Is COVID-19 affecting Indie Hackers?
Hey everyone!
I am lucky enough that I am able to work pretty smoothly remotely, but is the mass quarantine affecting you?
Many remote working & e-commerce projects are doing amazing right now.
Our team at www.seesnap.com was already working from home (as I am sure many of you are), and our product is able to be used by teams even under quarantine.
How is this time affecting you? Business is booming? Rough patch? No change?
Being able to work remotely means no commute, which means more time for indie hacking.
Haha for sure! I would think for a lot of us here on IH, this is potentially making it easier to carve out more time for our projects
Working remote is no problem. But, unfortunately, I build software for conferences/conventions. And they are all cancelling or postponing. I quickly went from a 2020 net revenue estimate of over $6K to an estimated net loss.
It is very possible that my company will run out of cash by the end of the year. Fortunately, my day job (local government SaaS) is, if anything, doing better. So I can likely sustain my company with personal cash until things go back to some sort of normal.
Dang. I hate to hear that. I’m glad your day job is doing better but I truly hope things get better for your company. Are there an opportunities arising from webinars/digital conferences? Or has that been a dead end so far?
I am attempting to pivot my existing software towards online conferences but I have yet to get much buy-in from my existing customers. They are either using other platforms (e.g. online course software) or they are postponing.
My current strategy is to provide as much value to them as possible by helping them to move online, even if they aren't using my platform. So far, that has successfully kept them from asking for refunds.
Most of the financial hit is from refunding registration fees. Those fees are charged to attendees, who I do not directly provide much value to, so I can't keep them.
Providing value even when your core product isn’t able to be offered seems like a great approach to maintaining relationships with your users/customers.
It sounds like your business had a lot of upside prequarantine since you registered attendees as well. Hopefully as the world opens back up in the coming months, people will be searching for more organized, structured, and efficient ways to manage their conferences. I’m sure people will be very careful when gathering in larger groups or with people they don’t know as well, but I’m sure there will always be a market for facilitating gatherings like this (whether in person or virtual).
As a business owner in Asia and US, there has been some significant changes, but in other parts of the business, not so much. Mfg business abroad has been 90% remote since 2017 and we’ve pivoted partial ops to other areas of production. Luxury markets have taken a hit, so that has made wholesale relatively obsolete and produced a poor forecast for remainder of 2020. Similar to a response below, a SaaS business we built here in NY had been serving a great number of restaurants but with temp closures, service changes and shuttering of businesses, we pivoted to address an internal problem facing us personally at present, full calendars of status update meetings. We challenged ourselves to build and launch Summit in less than 14 days and we launched Friday, reducing workflow interruptions straightaway.
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As digital nomads, I and my wife somehow affected. The visa is running out and a bit confused about the next step (lots of countries around close the borders). Meanwhile, quarantine was a great opportunity for us, We keep working hard on our new project (https://app.motiveex.com/free) but still nervous about the next destination.
That’s super interesting to think about. I’m sure international travel is a headache (to say the least) right now!
Oh yeah, I'm building a fitness app that is more oriented to endurance (outdoors).
How has it been doing? I’m sure tons of people are looking for ways to stay fit right now
I work in travel so it's been bad on a freelancing front and I was ready to launch an AI based travel product in mid March, just as all of this hit, so it has been a massive hit to me.
A lot of revaluation going on for me at the moment
Solo founder based in Singapore - the whole country is on lockdown (3rd week with 1 more to come).
Talking on a personal level, not business - almost nothing has changed. The main differences are:
(a) my wife is working from home and going a bit stir crazy, which then affects me; and
(b) I can't go to gym, so my exercise routine is disrupted.
I've been WFH since I arrived here 3 months ago (and did a number of WFH stints previously), so I'm pretty well accustomed to it. For a lot of people, there's the risk of overindulging on food and alcohol out of sheer boredom - I'm fairly happy I haven't fallen into that trap yet!
oh yeah. business doubled. being a delivery-only business paid off big time. we were gonna expand out of delivery but I'm glad we didn't yet.
“Expand out of” and into what? Brick & mortar?
It’s interesting to see how some businesses are getting amazing opportunities to scale! Out of something so earthshaking, some good can come of it.
What type of business do you have?
It’s attached to my profile. :)
on-demand warm cookie delivery.
Yeah, I've definitely been affected:
We've pivoted Tutorbook from being a peer-to-peer platform to being an entirely volunteer tutoring platform to address the new demand for one-on-one support for students (who no longer have face-to-face attention from teachers).
As crazy as things have been, it’s heartening to see people like yourself that have stepped up to the plate to help!
My product I was building for 1 1/2 years was in the restaurant industry... Was going to sign with an investor on March 21st, and he backed out that day. We had to build a whole new product in the last 29 days or from ideation to launch: https://addspotlight.com?spotlight=5e9e276e7375de00175c5958
What were you building for restaurants?
Props to you for the quick pivot! Making lemonade out of lemons for sure. 🍋
Hey thanks so much. Doing our best, but the effects are definitely felt!
I’m sure the effects can be unsettling, but I feel like having the ability to quickly adjust to the needs of the market and your users is the key to success, and it seems that you’re actively flexing that muscle!
Full time job wise its going smoothly, we're in quite a lucky position where we still getting lots of work in and we're able to work remotely. Side project wise I feel like I have less time somehow. I think its because I haven't got the work/home divide anymore so I'm sitting at the PC all day doing full time job work, and then once I've finished, I don't want to stay sitting in the same chair staring at the same PC for another few hours working on my own stuff, where when I had a work/home divide in the day that didn't bother me.
I totally feel this! The line between work time & personal time seems to have gotten fuzzy for many.
I'm excited to see what responses come in and see if we can help!
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