Side hustle indies, what will you be working on this weekend?
5 more hours and I'm done with my day job for the week. I know many people see weekends as doing nothing and chilling and fun. But fun for me is building :) I've been building a tool that helps agencies prove progress to clients (and work with that progress) so that's what I'm gonna be working on.
Any side hustlers? What will you be building this weekend?
Trending on Indie Hackers
🔥 Roast My Landing Page
Love these kind of threads - forces some commitment too.
The big goal is to implement my new Home Screen UI as code. Right now that’s all Figma and the app itself is still the original - very plain - look and feel.
I use React Native and am not a professional developer so it’s slow going but getting there.
After that I want to start scripting my “why I’m building this” “confession tape”/video. A short but honest dive into my sometimes-crippling fight with anxiety in my past, and an honest take on self esteem and the role of life balance in todays world. This piece is going to take a lot of time to do right and not be boring, and will be a centerpiece in how I get Evil Twin (the app) in front of target communities.
Also want to dig into GummySearch and see what communities I can identify.
All of this is probably 4 hours of total weekend work time! ¯\(ツ)/¯
We’ll make it.
(PS I did a similar agency reporting tool in my past so would love to hear more. Maybe I can give some pointers.)
Love that you are balancing product with marketing. How do you manage to get it all done in 4 hours, though? Or do you just make sure you make some progress? I'm exploring how to measure my weekend progress (and hopefully boost my productivity). On the other hand, I don't want to obsess too much about productivity and just have fun.
I guess it’s a time management hack, to me. I know I have limited time but not insanely limited (4 hours IMO is pretty good if you’re focused and intentional.) So there is always going to be a lot to do and doing things in concert kind of has this crossover benefit where you have little “ahas” that apply to other things as you go. Marketing/community work almost always ends up informing product, for example.
The hack is that by trying to make SOME progress on two things and having a time box for each, I have to just keep shipping. You start to better value the time-suck up front stuff like outlines, roadmaps, and drafts more but that pays off down the line.
Hope this makes sense. Early and need a workout!
Good luck have fun.
Super helpful. Thank you so much, Clay. Also love your highlight on how marketing/community work almost always ends up informing product. I need to start thinking of the marketing side as well.
IH needs a SAVE THIS ARTICLE Reads.
I will focus on integrating stripe payment system for Nolly.io
happy to gather first feedback from early adopters and some hidden bugs too
feel free to give it a try
Last year I learned how to code for the web and worked on a small side project in Nov/Dec http://onemorepage.co , mostly just to consolidate what I've learned. I know what you mean - I looked forward to the weekends because I had so much fun working on this.
Now that it's up I'm just working on bug fixes and adding more features.
Love this! Going to test how accurate it is soon. Been meaning to find some way to better allocate my time when I'm making a reading plan.
Hope it helps! Happy to hear feedback if you have any.
Tbh, the time estimations are based on the number of pages at the moment, but I'm hoping to get more accurate estimations by pulling in audiobook information in the future.
Starting up Phaedo by Plato today! Got an estimate of ~3 hours. We'll see if I can knock it out. I expect it to take a bit longer since I'll try to do as much active thinking as reading in the process.
This is r cool! I just learned about "subvocalization" :)
One feature that would be useful is to allow the user to specify the number of days to complete the book so it can calculate how many mins per day I need to read to complete based on my speed.
Thanks for this, I really like this idea! Will think about how to implement it without overcomplicating the UI.
how did you learn how to code for the web?
I started off with Scrimba's fantastic frontend course. https://scrimba.com/learn/frontend
Then learned a bit more about the backend through Angela Yu's web dev course and Academind's MERN course, both on Udemy :)
How do you plan to monetize this if it takes off? Affiliate commission?
Yep, with affiliate commission. But at this point I'm just glad to cover hosting fees haha. This was more of a learning project for me.
Almost all my non-work project time goes to my project Invertimo these days :). https://tinystruggles.com/posts/building_invertimo_in_the_open/ - it's open source so you can see my struggles in real time.
I'm working on a web app that helps skincare enthusiasts create and share their skincare routines. I was a little burned out and took a break for over a week.
