Week 0: Pre-launch

Hi everyone, this is going to be my first weekly post (or going to try to do it weekly) of my Indie hackers adventure. Every week I'll hold myself accountable and tell you what I've done, struggles I've encountered, and what I'm going to focus on next.

I've never been a social media person, but this platform provides so much learning and insights, I wanted to share some of mine too.

So let's kick off:

Week: 0

🙋‍♂️ Customers: 0
👀 Active Trials: 0

Table:

1. Let's talk about who I am and how I got here first.
2. Starting my own business
3. Structuring my life for Indie Hacking
4. Why I chose my tech stack

Next week is my initial soft launch week. So for now, I won't share too much about what I'm building, but if you work in the mobile app space, this one might be for you.

1. Let's talk about who I am and how I got here first.

So I'm Nick Smet, 30 years old, from Antwerp, Belgium. As long as I can remember, I've been tinkering with tech. I have a vivid memory of having stripped two computers apart, having it laid out on my bed, trying to make one great one.

In school, I went on to study computer sciences and graduated from University with the same degree.

Starting my career as a developer, I was trained as a backend developer, using Laravel/PHP (which finally seems to be cool 😎). Over the years, I started picking up more and more tech stacks, going full-stack, but with a real love for mobile development. That was going to be my focus, the combination of having something physical in your hands and having software interact with it just became a passion.

But something started to happen; I felt I was limited in what I could do in my current job. I wanted more, to learn more, try more, discover. So the decision to start freelancing was made.

Over the years, I worked at 5 startups, which was a rollercoaster of emotions, sometimes bad, sometimes good. But I loved it; it's the thrill of the chase for greatness, I guess.

2. Starting my own business

Working in startups, you do experience a lot of downs, which unfortunately don't always come with ups. None of the startups were able to make it big, which is the risk of the game. Every time the decision was made that the company was going to shut down or scale down, it felt rough; you have more emotional investment than you realize.

But doing that work in startups, a seed started growing, the entrepreneur seed. For as long as I can remember, I've been noting down ideas, I even had a giant whiteboard in my home office for a long time. My cabinet contains notebooks full of ideas, some bad, some creative, some perhaps good.

When my last startup fell through, I felt this was my chance to try bootstrapping my own company and try to grow something I could be proud of.

3. Structuring my life for Indie Hacking

An Indie Hacker's biggest struggle is money, the same applies to me. Life's expensive here, and doing this full-time just wouldn't be viable.

The last few weeks I've decided to work on my MVP, but then I need to get back into freelancing.

So I'm aiming to do 3 days a week freelancing/contracting, and 2 days (+ whatever time I have left) for my Indie Hacking. The goal is to spend 1-1.5h/day before my freelancing office hours, and some time I have after the freelancing day has ended. This should give me a minimum of around 20h/week.

PS 😇: I'm looking for some part-time opportunities, you can find my LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-smet-646b1a70/

4. Why I chose my tech stack

Requirements:

• It should be free, or as cheap as possible.
• If it doesn't save me time, I'm not using it.
• I should already be able to use it, or it should be easy to learn.

Pre-launch I can talk a bit about my tech stack. My product consists of a Mobile SDK, Web Platform, API.

My Mobile SDK is written in TypeScript/JS, aimed at React Native:

This allows me to target a wide range of companies and saves me a lot of time/money not having to develop SDKs for iOS and Android from the start. Later on, I will create Android and iOS SDKs and build wrappers around them for React Native and Flutter.

My Web Platform:

Next.js, along with TypeScript and Vercel for development. Having worked with React for a long time, Next.js was a logical choice, even the recommended one from the React team.

Working with Next.js, Vercel is the way to go for development. It offers a generous free plan and is super easy to set up. It's coupled to GitHub, and auto-deployment saves a ton of time.

API:

Here Laravel was my choice of framework. Out of the box, it comes with a ton of features, it allows you to set up a secure API with authentication, middleware, CORS in a matter of hours.

Deploying it, I chose Vapor by the Laravel team. It's serverless, super scalable, and runs on AWS Lambda.

I realize the costs might start running high if the app scales, so will need to monitor this.

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This turned out to be a bit of a longer post than I anticipated, but I hope it was informative. I'll try to keep future updates shorter 😇

Until next week!