I saved $5000 on servers by drinking coffee with Indie Hackers

While I’ve learned a lot from the discussions here, the most valuable thing I did was to share my contact details and city in my profile. In the past year I’ve been contacted by a few users who also live in Krakow and contacted a couple others myself. I met with four of them.

Right now there are very strict social distancing rules in Poland, so since this story won't develop for a while I decided to post it now.

Coffee #1

The first indie hacker noticed my product release and became my first user.
We met over coffee and discussed our businesses. I provided him with a free account and over the months he gave me extremely valuable, detailed, and frank feedback.

Coffee #2

My second friend was an expat living temporarily in Krakow. He had a lot of technical skills that I lacked. I was wowed when he showed me his way of building websites and the tools he used. Together we set up some of those technologies for my products.

Coffee #3

One other entrepreneur I met turned my product roadmap upside down.
He's running a business that's already successful and he even has a few employees. He told me all about how he managed to achieve this growth and invited me to his private Slack channel.

A few days later he sent me a tip that there was an AppSumo sale for Startups.com membership for $49. One perk of it was $5000 of Amazon AWS credits. I'm spending around $150/month on my servers, so that was a valuable tip indeed.

Now I can run my servers for free.

Coffee #4

The last guy I met told me about how he enjoyed Startup School. He said that at the end of the 8 week course he received credits for GCP. I'll update this post once I finish it and see if it applies to me as well. What I did get from Startup School so far though was really great feedback from a fellow maker during the weekly Group Session.

Don't be shy

Thank you to every Indie Hacker that I've talked to. I can only hope that I provided as much value as I received.

Still, there are some Indie Hackers who live in Krakow or Warsaw that I could meet, but won’t - because they either didn’t share their city or make it difficult to contact them.

Business requires luck, but luck won't find you if you're hiding.