Week 44 - shipped a free collection of user-testing tools, joined a live framer discussion and more!

My strategy and progress

Build a newsletter community of UX-driven makers
by writing educational UX content

Help companies w/ hands-on UX services
by working <= 25h per week and 4000€ of minimum revenue

Make user testing accessible to small teams
by building a simple affordable micro-SaaS

What's new

UX newsletter community (650 members so far)

@AddisonSchultz from framer.com invited me to discuss live with their Discord community!

We talked about:

• How I switched from UI developer to product designer
• My learnings as the ex-design lead of TicketSwap, a marketplace with 5+ million users

I interviewed @mikebeikos the Head of User Research at Skroutz

Skroutz.gr is the #1 shopping web-page in Greece, where I come from, with 34m sessions per month.

Mike shared how they design and test their product and adopt a user-centric culture in the team.

New post coming soon on this!

I shipped a free collection of 20+ user testing tools

It took me months of research to create this list. It's super hard to find and compare all the good user testing tools online, so I did it for you!

Check it out: https://jimzarkadas.com/collection-of-user-testing-tools

On Saturday we had our kick-off session at #ship30for30

Ship30for30 is a community of online writers that helps you build an online writing habit in 30 days by shipping 1 essay per day.

@dickiebush presented us the core principles and mindset we should follow and we got split into small groups, where we got to know each other and discussed about our writing goals.

Next week we will start writing and ship our first essays!

UX freelancing (€5300 MRR - 15h per week)

I created a mood-board with examples I can draw inspiration from and started designing the information architecture for the iOS app of Restocks.net.

Information architecture and navigation are so important for the UX, and yet so many apps get them wrong.

I pitched the same offer as Restocks to a new potential client that @AlexAlexakis introduced me to, two weeks ago.

As a freelancer I've decided to follow a transparent, fair, and public pricing model and I do not adjust my prices per client.

More details on my pricing model: https://jimzarkadas.com/ux-design-services/hands-on-design

For some reason after our call, I was skeptical about how I spend my time throughout the week.

My dream is to be 50% teacher and 50% practitioner.

To build products half of the week and to share what I learned the rest of it.

The thing with freelancing is that it's easy to say yes to new clients. Making more money always feels nice. But money is not my goal. It's just my tool.

That's why I took a step back and decided to open my calendar, the foundation of my daily-work system as an indie maker. I revamped it and created slots for every project I am working on, and now, I can see how much time I can invest in every project.

Here is how it looks at this moment:

• pink is for creating content
• orange is for freelancing
• purple is for my SaaS (thinkoutloud.io)
• grey is for personal stuff

Thinkoutloud.io (my micro-SaaS - MVP in progress)

We realized with @kanga_bru that Safari is hard to support when it comes to native screen recording. Therefore we decided to drop its support for our MVP and stick to Chrome and Firefox for now.

That's the beauty of launching with a private beta. You can focus only on the essentials!

That's all for last week 😀

Life is exciting and creative. Every week I learn so many new things and I feel more hyped than ever.

Even if some weeks are tough as hell!

I feel grateful for having the chance to chase my dreams and to be free to live my life in my own terms.

Finally, here is a photo of me with a gift I received last week from the skatepark team of Utrecht where I volunteer to! They made a custom skateboard edition for the volunteers as a thank you for our support ❤️

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If you are new to my journey, on June 2020 I quit my job with a year of savings (32.000€) to chase my dream of becoming a full-time IndieHacker. I had no specific plans or project ideas to work on. Only a goal, some savings and my skills. Since then I share every week what happens behind the scenes.

Feel free to join me on my journey, and to check all the updates I 've published so far!