startups in 6 months

Hey, I’m Matthias from DiggingClips.com.

Some weeks ago, my last freelance webdev contract ended and I took some time to reflect and consider what steps to take next. I came up with the idea to do a 6 month long IndieBootcamp, an intensive period where I aim to get the hang of IndieHacking and bootstrapping, and decided to run with it.

What’s the IndieBootcamp?

You probably know the concept of boot camps, where people join courses to rapidly learn certain skills, such as programming or design. For a long time, I wanted to focus more on indiehacking and bootstrapping, so I thought: why not do an IndieBootcamp, where I try to rapidly learn the skills required to become a successful indiehacker. What I like about the boot camp idea is that it’s very hands-on, with only as much theoretical input as needed, and that it’s short and intense.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how such a boot camp could look like, how to structure it, etc. But at one point I decided to just not overthink it and get going. So my “curriculum” is pretty lean, focusing on two aspects:

• Launching
• Marketing

As far as I can tell, these two skills are the most important skills an IndieHacker needs. You need to build and launch fast and often, and then market your products. So that’s what I’ll do over the next 6 months: I’ll launch at least 1 product each month, and try to market them. If one takes off, I’ll spend more time on it. If not, I’ll continue launching.

Why 6 startups in 6 months?

The inspiration for this obviously came from the 12 startups in 12 months challenge by Pieter Levels. The 12in12 challenge is great because it forces you to launch. It grows your shipping muscle so you become faster at building and launching products. It also forces you to dump projects that don’t go anywhere, have too big a scope, etc.

The thing is, from what I’ve seen, most people don’t actually do it for 12 months. They usually stop after products 6-7 because they either found a product that worked, or they just get exhausted and pivot to a more sustainable cadence. Besides that, there are two random facts that made me decide to do it for 6 months (for now):

• it’s almost July, and it’ll be exactly 6 months till the end of year.
• I can comfortably do 6 months in terms of cash runway (got more in equities).

I’ll evaluate my progress after 6 months to see how I’ll continue. If continuing at the speed of 1 product per month seems to make sense, I’ll do that.

Another reason why I want to do it for 6 months initially is that it’s not my first time building businesses. In 2021 I worked on a few different projects including CommunityValidated, and last year I worked on a funded project. So I tend to think I don’t start from zero (but still feel close to it).

However, looking back, one thing that always held me back from finding success with my products was that I didn’t move fast enough, i.e. launching fast. I tend to overthink things, then make some decisions that put the launch date a few weeks/months back, etc. My current belief is that launching fast and often is one of the best ways to find out what works. And I think the IndieBootcamp is great for this.

How do you finance this?

Most people ask me how I finance myself. Without opening my books completely, here’s the high level:

• I have a low burn rate.
• I got 8-9 months cash runway.
• I have more than that in equities. Don’t necessarily want to touch those, but if need be, it’s there.
• There’s always the option to take a freelance gig, either during the 6 months if it's a great fit and allows me to continue launching, or after 6 months if I don’t feel like liquidating my equities or spending more of my cash.

My strategy: ship weekly, launch monthly

I will ship weekly and launch monthly.

Shipping can be multiple things: a landing page with a signup / buy button. A new feature. A marketing campaign. Basically, anything that drives my agenda forward. But I need to put something out there every week.

Launching needs to be a new product entirely. The products need to be SaaS or data products. I also considered productized services. My view on this (which may be wrong): it seems to me that most IndieHackers with big success in service businesses have either built software in the space before, have a relatively large audience, or both. This is great for offering services: you showcase domain expertise by building software in the space and have distribution from your audience.

That’s why I’ll not focus on services just yet. I don’t have much to my name in terms of products, and I also don’t have a large audience. In 6 months I’ll have more products to show and potentially have built an audience alongside. At that point, I might consider offering productized service as well. (Yes, MRR from software is great, but fast cash flow from services is sweet, too.)

My products have to fit in either of those niches:

• Social Media Marketing
• Lead Generation
• Scratch my own itch

Why? First of all, jumping between industries with every product I build doesn’t seem to be a great strategy. It’s like digging many different holes, but not going deep enough anywhere to actually dig up something valuable. Besides that:

• Social media marketing is a huge space and will continue to grow imo, and I’ve got experience building products in that space.
• Lead Generation is an evergreen space with tons of $$$ in it.
• Scratching my own itch, well, it’s just a proven way of finding good product ideas.

Create content

Big part of my marketing efforts will go into content creation. I already have CommunityValidated, a business ideas newsletter with ~1.2k subscribers, which has been on ice for the past year or so. I’m considering picking it up again, probably rebrand it and focus more broadly on business ideas, not exclusively on the community niche. This will be great for multiple reasons:

• Helps me find business ideas to build
• Grows my audience
• Can monetize with ads
• Can launch my products to the audience

Besides that, I’ll also share my personal journey with people who’re interested. I’ll start by building in public on Twitter, and at one point probably spin up my own blog and maybe personal newsletter. But I won’t start all at once, as it might be too much for me to still do this:

Have fun

I feel like most of the time, I have taken business too seriously. Probably has something to do with me attaching too much of my sense of self-worth to success in business/career. But working with such an MO just isn’t too much fun, and I ultimately want to also enjoy what I do. So I’ll put an effort into having fun doing the things I do, and if I turn too sour over a period of time, I’ll change things up for them to become enjoyable again. This may be anti-hustle culture, which is probably a good thing.

What’s my goal with all this?

One of my main goals of getting better at IndieHacking is the obvious one: reach ramen profitability and more, so that I can live off of my own products. This is a tough one to achieve in 6 months, so I decided to add some additional goals:

• Find one product that sticks, in a market that’s big enough for it to become an attractive business.
• Become good at launching fast (ideally from idea to market in 1 week).
• Become good at audience building and marketing (have an engaged audience that’s growing).
• Enjoy the process.

Ah, and one last thing: this challenge is also kind of like a bucket list item for me. I really wanted to do something like this, and it’s already worth it for that reason. I had a few such things in my life, where I really wanted to do this one thing (go travel this country, take this course, …) but ended up delaying them for some silly reasons. Once I finally decided to do the thing, it has always been a great experience: I traveled to exotic countries where I met people who changed my life, took coding courses that turned my career around, did an IndieBootcamp challenge that … (we’ll see the outcome of that decision when I write my follow up post 6 months from now :P).

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I hope this post inspires some of you to embark on similar journeys! Let me know if you have any questions or want to share any comments :)

PS I’ll regularly post on Twitter, sharing what I’m currently working on etc.