Where are you in your journey? What do you wish you had known beforehand?

I'm working on Indie Hackers, this website you're currently reading. I started it in July 2016, and I sold it to Stripe in April 2017, where I continue to work on it. Today IH is arguably the largest active community of startup founders online.

One thing I've learned is the importance of perseverance and patience. When I started my journey, everything felt like a rush. Especially when I haven't hit "product-market fit" yet with various things I'm doing, I've sometimes thrashed around a lot, trying different things, and not thinking that I had any time. But I had plenty of time. The past 5 years flew by in what felt like an instant. The parts of IH that have done the best are the ones I stuck with, patiently learning and iterating for years. The parts where I thrashed around looking for quick wins didn't do well, because I didn't give myself enough time to succeed. Going forward, I hope to have the patience to tackle problems in years, not weeks or months.

I'm working on my freelance writing/ghostwriting + Product consulting career and building an agency. My current gigs make me just enough money to pay my bills. I started this career in August 2021 when I quit my full-time corporate job.

Plus I write a newsletter for the Indie Hackers community where I profile one successful bootstrapped business every week. It's a way for me to learn indie hacking by trying to teach it to someone else. (still figuring out how to monetize this, any inputs would be appreciated)

One thing I've learned is the value of having a presence online.

Founders talk a lot about "building an audience". As an introvert that sounds a bit overwhelming to me, so I reframed the concept for myself as "having a presence".

An online presence on platforms such as Twitter, Medium, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn plus an email list can be the biggest edge for bootstrapped founders.

The effort needed to build a presence is similar to the kind of money that VC-funded startups spend in advertising.

But its results are way better because the audience stays with you even after your startup has failed, unlike ads.

Fact is, whatever you're building, you will need eyeballs on it. And you can't afford to pour money into FB and Google ads.

I had a Twitter account for more than 10 years, but never understood the value of it.

I even spent a few thousand dollars in FB ads for my previous failed side hustles. And got nothing out of them.

6 months being active on Twitter this year and I was able to get enough clients that I could quit my job.

And now I am getting work that's going beyond my capacity. So I am starting to seek out interesting people on Twitter who I can hire to work with me - Baby steps towards an agency.

My tiny Twitter account is probably my most important asset right now.

Going forward, I hope to double down on Twitter but also have a presence on platforms such as LinkedIn and Instagram.

And ultimately funnel down people into my newsletters.

To hedge against platform risk.

As an Indie Hacker, the best thing you can do for your startup and all your subsequent startups is start having a presence online.

Hope this helps someone.

Cheers

1/ Marketing Examples. $2500 / mo. Hopefully that changes soon ;)

2/ Advice I wish I took (relating to charging money)

“If you want to be useful, you can always start now, with only 1% of your grand vision. It’ll be a humble prototype... but you’ll be in the game. You’ll be ahead of the rest, because you actually started , while others are waiting for the finish line to magically appear at the starting line.” — Derek Sivers

I'm working on a comprehensive and accessible Natural Language Processing course. It's about 60% complete and I intend to release it for free.

This is the first product I intend to ship after over a decade of "thinking about it", fake action (e.g. excessive reading), and self-delusion. I've learned a ton about the way I work, mental hurdles, and deep-rooted beliefs I hold. The amount I learned about myself was totally unexpected.

The lesson to learn is boundaries. If you don't have boundaries in your life, focus on why and start setting them. Chances are, mental cuffs were placed on you through long, subtle indoctrination and conditioning. Clear out the mental garbage.

It's already a slog, why make it harder on yourself?

I'm working on my consulting business right now. I've started a few things to limited success. I'm getting by with consulting, but I have yet to have a project be profitable or pay my bills, but I had one make like $7.50 before.

The one thing I wish started doing sooner was building a services business first (freelancing/consulting/contracting whatever). Based on my observations, most successful Indie hackers had services businesses beforehand. There are exceptions to this; there are always exceptions, but I really didn't understand how much of a 'gateway drug' consulting can be to entrepreneurship.

