July / Final Retrospective

Hey y’all, so it’s been well over a year since I started posting these retrospective posts.

When I started out this experiment of running my side hustle “in the open”, I wanted to commit to at least a full year of monthly updates about my business, our mistakes, successes and how it was affecting my well-being as a husband, father and full-time software engineer.

Now that the year was up, it was time to reflect on things and evaluate whether or not I would be continuing these updates. I ask myself the usual questions like “how does this improve my life” and “if I stopped doing this tomorrow, how will I feel?”

Simply put, while I do think that writing and journaling is extremely important in both business and in life, I don’t find that posting these retrospectives to Indie Hackers to be very beneficial, outside of the benefits of simply journaling in private.

It’s been a fun experiment, but I think the negatives outweigh the positives in terms of being this open, at least at the scale that I’m at with my business.

The thing is, I never came to Indie Hackers to try to sell anybody anything. I wanted to share my journey, hopefully help others and potentially make some new friends and even learn a thing or two along the way.

I’ve made some new local friends, so that’s been good, but as a whole, I feel like the community mostly exists in an echo chamber of trying to get other IHers to validate their ideas, or in terms of actually trying to sell directly to the community members.

I think it’s great that people have hustle, but when the bulk of the feedback you get on your posts are unsolicited emails trying to sell you something, with a small bit of smoke blown based on your own revenue numbers, it’s quite the turn off.

My journey’s not ending anytime soon, and I plan to continue to write about my business more on my own personal blog, but I think I’m done hustling in the open, at least for right now.

As always, happy holidays and hacking!