This weekend, my goal is to start working on it again. I'm going to think about the new user signup flow while implementing enforcing required fields for forms in order to submit.
Got it done a little early!
I just posted about it more in-depth on IH here, but I launched my first project TriviaScout into the wild today.
Worked on it for 3 days, and feels great to actually have something pushed out onto the internet.
Love the idea of TriviaScout! I read your IH post and am curious about your goal to build as many sites/projects as possible in 2022 - how are you coming up with your ideas and what's the process you have to decide to start on one idea over the other?
Thanks Zahra!
For me, I'm prioritizing any pain points that I've experienced in my own life. Moving, combined with me being a trivia host for a few months pre-pandemic put this niche as one I know more about.
The next ideas will either be things I've been frustrated with at some point, or a pain point pattern I've seen emerge in a community. This article explains what I have in mind!
https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-unbundling
And realistically, I'll probably do an idea or two that I just think would be fun to work on because YOLO haha.
This article is super insightful - thanks for sharing!
Sounds like a solid strategy. I definitely think working on solving a problem you've personally experienced will help with the motivation to see the implementation through to the end.. also helps with the marketing side of things!
My co-founder approached me with another idea this week, and has already set up a meeting with a potential customer for next week.
We have nothing build yet 😅
Spend today & yesterday planning. So this weekend will be dedicated to actually building the MVP.
It's going to be challenging, but I love it.
Saturdays are 'Squashing Small Bugs Saturday.' I'm looking forward to the weekend and getting out some quick wins :).
We're also releasing a big new feature this weekend at thesidekick.app so I'm excited to get that to the hands of our users!
Good luck with your build :)
Gonna need the sidekick app to help keep me in line after spending like 20 minutes just wandering around exploring the site 😭 very neat stuff. hope your new feature release goes/has gone smoothy!
heh thanks! Come join us :) We have a discord too and our community definitely keeps each other in check.
My wife thinks there is something wrong with me but luckily she just teases me and is understanding :) But once I put the kids in bed my night of coding fun starts :)
This weekend I'll actually be doing some overarching strategy work which is the best part. I've been working on a couple of ideas recently so I'll do some prioritization and try to decide which idea I should go ahead with.
Same here. It's the prioritization weekend for me as well!
Love reading all these - some weekend inspiration!!
I'm building a marketplace for creators and affiliates to match this weekend. Starting out with a focus on just Gumroad creators and hoping to expand from there.
Ping me a msg if you're interested in beta testing :)
I’ll be working on creating the DB schema and starting landing page template “editor” for mycosplace.com
I might try to launch a random mobile app I recently made too, if I get the time.
Are these photos free stock photos with CC license? or did you take them yourself?
The first photo is a free stock photo, but the rest are all of my friends. Random photos taken from different conventions with prior approval to use.
I'm still waiting on approval from a photographer to replace the first photo (the two girls with the gun & sword) with another one of a friend.
I will be working on my virtual co-working space for bootstrappers: https://wannabe-entrepreneur.com/coworking
Right now I'll be spending the weekend getting my thoughts together on 2 separate articles I am creating for enterprise SaaS clients. This weekend I need to make edits to one article as one editor got back to me on it and then I'm still awaiting feedback from my other client on their article. I imagine it needs work, as thats often the case with my first drafts lol I'm one of those people who writes a poor first draft every time, but after working on it for a week or 2 it starts to become real.
It's been a while since I've visited... glad this post is here as a reminder lol.
I have been working on a mobile app the past few months to help myself take quicker showers, and was planning to release it to the play store sometime soon. This weekend will certainly be a grind!
I'm working on open source chat app that saves NO messages anywhere ever. So chat history exists only while you are chatting
I just launched a landingpage for Marketingpad.io which is a project management app for marketing.
This weekend I will start to build out the app, starting with task management. Next week I will draft a full writeup on why I'm building this and post it on IH!
Currently focusing on making react apps. I'll be making apps for my tutorials and improving my website. By the end of the weekend I hope to have not only created and deployed multiple projects plus written tutorials for them but also have a portfolio using said projects. Killing two birds with one stone
Thanks for asking! Am the same as you - am much happier building than doing something like watching TV!