For example, I spent about a month and a half failing to close work and iterating on the positioning and negotiating in my sales script for my consulting gigs. As I was getting anxious and started considering a full time job, I closed my first 5 figure gig, and then another one, and so on. Now I'm confident in my abilities to do sales. A client even offered to sell me their business because they knew my goal was to have a bootstrapped, product-based business!

Plus, for the first time in my life, I have more time and flexibility to do whatever I want. During a gig this summer, I went home to spend much needed time with Friends and Family. It made me realize how not really remote some remote full-time jobs are since I would have had to ask permission to travel one timezone over or have side businesses.

I'm also beaming with business ideas now that I've been exposed to my own small business problems, and the interesting problems of my clients. It's so hard to break out

Finally, if you're having trouble starting or succeeding, my recommendation would be consider a services business before trying to make the jump to a bootstrapped SaaS or building your multi-million dollar info product empire.

After all, you have to walk before you can run.

Hello everyone.

I am currently working to create a content-based website that revolves around crypto coins. In-depth articles on any coin available in the crypto industry. I am just in the beginning stage and have written a handful of articles that can be read here - https://katochtubes.com/cryptocurrency

I wish I had known the real meaning of creating a vision and mission. These aren't big terms but if you're clear, the how becomes easy. Fortunately, after a long time, I am clear what I am after and why I want to achieve it. Wish me luck!

I'm working on my blog (https://remote101.blog), a blog about remote work and productivity. I started it a couple of years ago. Now that I am starting my own business (front-end freelancing, writing & building smaller companies), I aim to publish content regularly. Not actually for the money, but more for the absolute blast I am having while writing and, more importantly, the experience.

If I have to reflect on the past couple of years, it's essential to keep going and be consistent. Keep publishing, keep coding, and keep adding value. Too many times, I've gained a bit of traction with my blog and then watched it slowly dry out due to me not having/making time to produce content or add any value to my audience in any way. So my focus at the moment is to keep the content calendar filled, try to work ahead of schedule, and provide as much value as I can.

As many people on this platform already pointed out, it's not a sprint; it's a marathon.

TL;DR: I'm building a European travel app and the path of an Entrepreneur, Indie Hacker, Solo Maker is hard and lonely.

1. I am working on Eurotripr.com - a site to inspire others to travel to Europe. I'm interviewing travelers and sharing their advice and stories from their Eurotrips so others can learn from them and gain confidence to plan their own trips. I'm curating travel info on European destinations so travelers can decide what the best countries/cities/sights are to visit in Europe. I'm curating European travel itineraries so others can streamline the planning process and find the best itineraries for their trips. I'm building a custom itinerary planner, so travelers can create a custom Eurotrip itinerary for themselves.

I'm spending WAY to much time doing all this and not promoting a finished project to the world. I'm coding in a silo and not receiving valid feedback more regularly, so I am not 100% sure what I am focusing on is really what others will pay for. I'm not maintaining consistency day in and day out with coding and pushing things live. I'm not following through on my original plan and I keep jumping back and forth between unfinished features, or adding new unnecessary features, before I even have traffic to the site.

2. What I've learned is that is is vitally important to stick to a plan and maintain consistency while working that plan. Start with Primary Feature #1, build it, test it, launch it, promote it, analyze it. If there were positive users, move on to feature #2. Otherwise, I'll waste time building things before I know if their wanted, and waste time that could have been spent on something that people actually DO want.

Also, the longer I build something, the more invested I am and the less likely I will decide to pivot or scrap it because "it has to succeed!" now that I've dumped so much time into it. Especially since I left my job and am living off savings and spouse's income.

Also, don't expect to magically change your habits when you leave your job to focus on trying to build a valid startup. If you were piss poor at managing your time and juggling multiple tasks before, you are going to be just as piss poor. Get your habits under control before jumping ship. Who knows, you might even find you can carve out more structured time while working to focus on your project - without having to forgo sleep.

