"Just make $1": The mantra that got us from spitballing to executing in <24 hours

We're Ryan and Charles, two good friends from high school who are both mid-career software engineers taking sabbatical to work on personal projects and dive into the world of indie hacking.

This (HingeReviews.com) is our first project working together that was bootstrapped in <24 hours. We started working on this project Jan 3. 2024, a day after we met up for coffee to catch up over the new year. At this point in time we had independently tried running our own projects but both felt it was difficult to keep momentum going. As a result none of our self-run projects really took off. Neither of us made any revenue from our prior engagements. Eager for some wins under our belt, we decided that day over coffee that we should team up together to accomplish a simple target: "Make $1 off the internet".

That was it.

As trivial as it seems, once we said it aloud, we realized that this was actually quite a difficult task. To do it - we'd have to set up an online presence, figure out how to write copy, set up payments, drive traffic, and of course, get someone to pay us that $1. These things were all super novel to us and things we had previously dismissed as being "easy" prior when we were both working on our solo projects: "Pfft, Building systems and complex pieces of software were hard." Luckily we both came to the same realization that the skills required to make a simple $1 were both skills we lacked and skills we wanted to hone.

Thus, HingeReviews.com was born. An anonymous review site for dating profiles. This was a great idea because it could be run as a services business and the anonymous nature of it meant we could bootstrap it with ourselves as the reviewers on day 1. We quickly ideated on several things ideas in the same vein and ultimately landed on this one. What we wanted was to build a dead-simple product (which just required a landing page) to see if we could market it out and make us that coveted $1.

The goal of making just $1 was such a motivator and got us fired up in an incredibly productive way: That night we bought the domain and generated a starter website template using v0. The next day, we set up an intake form and added some snazzier copy and boom. Our site was ready. We opted for a build-as-you-need it approach, choosing not to build out functions or systems until we really needed them. For ex, while we wanted to, we decided we didn't need a whole review portal system day 1 where users could log in to see and manage their feedback -- instead, we thought: email can do (for now).

At time of writing it's been 1 month since we've birthed our product into the world. (Spoiler alert, we did end up making that $1! In fact we're at just over $50 monthly revenue in our first month of operation). Follow us to continue learning more about our journey as we document our wins and failures.