I'm bootstrapping 2 products while consulting as a fractional CTO and traveling the world. AMA!
Hey folks! I've been living the indie hacker life for about 1 year now, and am happy to share my experiences, projects, and thoughts on working towards your vision in a sustainable way.
Background
I'm a software developer from NYC. Have a failed startup under my belt, and worked for a VC-backed startup as the first engineer -> director of a 30-person eng team. Left my job end of 2020 because I missed building early-stage products.
Products
Hive Index - My directory of over 1200 online communities. Inspired by the supportive power of online communities (and this one in particular), I decided to make community discoverable for everyone, no matter their preferences for topic, platform, and features of community.
GummySearch - My Reddit audience research SaaS. It's a tool to quickly find online communities on Reddit where your target customers hang out, what their pain points are, what solutions they need, and what they are eager to pay for. You can use it to quickly ideate/validate business opportunities, and even find potential customers from Reddit.
Between the two of them, I'm currently at $500MRR. I spend about 50% of my working time on my personal products, and when I do I usually focus on one at a time. Currently, I'm working more on GummySearch, improving the product with the feedback from my paid users (mostly indie hackers), and building out a premium product tier for larger teams.
Consulting
In the other 50% of my working time, I consult for early-stage startups as a fractional CTO. My services include building out initial infrastructure/processes for scale, in some cases a product MVP, helping hire founding engineering team, and advising on technical decisions. I work with max 2 clients at a time, mostly via my personal network, and it's been a great way to make some income while still having time & energy to pursue my bootstrapped products. Although it's not always easy (sometimes it feels like I'm working at 3 startups at once), I've been quite happy with the freedom it provides and the new experiences that come with working on a project-basis with bright ambitious people.
Travel
My wife, cat, and I have been nomadic since January 2021. For the first 9mo of the year we did a roadtrip across the US. Currently, we're on a plane-based trip to Florida, Texas, Costa Rica, Virgin Islands, Mexico City, and California before returning back to NYC in March. My 2021 google maps update had me in 124 cities (although some were just brief stops on the roadtrip). It's been an incredible experience, and I truly feel like the change of scenery gives me energy and makes me better at my work. With all that said, I am happy that we're now settled in Mexico City for a whole month, and that in March we'll set some roots down and settle back into a bit of a routine for a while.
Overall, it's been an incredible 2021 and I'm excited for how 2022 is shaping up across all of the different things I have going on.
If you'd like to follow along with any of the above, I build in public on Twitter and share my journey as a bootstrapped founder chasing the dream.
Ask me anything!
Congrats on $500MRR! I'm curious, what goals do you have for your products in 2022?
Thanks Abhi! I'm going to 5k MRR by end of 2022 with GummySearch.
For Hive Index, I'm still experimenting with monetization and haven't quite set revenue goals yet, the primary goal is visitors. Right now I'm 6k/mo and would like to get to 100k/mo.
Oh and I'm likely to launch 1 new product in 2022. But that's a secret for now ;)
Awesome post, Fed! Such great info on juggling multiple projects. We'll be featuring you in tomorrow's issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter.
I'm curious about what made you start traveling long-term? Any advice for other founders looking to take the leap and hit the road?
Oooh awesome, thank you so much for including me in the newsletter!
Regarding my travels, I've always felt inspired by new locations and truly believe that I do my best work when I switch up my location from time to time. I had one amazing month-long solo trip to Singapore & Thailand a couple years ago where I worked on my first side-project for a couple hours a day, and adventured around for the rest. It was incredible, I loved every day of it, and got so much more done than I expected, only working a couple hours a day. I was hooked, and decided that I wanted to try this for a longer period of time and really bring some bigger ideas to life.
Originally, the plan was to travel the world for 9 months with my girlfriend (now wife), and we were saving up for it. We were going to hit every non-freezing continent, and had a fun route planned. Around when we were about to depart, covid hit and put a big pause on the plan. After almost a year of lockdown, we felt safe to travel but were restricted internationally, so we packed our stuff (and our cat), bought a car, moved out of NYC, and spent 9 months driving across the united states. It wasn't the world trip that we originally planned, but it definitely achieved a lot of the goals we had for it. Now that international travel is somewhat available, and because we love escaping the NYC winter, we extended for a couple months to visit some warm climates.
It's been fantastic, fresh, and fun. Best part is that we've met so many cool people on the way, and also got to see a lot of friends that got dispersed over the past couple of years.
What's next? We don't quite know. We have the next 2 months planned out and after that will either settle down somewhere to rebuild in-person community, or maybe bounce around Europe for the summer ;)
Tips for others wanting to do the same:
For those looking to embark on a similar journey, best of luck and enjoy! Feel free to reach out to me here or on Twitter if you have any more specific questions!
