The Kitze Interview: Founding Glink, Sizzy, and other SaaS tools

Indie Hacker: Kitze
Founded: Sizzy, React Academy
Sphere of Genius: Stamina

Kitze is a seriel entrepreneur and founder of Sizzy, React Academy, as well as several other profitable tools such as Twizzle, JSUI, Fungarzione, OK Google, and Lucky Retweet.

Below is my interview with him discussing his indie hacking journey, starting various SaaS tools, and his mistakes along the way.

Where are you from?

Kitze: Macedonia, it's in the Balkan region. That's where I grew up and where I spend most of my life. As a teenager, I was super interested in tech. But honestly, it's not the best place to be in if you're interested in tech. In the capital, there were technology companies being started. But usually in smaller cities, there are not a lot of things going on.

When did you get interested in technology?

Kitze: I was always interested in technology overall. Not programming necessarily, but ever since I got my hands on a computer I wanted to tweak it and customize it.

In every single stage of my life, whatever I touched, whether it was a forum or a blog or whatever, it had to be customized and automated.

But my first love with programming and stuff was in high school. We made a quiz app and everyone was groaning like, "Oh, we don't want to do this." And my eyes were just like, "I want to do this until the end of my life." Ever since then, I was just obsessed with programming.

Which languages did you concentrate on first?

Kitze: I was messing with PHP and WordPress, but I didn't consider it programming per se. I was just considering scripting and tweaking it. But later on in my life I attended an IT university.

In the first three months they taught us C and C++ and those basic languages. And while everyone else continued to dive into more algorithms I was more focused on building things.

Of course, my grades started going down and I started getting less and less interested in specializing more. It was during this time I made a website for memes.

It managed to be a top 5 website in Macedonia. Below me, there were websites who actually had content writers behind them. Meanwhile I'm just this clueless kid who made this website and suddenly I'm like, "What do I do?" I had 70,000 organic fans on Facebook with zero marketing. So, eventually it died down, and that was the end of that.

How did you react to the site’s demise?

Kitze: I bounced back pretty hard. There was startup weekend where students could submit projects for a contest and my roommates and I won first place.

Basically they gave us offices, funding, everything that we would need to actually make this startup a reality. But we weren't startup people and we cared more about styling the buttons and animating the forms.

When the investors started coming up with questions, "How are you going to do this? How are you going to do that?" All of us were like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Just let me do CSS and HTML. I don't want to do any of this." That also died down because nothing happened with it.

The idea was pretty basic, but in Macedonia back then there were no food delivery apps at the time.

Where did you focus your energy and attention next after these 2 failed starts?

Kitze: After that failure of a project, I attended an Android apps academy. Basically, I was preparing for a lot of time to be a web developer at home. I was watching all the courses. I was doing all the stuff, but I wasn't applying it. I wasn't building something.

Until one day my dad was like, "Buddy, you cannot just keep chilling on the couch and watching courses. Eventually you have to do something." He just nudged me to find a job and basically I found my first job in the capital city. I went there and basically bullshitted through the interview.

Luckily the interviewer gave me a chance and once I was hired, I outperformed everyone in the company. I learned everything. When I started working for them, one of the first issues that they had was that everything had to be perfect for responsive design. They just keep repeating that. It needs to be perfect. It needs to be perfect for responsive design.

After resizing my browser for the billionth time, I was like, "Why hasn't someone invented a browser for a responsive design?" That's where the idea for Sizzy came. I just asked people, "Hey, would anyone be interested in a browser where you can check multiple devices at once, instead of resizing your browser all the time?" People said yeah, and I started building it. This was 2017.

How do you typically come up with SaaS ideas?

Kitze: Everything that I've worked on so far comes from my own frustration and my own issues. I've never been money oriented, or followers oriented, or success oriented. If I have a problem at that particular point in my life, I just make a fork in my life and I go deep and I solve that problem.

I don't care if it becomes a business or a painting or whatever, I just go and solve it. Sizzy was one of those forks, where I was like, "I'm not going to keep on building websites until I build a browser where I can build those websites."
The story is, I created it in one day. I get momentum. I get hype. People are excited. Then as soon as I get hype, as soon as I get momentum, the thing dies down.

That’s rough, so did you consider taking a break or just pushing forward?

Kitze: It was tough.I got a couple of offers from Facebook to work for them. I just rejected everything and I just decided to go on my own. At the time, a friend invited me to a conference.

A couple of days before the workshop, I built an app and to this day I'm using it, it's called Labs, for teaching people about React. After we did the first workshop, I got hooked to the teaching experience, because I'm a person who wants to share, to talk and to teach. I was like, "I should drop working for this startup and just start my own academy and start teaching." I literally quit with no safety net. I didn't have a lot of savings. I didn't have anything. I just told them, "Hey guys, I quit."

And for one month I was going to the university library every day, building React Academy, my academy for teaching. I was building the landing page. I was making a plan. What am I going to do? Day in, day out, this was the only idea in my head. Soon, this guy who had never led a workshop in his life was going to teach workshops throughout Europe.

I DMed a couple of companies about my academy, and only one or two said yes. That started a snowball effect and companies started requesting me and conferences started requesting me. I'm still doing conferences and workshops. But it's not my main thing that I do. It's just part of my business is doing conferences and workshops.

What are your general thoughts on React as a language?

Kitze: Still at its core, you're just running JavaScript functions and that's what I'm trying to do in my basics workshop, disassemble React completely. I'm telling whoever's attending the workshop, this is just JavaScript functions calling other JavaScript functions. You just need to know JavaScript in order to be an expert in React. For React, if you already know a lot of JavaScript, you'll benefit from all of it. I think for beginners it would be even easier than the other frameworks.

At this point you had already some success, what inspired you to keep building?

Kitze: While we were writing the change logs for Sizzy, my tool crashed on me and it lost my draft. So I said to myself, "Okay, I'm going to stop everything I'm doing. I'm going to start building this." And now it's called Glink.

It had other names in the past. I stopped everything and for months while I was building Glink. The main idea behind Glink, it is essentially the safest way to write change logs with a team. Instead of one team member writing everything, team members can write different parts of the change log. At the end of the day, we can combine and release the change log.

What are your thoughts heading into 2022?

Kitze: Improving Sizzy. I realized along the way as being an Indie Hacker, being a solopreneur, that I need more people. That would be the number one thing that I'm trying to change, but it's just such a massive and drastic change that I can barely go through it.

At some point I just want to drop everything and do everything myself, but I know that I can't. This year I hired someone who's a technical writer to document all of my products, because I was getting burned out working on them and to write help centers for them and to document them. The one lesson that I'm learning is I need to delegate way more.

I need to trust people more with processes. I don't trust anyone. I delegate a process and I keep with half an eye, I'm looking like, "Are they doing it the way that I would do it?" When you work alone, you think the grass is greener. When I work with people, I'm like, "Oh my God, I envy people who just work by themselves and they don't have to deal with it."