This is what happens when you regularly read Indie Hackers for a few years

You start a side project (in only 16 days)!

Hey everyone! My name is Ion-Alexandru and I’m the founder & techie behind Zen (https://yayzen.com), part of YCombinator S21. I’ve been following IndieHackers since 2019, when I graduated from University of St Andrews, in the UK - yes, that’s the university that princess Kate and prince William went to!

I’ve had the chance to read so many indie hacking stories, from people who took days or months to build a project, from people who are making $0 or hundreds of thousands of dollars and from people who start indie hacking out of passion or to achieve financial independence - all of those stories have always inspired me and pushed me to go harder.

Since we started hiring at Zen and my job is slowly shifting towards leading people, I’ve decided to not loose my engineering acumen (I still code at Zen!) and so, I’ve started a tiny side project. I’ve been playing with Stable Diffusion and DALL-E for a few months now and I’m honestly astounded by some of the creations that I’ve seen. It’s crazy to think that AI-powered software can do interior design, create digital art or create human avatars.

Having said all this, I’ve decided to spend the last 2 weekends on coding https://www.myaiavatar.net/ - an AI avatar generator (use code LAUNCH for 50% off). I’ve seen lots of people work on this recently, so I sort of challenged myself to turn my research from the last few months into a side project, in under 3 weeks.

I’m more than happy to connect with anyone who wants to talk more about this space, engineering or indie hacking in general. Here’s my social credentials:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/thesecara

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ion-alexandru-secara/

For anyone interested in how I managed to build the software in under 3 weeks, here’s my tech stack:

Landing Page: https://typedream.com/
Frontend: ReactJS
Backend: NodeJS (Express)
Payments: Stripe Checkout (No Code)

This is my first indie hacking project so I’m super excited to have shared this with you all! I don’t think this project will generate any significant amounts of money, but I do believe it makes a good introduction to the community, after years of being a passive member.