Sunsetting two businesses, exiting another, and joining a 5-figure-MRR business as cofounder

Igor Debatur, was running three successful businesses, but realized his attention was too fragmented. So he cut back and focused on Uploadcare.

This led to huge growth and an exit in 2024. Now, he's working on Outmap, which is bringing in a 5-figure MRR.

Here's Igor on how he did it. 👇

Writing code in the early days

I started as a full-stack developer back in 2003. The first piece of software that I was able to develop and sell was an automation for a character in Ultima Online. Walking around in stealth mode, looting treasure chests, waking me up if a Game Master is present. I also built a content management platform back in 2004. It powered a dozen websites.

Back then, developing products for the web was quite easy. Write some dirty PHP code, upload via FTP, and you're as good as everyone else. And I always loved the quick turnover: You develop something and people can use it right away. The feedback loop is very quick, and that always ignited my passion to build products. I love seeing how people use them.

Then, I cofounded a web development agency, Whitescape. We did a lot of outsourced engineering for startups and major brands. Launched more than 100 different products with a team of 20. It was cash positive from the start and eventually reached $100k/mo, but it never generated any notable profit. So we brought in other people to run the company and re-focused on Uploadcare, the content management and delivery platform we were building for ourselves.

Uploadcare has grown from a small team of 3 to a team of 34, with customers including Zapier, PandaDoc, Sequoia, Soundcloud, and thousands of other companies. We had multi-millions in ARR.

Uploadcare was acquired by Tiugo Technologies in 2024. The exit took longer than I wanted it to, but then again, not many founders are able to exit within two or three years. In many cases, it's five or seven or nine years — or even more.

Tiugo Technologies has proven to be a great partner. I learned a ton working with them 1.5 years past acquisition. Unlike many stories where companies are being squeezed or dissolved after PE acquisitions, ours was a happy story – the team and Uploadcare's DNA stayed intact, just becoming a part of a larger structure with more access to resources and major partnerships.

Too many businesses

In parallel with Uploadcare, my cofounder and I launched the RIDERS app. The RIDERS app helped hundreds of thousands of people to improve their skills and learn tricks in skiing, surfing, BMX, skateboarding, mountain biking, and many other disciplines. RIDERS became a huge community. We worked with all the big extreme sport brands. People were wearing our t-shirts and you could find our stickers all over ski resorts and skate parks. But we were always just below break-even.

But at some point, back in 2017, I realized that I was struggling to manage three companies at once. I couldn't focus and any success in one company led to a failure in another. So we let go of Whitescape. And then, unfortunately, we sunsetted RIDERS.

Uploadcare was getting significant traction and we knew that we had to choose one company. Having just one focus helped: Uploadcare continued to grow rapidly until it was acquired.

My passion for working with the outdoor and extreme-sports audience never went anywhere. I loved building RIDERS and was looking for something in a similar area. So, at the beginning of 2025, I started advising Outmap, an app that helps people to plan and navigate in backcountry terrain. In September, I joined Outmap as a CEO and cofounder.

There's a difference between a one-man shop and a business. My goal is to make Outmap a business, finding what's missing and finding ways to fill these gaps effectively and quickly, being very lean. We are very conscious about not bringing in venture funding; we invest our own money and expertise, working with tens of partners and volunteers who are interested in the same – building the best app to find and plan routes, to navigate in the backcountry, and to come home safe after having fun.

I see the huge opportunity that excites me, and many layers of complexity that will be interesting to tackle.

Building the initial products

As far as building them, Uploadcare was developed by our agency. We scratched our own itch and built something that we wanted to use. It took $30k of our own money and about a year of work before the alpha version. Then, we took angel investment and a full-on venture story until the acquisition.

RIDERS scratched my personal itch. I was struggling to learn several mountain biking tricks — very basic stuff like higher bunny hops. My cofounder and I collaborated with a few athletes and a cameraman to produce 15 videos. We instantly noticed that those videos generated a huge amount of views and positive feedback, so we tripled down.

And with Outmap, I joined when the product already existed. It was created by a solo developer, Felix Gourdeau, in Montreal. He has been working on it since 2021. When I joined, Outmap already generated 5 digits in MRR, and my goal is to scale it many times.