I'll be launching v0.0.5 of our platform (The Nice Place), woo! And then for the early part of next week I'll be posting it in a few different places to get some more members. We're also going to be covered on Bubble's website and social media so that should help!
I'm working on an app that allows people to discover and study YouTube trends (both trending videos and channels.)
This weekend, I plan to write the first draft for the landing page copy, which is very important.
Sounds great I am in!
Hi @AskSolomon,
The product is ready for launch. Are you open to take a look at it and try it? I'd like to get your feedback before the launch.
Thanks!
This is a product I'd be personally interested in. Let me know when the product is out.
I'll make sure you'll be among the first to know when I launch it :)
In the mean time, here is an analysis I've done that inspired this project:
Analysis of YouTube Trending Videos of 2019 (US). Thought you might be interested.
oh wow this is wild
I will continue building my app Cloudcostify, which visualizes cloud costs and enforce budgets when deploying cloud resources with infrastructure as code tools such as Pulumi and Terraform. It is supposed to be integrated in a CI/CD environment such as Github or Azure Devops to calculate costs before actually deploying the cloud resources.
The prototype CLI looks like this for now for cloud costs for Virtual Machines in Azure, but I am improving the visuals continously:
Right now I am focusing on setting up websites for announcing features, provide documentation and gather customer feedback.
If you can recommend solutions to implement these websites fast while making them visually attractive, please let me know.
I'm going to work on Microns.io it's place where people can discover micro-startups for sale.
Now that my landing page is done, I'll be working on a bug in my app that has been annoying me for months.
Then my focus will be shifting primarily to GTM planning.
Great weekend so far. Just woke up to Sunday and can't wait to get sh*t done today as well!
Wonderful thread!
I built a chrome extension to shortlist interns automatically by looking at their GitHub Profile (on a sourcing platform) for a startup that I work in.
It saves me some time which I can spend on YouTube later. ;)
I’m editing some of my intake forms to comply with a new law. Working on developing a student support program, setting up calendars, and advertising through social media.
This was my fun weekend project: AI startup idea generator
https://whattoship.com
A Notion Page / Google Sheet Framework to decide which of my many ideas I should build or drop
Progress can be seen on twitter @alvi2030
The goal for the weekend is to spin up a landing page and validate an idea next week. Besides all of that, I also have plans to write a couple of blogs posts that will be published next week about the journey as an Indie Hacker.
For the landing page, the goal is to be simple enough to get a few emails interested in the product. I'll send some paid traffic to it, and analyze the data I'll gather from the experiment. I'll probably make a few variants and I'll decide if I'll invest time building the product.
Playing with WebGL (Threejs), because it's fun and there are many opportunities here
As well there are not so many devs experienced in it
I'm working on getting sponsors for my weekly newsletter https://www.workspaces.xyz/
Going into 2022 with the below numbers so think it might be time:
-3,350+ subscribers
-60% open rate
-7,000-10,000 views per feature
I'm working on a service called IP2Mongo that allows developers to add dynamic IP addresses to their Mongodb.com AccessList.
When running apps on DigitalOcean's App service or GCP's AppEngine etc, your app gets a new IP every time it deploys, scales or restarts.
The only way to properly secure a hosted database is to limit which IP addresses can connect.
My service adds and maintains that dynamic IP address on your accesslist. When your app scales up with a new IP, we'll add it to the list!
The app and service are up and running, I need a landing page, and need to sort out the subscriptions this weekend.
Can you not use a static/fixed IP for the services/apps?
One problem I have faced is whitelisting my own dynamic IPs on AWS instances, MongoDB etc.
I use this to update on AWS: https://gist.github.com/ankitdbst/9bb9d2a8078286da4b13b674e1934e6a
When do you run this bash script, and from where? Is the cli known to be installed there?
This is from dev machines currently. It s mostly for securely accessing Mongo / EC2 production instances.
I have an ISP that allocates dynamic IPs
Got it. That makes sense. 👌
Short answer is no, the IPs are dynamically assigned.
