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My first year as an Indie hacker - built 6 products while working full-time!

I had big plans for 2019. Massive ones.

Back then, I had an extensive list of app ideas I wanted to test but never really started taking action and actually doing the work.

The biggest blocker was my coding skills. So at the end of 2018, I decided to finally take serious action and (1) learn to code, (2) build products.

In this post, I'm sharing some insights from my first year, including some wins and fails: https://blog.iamtamas.com/first-year-indie-hacker

Onward to 2020!

  1. 1

    Interesting and congrats !
    I think things like "foodsdogscaneat" have the potential to cover a looooot of long tail keywords and thus have decent traffic. Have you tried that ?
    If you can find a way to rank for KWs such as "can my puddle eat oranges", could be interesting to expriment the potential traffic.
    dofollowlinkchecker could be interesting in a chrome extension format.
    cheers

    edit:
    for sadfornoreason, not sure if you have some traffic and if worth spending more energy on it. However, I would be curious to see the dropout rate and if having a progress bar would help improve it.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the comment!:)

      Yeah, I've added a lot of long-tail KWs, If you scroll down you will see a 2000+ word long post that incorporates a bunch of keywords ppl are searching for.

      Dofollow checker: definitely a Chrome extension would be much useful. I think adding a bulk check would make this app much useful.

      I haven't started promoting the SadforNoReason app, I'm putting together the promotional materials, but I'm not planning to spend much energy on it.

  2. 1

    I thought you will write how did you start with coding, also I think this post is much more intersting: https://blog.iamtamas.com/tv-premiere-alert-a-tool-i-built-without-writing-code.html (even if is simple)

    1. 1

      Thanks! :) My coding career is pretty simple, I started an HTML, CSS Udemy course then finished a JavaScript course and started a NodeJS course after that. But the best way to learn to code is actually building something. So here is my recipe:

      1. Learn the very basics of the language
      2. Start building a very simple app (not a lame Hello world bot but something you're excited about)
  3. 1

    Where or how do you have all these project ideas ?

    Congrats, very inspiring. Let's smash 2020 !

    1. 2

      I have been collecting ideas for years. :D Stored in a spreadsheet.

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