Five years of indie hacking (opens in new tab)

I'm about to launch a bootstrapped project on my own (my third idea). Your post really resonated with me because I have been thinking about the same feelings and outcomes as you shared in your blog. My conclusion is that the only guaranteed outcome from ventures like this for people like us (who are trying to build wealth from nothing) is and should be the learning. I have accepted that today I don't know how to create wealth by building a SaaS product and I want to immerse myself in that problem enough to learn more. Building my product is my teaching instrument. When you have a full time job, a family and other responsibilities this a hard thing to justify because you sink so much time into it; time which you are taking away from yourself and your family but this is what it takes to succeed IMO.

I am sure that I will fail but there is no other choice except to assess what doesn't work, adjust, rinse and repeat until I figure it out. Some of us get lucky and struck success early but others will have to try again and many will never succeed and that's just life and nothing is free in life (unless you come from money but then again I've never been in that position either).

I think it's easier to take a traffic source and build a product around that, than to build a product and then find traffic.

An idea for a traffic source is a gimmick. i.e. something you build that brings people to your site.

The best example I've seen is https://blockchain.info now called blockchain.com/explorer.

They had a site that gave a web based view of bitcoin addresses, balances and transactions.

This gained a huge amount of traffic in the early days of Crypto (2012).

Then the rest of the products, i.e. wallet and exchanges came later and sit on top of that traffic.

So my advice to myself. Traffic first, then build a product.

If the product fails at least you learned something and still have the traffic.

Here's a link to the author's project: https://pagefactory.app/ For an indie hacker project that you're doing for passion, you really have to pick something that connects with the dreams of people. Especially if the thing is a tool that empowers ordinary people. No one dreams about how much better the web will be with lots of auto-generated content. In order to sell something like that, you'd have to do a YouTube hustle talking about how rich you got doing it, and how rich you can get too if you buy the product. A bunch of people have been doing that lately encouraging people to submit ChatGPT generated articles to publications that pay for content, and a lot of those organizations are now shutting down their open submissions due to the avalanche of low-effort content.

Ha, I thought this was a great line, I guess I always assumed you'd spend all your time building the products you were selling. But I can imagine there's a ton of customer support, unplanned features requests, talking with tax people and other business owners in the space etc etc

"Starting out, I thought bootstrapping meant freedom from the messy complications of building and maintaining relationships. Turns out, it's just the opposite."

"Indie Hacking"

An indie hacker is an individual who builds and launches a business or product independently, without the support of a large organization or team.

Most 'indie hackers' i've met are working on some app, or SAAS that they see a need for in the market. They strive and toil, for a grand vision; And there is beauty in that, but....

More 'Indie Hackers' should find fulfillment in starting an agency. The risk is honestly zero, and although harder to scale it may bear the same fucundity of any 'Killer App'. Even if you don't have the connections, Upwork is a fantastic way to get your initial clients.

When people quit their software job to be an indy hacker, what they really want is the freedom to code in the direction they choose. Although dealing with clients may seem like 'having a boss', the ability to pick your clients wisely is the first skill you learn.

I quit my job working in tech and now i run a solo tech consultancy. You get your initial clients to pay for the infrastructure and as long as you stick in your lane, you can utilize all your tooling for the next client and charge a bit more in hourly rate. It soon becomes a self-fulfilling cycle.

> With the launch of my second business last July (a programmatic SEO tool called PageFactory

Great read, but it's a bit disappointing to see that the author was only able to make money with yet another SEO spam tool to generate low-quality content. The idea of the original Fantasy Congress was much more interesting, too bad that didn't work out.

One idea for folks trying to bootstrap an indie hacking project as a cure for megacorp blues is to work for a year in a small startup.

That way you can get some exposure to non-software tasks you will have to handle and will be able to move faster when bootstrapping your own. My 2c.

as someone who is also thinking about quitting my job to start a business , this suggestion is helpful to me : "I wouldn't encourage anyone to quit their job until they've made at least one dollar selling a product or service online"

I share the same dream; of one day charting my own path. I've been doing things a bit differently. I've kept my job and am building my product (www.bannerbox.io) on the side. I wake up early and dedicate a few hours to it in the morning. So far I've built the MVP but have no users. I'm fine with this because I'm learning.

Last year I've dedicated 100% of my time to building. This year I'm spending half of my time marketing. I'm struggling with this new arrangement. Marketing makes me uncomfortable. I haven't made meaningful progress on marketing yet but it's the right move as long I am consistent.

It was very disappointing reading how the author found credible podcasts, books and people to follow, only to recommend nothing and leave the reader wondering about this mysterious information.

I'm interested in the author's latest SAAS.

Can you really game SEO by spamming out templated articles?

I thought Google filtered out that sort of thing.

Thanks for sharing. Curious, how do you sustain on just $1k/mo?

The idea is inspiring but also out of reach for most people with expenses exceeding that

I honestly found the article rather confusing. Maybe it’s the terminology used? When I hear the term “indie hacking”, I don’t think of product building (although author’s link has that as a definition). Going into the post I thought I’d read about some person’s five year journey into some wonderfully whacky personal hacking projects. The post seemed to start that way.

But then half way through, the tone changes to talk about product and business and learning all that commercial stuff.

The story ends talking about the projects only generating minimal revenue, and disappointment stemming from that.

I am far from an expert in this, but what seems to be lacking is clear cut goals from the start on the business side. If the goal is to hack, then the code itself is the reward. If the goal is to start a business, then you need targets (users, revenue, profitability, growth, etc) and plans (product vision, marketing strategy, market research, etc).

I resonate with your idea about passion a lot. Passion is what gets you to do the job, but once you're on the job, you have to put that aside and think with a cold mind. You turn passion into a small flame inside of you. It helps you go through the darkest moments.

I think an important thing is to identify what your end goal is - is it to create some cool app and get some people to use it or create a real business. The latter is much harder and even startups/companies with big funding and millions of users struggle to do it.

And just by implementing some cool app you don't magically obtain business knowledge required to get it to the next level - probably the ability to sell stuff and marketing being the most fundamental.

> I finally started generating enough consistent revenue to pay myself a meager salary. After five long years, I now make $1k/month.

> More than anything though, I'm so thankful I had the courage, and privilege, to take a swing at this.

I'm glad the author acknowledged that privilege. As someone not from a terribly privileged background, this sort of article usually just makes my blood boil.

> And that most people take many years, and many failed ventures, to eventually build a sustainable, profitable business.

I'm not sure how to parse that.

Sometimes people need to hear that it's not going to be easy, and they have to stick with it. (How I've sometimes put it, something like: "You know how, when a startup person is telling the story of how they succeeded, and the hardest part was when we thought we wouldn't succeed? This is one of those times. And if we can pull it off, someday we'll tell the story of how we didn't know whether we'd succeed, and no one will really understand until they experience it themselves.")

But other times, people need to know that many people will never succeed at building a viable business, no matter how many times they try. There are many factors, including dumb luck. Someone trying to start a business can lose a lot. They should go into it knowing that odds are that they will probably fail to build a viable business, that it's harder than it sounds, so they should take it seriously, and cover all the non-luck bases that they can.

For some guidance on successful bootstrapping, I would suggest to look into Alex Hormozi (Youtube, Podcast).