Week 40 | A 2min behind the scenes update

I am on a mission to empower fellow makers build products their users will love.

Here is what happened the last week behind the scenes.

⚡️ The Human Centred Maker (my UX community)

123 new makers joined my newsletter community to improve their UX skills!

I launched my newsletter two weeks ago and we are already 437 founders in total! This is mind blowing for me. It's the first time I experience this kind of growth.

This is the fist article I shared and the amount of engagement it got, makes me very happy!

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-prototype-and-user-test-ideas-in-hours-not-weeks-24fb4d8a10

👨‍💻 Think Out Loud (my SaaS)

We finished with Scott (my co-founder) the v1 of our MVP for thinkoutloud.io and aim to launch our private beta in Q2.

I am super proud with the quality we've achieved so far and can't wait to give access to others to use it!

🧠 UX coaching (freelancing)

A new potential client reached out. They are a pretty successful sneakers marketplace.

Our call was really good and we share the same values. We both believe in growing by talking to users and not using growth hacks.

Let's hope it will work out!

This call happened on Friday.

Two days before that, I was searching for people to reach out to for my UX services. I was stressed. I need to increase my revenue by the end of May and I am not used to cold-sales.

I sent two emails but didn't get any reply back.

This potential client found me on their own through LinkedIn. What can I say, life is random 🤷‍♂️

In the meantime I did a coaching session with my existing client and helped them to come up with a user flow and general specs for their MVP.

Next week we'll start prototyping!

Other news

I received a letter to pay $5200 of VAT tax and it scared the hell out of me. since I was waiting to get $500 back cause I didn't have much revenue the last quarter.

Turns out it was a mistake and I don't have to pay anything. This costed me of 1.5 days of stress + bad productivity.

That's life when you go indie, all kinds of things will happen and you have to adjust 😅

As almost every week it was full of ups and downs and I tried to focus on just getting 1% better.

That's all for this week!

For the ones who are new to my journey

I quit my job on June 2020 with 12 months of savings to become a full-time IndieHacker.

The last few months I started making a living combining products and services, using the small bets strategy of Daniel Vassallo.

Finally you can find here all the updates from the previous weeks https://jimzarkadas.com/behind-the-scenes