Brain puzzles and indie hacking

It's easy to start building a navigation app in 2025, which explains why there are so many of them. But why is there no clear winner, except FATMAP, which was killed by Strava? Making a successful app to guide people outdoors is tricky; it consists of many parts. Like how you work with elevation layers, how you generate contour lines, how you get and enrich data, how to work with user-generated content, how to work with sponsors and partners, where you get satellite imagery, how to make proper UX, how to work with separate platforms at once, how to drive adoption, and more.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Last week's challenge was, "How to communicate with 150 people as one person". We underestimated the number of people willing to join our partnership program, and since I'm the main business development guy, I had to quickly figure out all the tools and workflows. Luckily, having an engineering background, it was easy enough to set up a combination of Tally+n8n+Gmail+Notion+Spreadsheets+RevenueCat.

We tackle challenges like this pretty much every day.

One of my favorite gaming genres is tactical strategies, like XCOM2, and brain puzzles like Baba is You. But I stopped playing them — I have enough tactical puzzles with Outmap, and frankly, I enjoy them more.

Outmap's tech stack

Outmap is freemium with monthly and annual subscriptions to use advanced features like the offline mode.

Here's our stack:

• Next and React Native on the frontend

• Supabase and Firebase on the backend

• Amplitude to track numbers

• Mapbox with a significant amount of "secret sauce"

React Native nowadays is a lifesaver, enabling us to build one app for iPhones, iPads, and Android phones. And Supabase is much more cost-effective than Firebase. We love it.

Word-of-mouth growth

Outmap has grown significantly in 2024-25, even before I joined: 5-digit user base, thousands of paying users. It was a good start!

Uploadcare solved a major pain for developers. We were eating our own dogfood and investing time (maybe too much time!) in creating the best-of-the-best solution. That led to a very notable amount of word-of-mouth — mostly via mentions in developer communities. So Uploadcare's growth was mostly organic for more than 5 years. After that, we experimented with paid ads and other channels.

Outmap started the same way — the product is solid and users love it. That's why I joined. My friends and I started using Outmap and it helped us to navigate in Japan, then Canada. The goal is to keep our organic growth but get to scalable channels much sooner.

And we have to do that while keeping a positive ROI because we don't have investor money to burn. We're very lean and mindful. Having limitations adds discipline, but also helps us to be much more creative.

Ego and focus

Two challenges have come up for me time and time again. Lucking both are in the past now. They are focus and ego.

Lacking focus led me to lead three companies at once and I've already mentioned how that went down. It was doable, but all of them were growing very slowly, and I felt miserable.

As far as ego, I wanted everything to be perfect: design, UX, workflows, and processes. The best-of-the-best tools, and so on. Now, I care about delivering value, being focused on one thing, and then another. I was able to let go of everything less important. I became ready to cut losses and agree that I made mistakes.

More results, less stress.

And everyone else in the Outmap team is the same. No large egos, we do what we must because we can.

Two books every indie hackers should read

Two books in particular have been a huge advantage for me. They're short, but multi-layered. If you follow their guidance, you won't be able to not build and ship a product.

The first is Disciplined Entrepreneurship. A step-by-step guide on how to build a startup, based on statistically proven methods, written by a person who guides tens of startup teams each year, leading them to build meaningful businesses.

The second is The Great CEO Within. A handbook for existing and future CEOs.

And as an honorable mention: The Hard Thing About Hard Things

If someone is able to blindly follow just the guidance from these two books and avoid mistakes mentioned there, I'd invest in them without much hesitation.

But, unfortunately, some mistakes just have to be made to learn from them, even if they've been explained in detail in historic and philosophical literature, and then summarized in business books.

What's your advice for indie hackers who are just starting out?

Choose an area you care about — where people you care about struggle with something you know how to solve.

Talk to them. Run 20 customer development interviews.

Then, find others who care about this particular area as much as you do, or more. Bring them on board: It won't be hard.

Make sure the people you bring on board are founder material: A rare kind of person who is ready to overcome struggles, seeing the big picture and a major goal ahead. Don't bring mercenaries, bring missionaries.

Worst case scenario, you'll spend time building something you love with like-minded people. And if you're persistent enough, you'll get where you want to be, no matter what.

What's next?

My goal is to make Outmap the default app for planning and navigating in the backcountry.

You can follow along on Instagram, LinkedIn, and my personal website. And check out Outmap!