Five years of indie hacking
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Five years of indie hacking
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Re: Five years of indie hacking
#2as 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"
Re: Five years of indie hacking
#3Thanks 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
Re: Five years of indie hacking
#4Thanks 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
From looking at author's linkedin, looks like they have done some consulting/contract programming over the past few years too.
Re: Five years of indie hacking
#5as 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"
Author here - Glad you found that line helpful. Of course, the goal would be building your business on the side until it's making a substantial amount of money, and then quitting your job. But I know that isn't a feasible path for everyone. Personally, I tried starting my initial project as a side project, but made very little progress over two years, which was the catalyst for going "all in". I'd still suggest trying to build the business on the side first, just to see if you can manage it. Best of luck!
Re: Five years of indie hacking
#6Thanks 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
Author here - Thanks for reading. The $1k/mo is just my "salary" from revenue generated by my indie projects. I had a substantial amount of savings that I lived off of for my first year. Since then, I've supported myself with contract work. I'm also very lucky that my partner is very supportive and has a good job, so at times (such as last year when I was launching my latest SaaS), he picked up our shared expenses.
Re: Five years of indie hacking
#7Ha, 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."
Re: Five years of indie hacking
#8as 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"
Author here - Glad you found that line helpful. Of course, the goal would be building your business on the side until it's making a substantial amount of money, and then quitting your job. But I know that isn't a feasible path for everyone. Personally, I tried starting my initial project as a side project, but made very little progress over two years, which was the catalyst for going "all in". I'd still suggest tryin…
Agreed.
It really comes down to side business model, the culture of where you’re at full-time and how much you’re willing to sacrifice personally.
I never quit my day job after growing my business to ~$5m annually mainly because it’s e-commerce which is easy to automate and I’ve hired a great team.
It’s sad to say but unless you’ve cleared $15m; making a few million really isn’t a lot of money truly so I recommend that people either:
1) make their day job their first customer or an investor
2) explore lifestyle type businesses that work well with their day job meaning no travel, easy delegation, etc (ie. FBA, shopify, physical products, micro-SaaS)
Re: Five years of indie hacking
#9Ha, 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'…
Author here - Yeah, realizing I couldn't spend all of my time just building the product was a hard lesson to learn. This experience has forced me to learn a lot of new skills though, and I'm much more rounded as a person because of it.
Re: Five years of indie hacking
#10Thanks 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
Author here - Thanks for reading. The $1k/mo is just my "salary" from revenue generated by my indie projects. I had a substantial amount of savings that I lived off of for my first year. Since then, I've supported myself with contract work. I'm also very lucky that my partner is very supportive and has a good job, so at times (such as last year when I was launching my latest SaaS), he picked up our shared expenses.
> Since then, I‘ve supported myself with contract work
So „jumping into indie hacking full time“ is actually a bit misleading, no?