Who here quit their day job to pursue indie hacking?
I'm planning on doing just that, and it's scary. If you've done this, how did you end up doing it and what was the "breaking point" for you to make the decision?
I re-listened to the Indie Hackers podcast episode with Jon Yongfook and I am in a similar place that he was. He'd been working a corporate job and realized he was reaching the sort of pinnacle of what he could accomplish there, unless he went into management doing more things he wasn't interested in or good at.
As a dev in a big company, I don't really have a say in product direction. I can offer feedback, but ultimately other people figure out product, talk to customers, and plan the year ahead. I just build what they tell me. That is sort of the breaking point for me. I love getting involved in figuring out what to build, how to build it. How about you?
I was in the exact same place. I started by working 4 days instead of 5 so I could safely figure out what products to build. Started to get a bit of income from this, around USD 750 a month.
After two years I quit* and started freelancing to save money to finance web application development. Saved up some money by doing two half year consulting projects (4 days a week). In the mean time kept learning and improving and pivoting products to find my place in the market.
I managed to get a small client on the side which I would do consulting work for one to two days a week. This created more space to work on my own products while still being able to support my family (2 young kids).
When Pintura (my main product) generated around 5K MRR I decided to go all in and let my final client go.
Now at 30K MRR.
*I recklessly (due to frustration with management) quit my fulltime job having just bought a house, zero savings in the bank, and our first child on the way while suffering from RSI. I managed to work things out. You can probably approach this in a more calculated manner and create a better starting position than I had 😅
Thanks for sharing!
Congratulations in getting to where you are. 30k MRR is fantastic. It sounds like it's been quite a journey, especially with a family to take care of.
Did you end up trying several projects before ending up with Pintura, or was this something you worked on from the very beginning?
Thanks! It very much has been :D
I’ve literally build like 20 different products, some open source some commercial before finding out what worked. I think it took me 7 products before deciding to just scout the market and see what people were buying instead of shooting in the dark.
Pintura went from 0 to 5K MRR in a year.
Would love to quit my job in medicine but still paying off loans and fearing I may get trapped by the golden handcuffs, trading time for money.
Hoping as we can get our MRR up to gradually justify decreasing my shift load, as my group is pretty flexible with part time work.