Also, create and stick to a routine EVERY DAY if you leave your job to focus on building your projects. Wake up early, exercise, shower, make breakfast, get the kids on the bus, review your plan for the day (you do HAVE a plan for the day right?), tweet/blog/stream/post about your current status on your project - promote your journey every day, spend several hours focused on completing today's feature, test yesterdays feature, launch yesterday's feature, stop working at the same time everyday, walk away from the computer, spend time with friends and family, plan tomorrow, read, go to sleep BEFORE midnight. HAVE A ROUTINE. Otherwise you are going to wake up at 10:30 6 months later and realize you've lost 6 months, and you no longer recognize yourself, nor have control of your day because you left too much shit undone.

Also, find people that are on the same journey as you and understand the ups and downs. Your family doesn't get it. Your friends don't get it. They wonder why you

1. don't have a job,
2. don't have and free time,
3. don't have anything constructive to talk with them about
4. why you need to 'play' on your computer all the time since you don't have a job

Having a community, or even one other Indie Hacker to share your experience with who gets it is priceless and a very underrated necessity on this journey. Find a friend and talk with them dailly, weekly, whenever you can to share all the fears, doubts, hopes, problems, mini-successes, and plans with. Because no matter how well-intentioned your non-founder friends and family are, they just don't get it. You need someone to talk to who does.

What I've learned is that this journey is hard and lonely and soul-crushing. It takes everything to keep moving forward when you don't even know if forward is the right direction. It takes confidence and unwavering hope to continue down this path not even knowing when (or if) success will come.

There will be a lot of bad days when you have less than zero motivation, when everyone around you is begging you to stop and go back to a 'normal' way of life, go back to your 9-5, give up your dream because your life is already wonderful.

There will be a lot of days when you doubt yourself, when your imposter syndrome hits all-time highs, and you really do wish you'd never left your job or knew what Indie Hacking was. You'll question whether you can see this through, if you are expert enough to make this thing and promote it to enough people to earn a living from it.

There will be days when you are so embarrassed with your current failure that you don't want to see anyone, you don't want to leave the house, you don't want your wife and kids to realize you're a loser, you want to disappear.

Then you'll read that one post or podcast on Indie Hackers, or see that one inspirational tweet, or re-watch Pieter Level's presentations on YouTube, and realize that EVERYONE who has the success you so badly crave at this moment, has been to this exact point in their own journey. You'll realize that everyone who's started something worthwhile has had these moments of doubt and insecurity, that they've all broken down exactly like you are right now.

And you'll see that each one of them persevered and kept moving forward, sometimes pivoting, sometimes entirely scrapping what they've poured their time, heart, and souls into, but they all moved forward long enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel. They stayed the course and in the end - regardless of how long it took to get to that end - they paved their own path to success on their terms.

This path requires patience, willpower, grit, and an unwavering belief that no matter what others say or do, I am the right person to be building this thing, and right now is the right time to be building it. No matter what doubts I have, I will be able to overcome them and achieve success on my own terms.

This shit is hard. My resolve to be successful at it must be harder.

Currently working on an MVP for a product that aims to provide business infrastructure for entrepreneurs (thevenlab.com). Here are the mistakes I've made (both on this product and other products in the past).

1. Building the first version of a product (MVP) is to validate the hypothesis. To validate your ideas. As many of you know, the idea of an MVP is to build only the core functions of the product. However, I mistook "core function" with 'easiest function". I built around the lowest hanging fruit, which wasn't the core function, so whereas there's a product out there, it isn't directly connected with the core offerings/functions. So even if it goes on to be successful, it doesn't tell me much about the receptivity of the idea in general. So now I have to rebuild the entire thing with the core functions.

To give more context, this is the equivalent of Uber building their MVP that only lets you see drivers on the app, but not book any rides. Booking rides is the core function. So, even if millions of people downloaded the app only to view drivers, it wouldn't matter, because the core function (book a ride) isn't included. That's the mistake I made. Building an app that allows users to only see drivers is the easiest thing, but not the core thing.

2. Another mistake I've made in the past is building an MVP without setting metrics to track. In the aforementioned Uber example, that would be like building the Uber MVP, but not building allowance for tracking how many people are requesting rides and booking rides.

I don't necessarily regret making these mistakes, as they've made me make wiser decisions going forward.

