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12 Comments

Time needed to indie hack?

Hey everyone. First post here. Question for other indie hackers: how much time did you spend in early weeks on your project?

I work in management consulting and work ~60 hours per week. I want to start a project but only have 5-10 potential hours to work on it. Wondering if it's worth it to start now or wait until I have more time? Thanks all!

  1. 3

    You can do a lot with 5-10 hours per week. Start now

  2. 2

    Better to start now and see how it goes, no one here can tell you definitively what is better as we don't have all the variables. See if you can make progress with your limited time. Make sure you spend your best hours of the day on the side project.

    1. 2

      Appreciate the response! Like the idea of using my best hours on the side project, now just need to figure out how to do that lol.

  3. 1

    In the end it really depends on how much time you can commit to it and the idea you want to create. If you only have 5-10 hours then plan around that and have a clear goal before you even start so that you don't lose time browsing the web looking for inspiration and actually know the steps you should be doing on those blocks of time.

  4. 1

    I'd avoid mission-critical SaaS, i.e. anything where an outage of your product impacts whether your customers can make money. Infoproducts are a good place to start in general, but especially when your availability is so restricted. You could always take profits from a simpler first product and use them to hire help for a more ambitious second product.

    1. 1

      Good point. I have a couple ideas I'm fleshing out right now and hadn't thought of that, but definitely something to consider. Thanks Matt!

  5. 1

    Start now. The weekendfund by ryan hoover of producthunt is all about doing projects that could become big in free time. Just build something quickly and get it out there fast and iterate!

    1. 1

      Hadn't heard of the Weekend Fund, pretty cool concept. Thanks for the reply!

  6. 1

    5-10 hours a week is more than enough to get started. Spend that time working on your plan, and validate as you go. You'd honestly be surprised how much you can get done in that amount of time once you've started. Even if all you have time for in a given week is putting together a to-do list of things to get done, the next week you can start working on things that will take roughly the amount of time you have to dedicate, and once you start crossing things off the list, thats when things start moving. My biggest regret in all my years is constantly saying "i'll do it when i have more time"

    1. 1

      Yeah looking back at what I wrote "or do it when I have more time" is funny because at my current job I'll only have less time as I stay longer. Thanks for your thoughts Sean!

  7. 1

    Start now. Try to make a solid plan for how you'll spend those 5-10 hours a week and try to work when you have the best energy — whether that's before or after work so you can make the absolute most of them.

    1. 1

      I like the idea of picking my best hours for the side hustle, thanks Corinn!

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