On DigitalOcean App service, they don't even publish a list of possible IPs that you could add to a firewall. Assigning static IPs to App service instances isn't on their roadmap. A Droplet may be assigned a new Ip if you scale it up or down and their Floating IP option is limited to the inbound IP, not outbound!
On GCP, you can get a static IP for your AppEngine Standard instances, but there is a lot of additional setup and it will add a chunk to your monthly cost.
The only reliable way is to use a set of known external IP to manage adding IP addresses the Access list.
I haven't used AWS in a while so I don't know if this is a problem there too. If its called from the backend of an app, it could be used to facilitate wifi hopping too.
Okay. I don't understand the outbound part. That IP would be whoever is accessing the app. So you want to secure those IPs then?
AWS does provide the option to secure the outbound IP in the security rules which was the use case I had to secure from unknown IPs (which in my case were dynamic).
If you put a load balancer in front of 3 instances of your app, you would have a static inbound IP address.
Each instance would have it's own IP address for outbound traffic, e.g. making a connection to your database. This is the part where my service will help!
I'm a big fan of the managed Atlas Mongodb service, so a VPC doesn't help me, and using 0.0.0.0/0 with a strong password isn't something I would trust to secure customer data.
I believe Atlas and AWS have something available for securing traffic, but like I said, I'm not on AWS at the moment.
Hey Alessandro!
I totally feel the same about having fun by building stuff 😄
This weekend I am full on my new side hustle.
Everyone building an audience on Twitter knows that DMs are very important.
But it's not an easy task, and you could feel the anxiety of being ignored or rejected.
So I made a platform to facilitate this process and save you a lot of time.
You find it at www.hivoe.com
😄👋
Working this weekend on https://joinyuu.com
Reaching out to Media outlets that have Top app lists for Audio Erotica apps. Trying to onboard them on an affiliate program.
To add, there's also https://watchfaces.co that focuses on Apple Watch users and helps them to personalize their Apple Watch Face!
Another one! - https://stickerrs.com/ - Stickers for iOS and Android messaging apps!
Doing some final design touch-ups on my Scrabble-like fun online multiplayer game.
https://wordathon.fun/#/
Working on my Chrome extension this weekend. Enjoy, Alessandro :)
For the last couple of weekends actually. It's a tiny tool for web developers to manage SVG icons. https://icon-shelf.github.io
Forced myself to release it a week before. And I'm so glad I did. Got many feedbacks and feature requests which I will be working on this week.
All the best to you @alemakers
Before the weekend ends, I want to build a “try it” feature on https://waitlist.today, which is a waitlist page builder for indie developers and startups looking to gain traction before launch.
I worked on the dark mode for https://remotefrontendjobs.com and https://remotebackendjobs.com. It was pretty simple actually, but I think it greatly improved the experience (especially in late hours).
Ok. So planning to work on a Crypto savings protocol 😅
Seems wayy fun
What I did:
I will focus on integrating GA and enhancing the translation for uisaltor.com. Have just launched today. Really love to gather feedback for the early adopters.
I'm working on my email-focused side project. Got slightly carried away with some cool, but unnecessary visuals on the landing page. Today I'm focusing on the product itself, trying to understand how email attachments work!
I'm working on a boring old SaaS-marketing newsletter, but it's something I always wanted to get off the grounds. Having a viable mailing list still sounds like a fantastic digital asset to have.
I'm learning golang, nearly at the end of this incredible series ( https://github.com/techschool/simplebank ) on youtube. No idea what I want to build yet but open to offers.
Just joined but tonight I'll be researching ideas in the sass space.
I'm going through my list of ideas and doing research which ones are viable to proceed with. Trying to order my list from most to least viable.
I was feeling guilty for working on this Saturday until I saw this post, thank you for the motivation!
It's 9:49 am here in Buenos Aires and I still got about 8 hours to go before starting my weekend. My biggest promise this weekend is not to buy any more domains and work with the existing pool of ideas.
hehe hope you are enjoying your weekend fun now :)
I work only on Sundays. I've been working on an "email digest" feature for the past three Sundays, hope to finish this by Sunday evening.
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