I'm writing a blog for developers for years now, focusing on timeless practices and tool. The aim is to go against the never ending trend in development: https://thevaluable.dev

From there, I've written a book I've published in February: https://themouseless.dev
I've sold 480+ of them, thanks to a good launch on HN and 20+ visitors per day, coming from my blog.

I love writing, so I'm writing another book right now: https://themouseless.dev/vim
It's not random, I've written a series of article about Vim people really liked.

I know I won't be able to live from my writing, but I'd love to. Let's see.

Other than that I'm working fulltime as a developer, but I try to specialize in complexity measurement. The goal is to be a consultant using data analytics and my expertise in legacy systems to get rid of complexity software.

Writing book teaches me a lot about formatting and other stuff about editing, I'm thinking about launching a product only for book writers. Not sure yet, exploring the idea / the space.

That's all for now :D

Right now, I'm working on a product called Ezfire. It is a tool that allows developers to run ad hoc queries on Firebase databases, using familiar APIs. The product is still quite new and I'm currently working to try and get my first (paying) users.

One thing I've learned in my journey is that it takes more than a good product with nice tech to make a successful business. Understanding your market and the needs of your users can make or break your business. My first attempt at building a business was a site for marketplace from trading video games called Replay Value. I understood what the buyers needed from a site, but failed to understand who the sellers were and what their needs in were and so I had difficulty growing the size of the marketplace. I wasn't offering them something they really needed. In all my future projects, I try to focus on really addressing a need that I understand.

Quit a very nice big tech co. to "run away and play with my friends". This is a small services business - I'll be 6 months in on Thursday, with a team of 6 as of this Monday, close to closing another hire. Initially funded out of savings, we are now cashflow positive, the business has repaid its director loans, and we have the luxury of a tiny but dedicated product team, who are working on a B2B SaaS offering to help other business folks work with the US government (we've done a technical POC and a little market research - over a trillion dollars of annual procurement!), it is MVP time now!).

I wish I had realised sooner how open various friends were to having a business relationship with me. I was just collaborating and having fun, but it was - hindsight! - also good business development.

I also wish I had realised just a little sooner how much hiring would REDUCE my work stress. It is a company, not a solo!

1. I'm days away from launching on HN - I still need to finish up on 2 more features + create a promo video for my app (and that's after more than 3 years of work)

A. It's fucking hard to get feedback on your app especially on a crowded market such as mine.

B. Creating Desktop apps using Microsoft API is the wild west now (to read: MS has no fucking idea what they're doing).

C. Finding reliable people to work with is close to impossible (unless you're willing to spend a fortune). In more than 3 years, I've found only 4 (still collaborating with 3).

D. It's ups and (a lot of) downs most of the time. I've come close to depression a few times (solution: get a dog; P.S. I have two 😁).

E. Be prepared for some excruciating feedback along the way -- some people simply have no moral compass whatsoever.

1. I'm working on Happyfeed a journaling app making a bit more than $1000/mo. It's a tough milestone to hit in b2c but I've been struggling with growth for the better part of this year.

2. Most important lesson: do the hard thing. I can almost guarantee that you know what this thing is. Maybe it's putting out content once a week, maybe it's building out a referral program, and maybe it's scheduling a few calls with your users. They aren't necessarily technically hard but you probably don't want to do them. Regardless, these things will actually move the business forward and spending 4 months redoing your photo uploading backend WILL NOT.

A way to justify this approach in your technical brain is to hypothesize the impact of every action: "Increase downloads from the website by 20/week and boost overall growth by X%" for example. If you write each one down, you'll have the added benefit of learning from each mistake and success.

Man, it blows my mind that IH has been around so long. I still remember finding it in 2017 and being blown away by how interesting it was. Founders sharing numbers on their businesses? Dayum! It was ahead of the curve.

1. Right now, I am working on a content site for a hobby of mine and a niche job board. Neither is making much money (The job board is only a few days old) but these are projects I can keep running for years if I want to since they don't require crazy input.

I also made a couple of games that I maintain with small updates, which typically generates ~$100 a month.

