I tried to leave indie hacking

It's incredibly ironic that the last post I made on IndieHackers was about leaving the indie hacking scene and coming back.

That was just over a year ago. At that point I had been laid off twice and had started GrabbrApp. Since then, GrabbrApp reached a single enterprise customer and flopped after that. I applied for YC twice and was rejected twice, and other attempts to get funded failed. I was laid off again, and most recently, I lost tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on a contract.

I promise, this post gets more positive!

adversity and being indie

I've dealt with quite a bit of adversity over the last couple years, enough to honestly be over it. I left the indie approach behind because I thought I wanted "the quick route" of getting funded, or "the parallel approach" of working contracts to give me more time to work on my apps. I honestly had a pretty arrogant attitude toward it all.

"Oh those indies are just naive. If you want to build something big, you have to get funded and blow up."

Then it kept crashing down. Layoffs, job rejections, getting ghosted on contracts, having the SaaS I put a ton of hours flop, getting rejections from YC, it all came, one hit after another.

After the most recent contract fiasco, I've dealt with a lot of anger and angst. A lot of "why me"s. A lot of questions and very few answers. I started to really think about where my focus was and where it ought to be. I made a few observations:

• I don't really want to be a big-shot CEO with hundreds of employees. I've been a part of those big companies, and the only thing I could imagine being worse than getting laid off is having to swing the ax myself.
• I definitely don't want to be a freelancer. Chasing folks down for money for a living sounded miserable. The constant feast or famine cycles didn't make for a very safe living for a family of 4.
• I don't want to be an employee for the rest of my life. This sucks.

So… why was I pursuing VC funding when that will inevitably lead to me being a big-shot CEO with hundreds of employees? Why was I pursuing freelance contracts? Why was I not instead focusing on building startups to get me out of being an employee?

Why did I leave Indie Hacking?

10 startups in 12 months

So I did what any indie hacker would do. I dove into an X startups in Y months challenge. For me, I started with 10 and 12 and am doing that through ~March of next year. Since then I’ve launched randomstonks, a meme site that picks a random stock pick every day, seclinks, a URL shortener for security researchers, and am working on a couple more sites and apps. I’ve got… a lot to do in the next couple months to get to where I need to be, but I’m starting to nail down processes and tech stacks to help me move faster.

I’m also re-launching GrabbrApp and making it better this time by focusing on core features, writing solid code and… actually doing marketing.

IndieHacker is a great community, and one that I want to come back to. The indie hacker philosophy, or at least my reading of it, is the one I should have stuck with all along.

Here is to brighter roads ahead!