The fractional CTO job sounds super interesting. How long do you usually stay with a startup? Are these early stage?
The time commitment differs quite a lot! For example, for my current clients (both early stage startups):
Now that I'm done with the active part for the second one, I'm thinking of the kinds of projects I'd take on in the future. I think my ideal scenario would be more 2-3 month active projects, and if we have a great working relationship and I believe in the future of the company, I stay on as an advisor.
This sounds really awesome. One more thing, and I can understand if you don't want to go into too many details. How technical are these startups? It doesn't sounds like SaaS for example, where I'd imagine they'd want a fulltime CTO. Can you share some details about that as well?
They are actually both quite technical, but just don't need a full-time CTO or eng team right from the start (most startups don't IMO). I provide a sweet spot between getting enough done in a short amount of time so that they can go to market, and buying them the time to find product-market fit before raising gobs of money and buying a full-time CTO.
One of the startups is a SaaS in the legal-tech space with a really long sales cycle, the product is obviously very important but most of the efforts now are on the commercial side. The other is a women's health startup which will require a very technical full-time CTO to handle data + eng eventually, but my MVP got them from 0 to 1000 customers and a great round of seed funding. Now that we've got that out of the way, we're hiring the team that will build the long-term vision, which is much broader than what we scoped for the MVP.
Congrats on the first bits of MRR. Not a lot of other people are willing and able to work on multiple startups/projects at once, let alone as many as you are with your personal products and fractional CTOing.
Do you find it hard to context switch between the different projects? Do you have the same or a very similar tech stack for each project? Or do they vary greatly?
PS: I too am working on multiple products at once. They are all personal projects, so I am able to keep the same/similar tech stack between them to help with making progress faster and maintainability. I find it really nice to be able to to switch my focus between the projects, helping me not get burnt-out on any one
I love working on multiple projects. It has some downsides, but I think it's a great way to derisk, as well as not get burnt out. If I'm stuck on something for one of my projects, I can switch to another and get my momentum back while I think of the best solution for the first one. Background processing is quite a powerful concept.
I actually think that my tech stack is what enables me to work like this! Across my projects & consulting work, they are not always identical, but I try to keep them very similar.
I've developed a boilerplate with my preferred tech stack that lets me get up and going in a very short amount of time. Of course, when working with external clients you need to make sure that this tech stack works for their products, and this really only works if you're starting a codebase from scratch for them (which I am for the most part)
The best thing is, because I work across multiple codebases I can re-use certain feature architectures. For example, I implement transactional email, or a subscription billing set of features, if I need to implement that in another projects I have a huge head start because I have already architected it out. The more projects I start, the easier each additional project is.
I completely agree! I also have a framework I have created to help get my projects off the ground faster
Very cool! How do you find these fractional CTO jobs?
So far the ones I've done have been via my network. People I've worked with that left to pursue their own startups, or folks I've met through my friends. The more of these jobs that I do, it seems like more people are aware of my service and more opportunities come my way. In fact, I have to turn some down sometimes.
I've noodled on the idea of keeping a list of talented indie hackers that are open to this kind of work part-time, and passing along jobs that I can't take on at that time.
That's great – feel free to reach out if you ever start that list, that's right up my alley!
It's funny because yesterday I saw others saying they are juggling tons of side projects at the same time. Sounds like you prefer to focus on one at a time, what led you to this approach? Do you find focusing on one project at a time improves the success of it? I think that'd make sense. Cheers.
Well I do work on multiple projects at once in the regard that they are both live & doing their thing at the same time. However, because I also have to split my time between my consulting work & travel, I need to be smart about time allocation.
I don't like switching focus too frequently, so what I like to do is:
How do you think about compensation for a fraction CTO role? i.e. what are fair asks for cash or equity and associated time committment?
Cash & equity are a sliding scale, and where you would land on that will depend on what you're looking for, and the relationship the startup desires. Same goes for time.
What I do for active projects is between 10-25 hours a week, charging $100 - $150 /hr depending on the length of project (more time is discounted). I've heard of some folks charging much more, in my case I'm working with people I know and take equity so I'm happy with my rate.
To determine equity, I'd recommend deciding on your hourly rate, and estimating what the project will cost overall. If that doesn't fit in the budget of whoever you're working with, take part of your payment in equity. Personally I'd never go full-equity, but that's just me. For advisor relationships, research the "FAST contract" for some good industry baselines of what time/stage/equity ratios are.
Congrats on the MRR! Whats your tech stack for GummySearch?
Good to know this, Fed. Keep travelling & building. :)
Thanks Atul! I totally intend to.