How Andero Avastu Is Building A SaaS Business While Freelancing

Andero Avastu has been passionate about technology all his life. 

Now, after a few years working for a healthcare startup, he’s diving into the entrepreneurship deep end. 

I caught up with him to get the details. 👇

A Lifelong Passion

I've always loved technology, software development, and business because my dad had his own company, and I saw how it gave him so much freedom. 

So seven years ago, I started developing WordPress sites. Eventually, I began to get bigger jobs from clients, and those weren't quite suited for WordPress, so I found Bubble, which is a no-code app builder. It was from learning Bubble that I built my first project, a Bubble and Webflow component library. 

That did pretty well, so I built another project with one of my WordPress business partners: a booking site for nail and hair salons. Unfortunately, that didn’t go as well, so I decided to join a startup built on Bubble. 

Burn Out To New Opportunities

I love Bubble, but working on it every day got super repetitive. It’s just the same thing over and over again. So I burnt out, took some time off, and then got back into freelancing.

As I got back into freelancing, I discovered that many clients now want my time reports, and I was having a hard time finding a good tool to help me because I would often forget to start the timer.

That gave me the idea to build Taim, an automated time tracking app. 

Balancing Work And Indie Hacking

Managing my freelance schedule with my indie hacking schedule has definitely been challenging, but manageable. 

Right now I wake up around 8 and do freelance work for two or three hours. I’ll then take a break, do some work on Taim, and then continue to do freelance work until the evening. Then, if I still have some energy left, I’ll do some more work on Taim.

My goal is to work on Taim at least two or three hours every day. And if it’s able to get to $4,000 MRR, then I’ll be able to work on it full-time.

New Skills

One of my favorite things about working on Taim is that I’m constantly learning new stuff, which is something that I felt was missing from my full-time job.

So being able to learn Rust, design, product development, UX, and marketing has been amazing. Even learning some new tricks with tools has been great, like discovering that Llama is much better than GPT at Rust. 

A Big Early Win

I posted Taim to Hacker News not really expecting much, but then like two or three hours later as I was getting ready for bed, I looked at my analytics and saw that there is 300 people at the same time on my website. So I was like what the hell is going on?

I pretty quickly figured out it was from Hacker News. I literally couldn’t answer the comments fast enough before more would immediately come in. 

At the end of the day, I got quite a bit of good feedback on the copy, the pricing, and the product, a couple of pre-orders, and 14,000 site visitors in 24 hours, by far the most I’ve ever gotten.

Lessons From The Past

When I was building my past projects, I always completely finished the product before even telling anybody about it. That was a huge mistake because you really need feedback from those early users.

So this time, I’m talking about Taim on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook just to get the momentum going and make sure that people actually want what I’m building. 

The ultimate goal is to build a community around myself that I can leverage for Taim and any other future products that I build.

Last Piece Of Advice

My advice to other indie hackers is to start small, focus on solving a real problem, validate your idea with potential users, learn from feedback, and, most importantly, stay passionate and persistent because building something meaningful takes time and dedication.