2. Nothing happens fast. To echo Courtland's post a bit, whenever I've chased fads / what other people have had success with, it doesn't work. It feels like flailing around, and I have to be careful how much time I spend on here or Twitter.

I guess I'm more impressionable than I'd like to admit, because I've worked on projects purely based on what I perceived to be a win based on potential income (that never happened once for me) - and when they didn't take off, I was discouraged and frustrated.

I'm trying to listen more to my inner compass these days and work on things I'm genuinely interested in. Otherwise, I don't stick to a project long enough to give it a chance. There's so much coming out these days and it's very hard to fight for attention online if you aren't sticking to what you actually give a shit about.

1. I'm working on a deep link management and testing tool for iOS Developers. (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/deeplinkr/id1586244217?mt=12) It helps developers easily document deep links and test against the iOS simulator.
2. I realized pretty early on that I suck at marketing and any money that I had spent on paid ads was never worth it. Even having a small Twitter following of ~700 has had such a huge impact on the success of the initial launch. I wish I had focused on Twitter more aggressively and much earlier.

👋 Hi everyone! I'm working on Outdone, an Ai-powered gift recommendation engine.🎁🤖(https://app.outdone.io) We launched the site at the beginning of last month. And to date, we've yet to generate revenue, but we are steadily adding new brand partners and improving our weekly new user metrics.

One thing we learned the hard way is the amount of lead time needed to build SEO. We had a master plan that once the product build was done, we could shift our focus to content creation, and within a month or two, we'd have hundreds of users from organic search. I know, I know — this is super naive! We just simply didn't know any better and were too heads-down on getting the product out to realize how wrong we were on that front.

I guess the lesson for that is twofold:

1. Build SEO with a 6-8 month lead time in mind. This is how long most experts agree it will take to see substantial progress.
2. Earned media and audience building (on sites like IH) are your best friends for generating early users. Like SEO, they're free and you'll see quicker results!

I'm working on TurboNav, an extension that levels up your browser by providing a command-line experience. The goal is to bring IDE-like features over to your browser. I just recently released an MVP that has two commands: /save and /schedule. So far, not making any money from it, still gotta build Pro features, but that's coming next. Along with getting users to install it.

I went full-time indie hacker a couple of months ago. It's definitely tough, and sometimes uncertainty creeps up. But overall I have support from my family so that's helped tremendously. Also building in public has been a big plus. I've been able to connect with other like-minded individuals that are in the same boat as me.

I don't think I have a lesson (yet) since I'm just starting out, but I'll share a struggle and discuss what I'm doing to resolve it.

I'm bad at describing my product. Every so often I'm changing it to "align" with the vision I have for it. I guess that's the purpose of iterating. But it always feels that my description is not clear.
I think a big problem is with being consistent. I started off with "A mission to help you achieve inbox zero for your browser". I believe this extension will be more than that though, but to achieve that I need time to develop the right features. So that's been my dilemma.

So in order to solve this problem, I'm working on finding the right wording that I can evolve as I approach the vision I have for my product. It's still WIP, but the idea is to clearly define the Why and the How and the Journey. This way it's clear to users what TurboNav will become. Maybe I'm thinking too far ahead so this could also be a slippery slope. But that's the plan.

I'll be sharing this progress on Twitter so follow along!

I found that sometimes your mind will tell you a fake story. I thought building a landing page to validate my ideas is challenging and time-consuming. I procrastinated for a week and started doing it on the 7th day. Then I finished it within 2 hours (https://www.ideaio.xyz/) - a decent but not perfect one. It is always hard to get started.
I need to get started before my mind finds any excuses kicking in. I hope this can help anyone who is facing a similar problem I used to face.

I'm working on music apps and games. Each month I do about $150 of sales. In October I sold 125 copies of different apps and games.

What I wish I had known earlier is that SEO is the way. Also, stick to fields I know and love.

I'm now trying to apply what I have learned working on single-pay apps, to a recurring revenue micro-SaaS called TweetFeast.

After a good career as a freelancer, CTO, and consultant, indie hacking is the most humbling thing I have done.