MockRocket

After almost two years working as a software engineer on the growth team at HubSpot, I decided it was time to jump into Indie Hacking full time for a while.

It was a difficult decision to leave, compounded by the uncertainty of the ongoing pandemic. I liked the company and my team a lot, and there were plenty of opportunities to keep advancing in the engineering and management track. I was a front end engineer, but I had a persistent itch try my hand at all the creative aspects of launching early stage/indie products–design, marketing, and backend–an experience that's difficult to get at a large established company.

While working full time I launched a handful of small side projects on nights and weekends, including one paid product, AppointmentScanner.com, which helps people find Global Entry appointments. This project helped me prove to myself I could identify a problem, build a complete software solution and convince people (not friends or family) to pay for it. I managed to get 6 customers.....and then COVID shut down the travel industry ¯\(ツ)/¯ and my business disappeared. But it didn't matter. As soon as that first Stripe notification hit my phone, I was hooked. That $10 payment felt much more significant than any paycheck I had received to date. And when that first customer emailed me a feature request and told me he had recommended my product to all his coworkers–game over. I was an Indie Hacker now.

Although I've had entrepreneurial dreams for over a decade, I definitely never pictured myself leaving a full time job before my new business was bringing in reliable income. If you read accounts from successful Indie Hackers, you'll find plenty of advice on both sides of the "when to leave your job" debate:

• "Don't quit until you replace your income. SaaS has a slow ramp up."
• "Build up some savings and just go for it. Worst case you get another job and not having income can be motivating"

For me personally, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me to just jump in.

My thought process went something like this:

• I'm young (24) and have very few responsibilities at the moment so I can tolerate some risk. No house, family, kids or even pets to worry about. I'm even fortunate enough to be able to cling to my parent's health insurance plan for two more years (until 26 in the US).
• Even if I didn't leave my job to build this business, I would probably still end up leaving in the near future to move to an earlier stage startup, just for the experience of it. And if I'm going to change jobs anyways anyways, why not take some time off in between and try my hand at this? I have enough savings to last for a while without income
• Regardless of whether this business works out or not I'll learn a lot and probably end up a better engineer and entrepreneur
• Working full time on this project, I'll learn much quicker if it has potential than if I were trying to build this on nights and weekends over months and months

So I did it! May 15th was my last day at my job. It was bittersweet to leave, but my coworkers were incredibly supportive. I left on good terms and I'll be keeping in touch in case things change in the future and I want to jump back into a full time job.

As of writing this I've been building MockRocket for about 5 weeks, and nearing a big MVP milestone. More updates coming soon!

I was originally working on another project in the video creation space (YouTube intro maker) that involved automating After Effects templates.

It occurred to me that I've probably spent hundreds of hours over the years fiddling with After Effects to create promo videos for my projects. Creating nice looking app mockup videos is difficult and required a fair amount of specialized knowledge (read: hours and hours of YouTube tutorials) and complicated tools.

A typical app mockup video might include app footage displayed on a 3D model of a phone or laptop rotating in 3D space. To make it look realistic, you need to set up the model with realistic materials and textures, lighting, reflections and shadows. After Effects can be daunting enough on its own. To manipulate 3D models you also need to use a third party plugin such as Cineware or Element 3D.

Looking at the existing tools on the market to attempt to solve this problem:

• Template-based sites like Placeit and Renderforest don't offer much customization at all and produce cheap looking videos
• Some 2D mockup generators support videos on the device screens, but the videos they produce are static, no motion involved, so they work well for simple demos on websites, but don't look great as promo videos
• There are a handful of 3D animated mockup video tools (all made by indie developers), but at the time, all of them were either 1. too expensive for most businesses to use ($200-500/month, 2. were native apps that only supported specific platforms (Mac and iOS) or 3. Had slow performance and still required a really fast computer to get decent results. If you're a Windows developers with a budget of less than $200 / month, you're stuck with After Effects :( There's lots of examples of this user pain on Twitter.

So I'm building MockRocket, with the following goals:

• It will be web-based, so it's accessible to users on all platforms using WebGL
• Rendering will be done in the cloud, so you don't need a computer with tons of RAM and processing power. You want to render a 4K 60p video from your iPhone? No problem.
• The interface will be dead-simple. You don't need experience with video tools to use it, but if you are familiar with advanced settings, like environment maps, keyframe interpolation modes, lighting, etc you can still customized all that
• Pricing will be startup / indie developer friendly
• The videos will look great on pitch decks, social media posts, app store videos, portfolios, Dribble, YouTube and more