AMA with Anthony Castrio, the maker behind Indie Worldwide 🌍 & writer of Bot Eat Brain 🤖

Hey Indie Hackers!

I've been featuring another maker's story every Friday in my newsletter and last week I've added an AMA feature to give everybody a chance to ask these makers any questions they might think of, directly from their CtrlAltCC page 🤩

This is the 2nd AMA so far and it comes from none other than Anthony Castrio, an indie maker legend who is building the Indie Worldwide community and recently started writing a newsletter about AI trends called Bot Eat Brain

Here's Anthony's story:

"I started Indie Worldwide a few years ago. I was a digital nomad who wanted to become an Indie Hacker but wasn’t sure what I should build yet. I started hosting local Indie Hacker meetups in whichever city I was visiting, but after doing that a few times I realized it was hard to keep the friends I made or to keep those meetups alive once I left. That’s when I started working on an online meetup group for indie hackers: Indie Worldwide.

Indie Worldwide was not a business in the first year and a half it existed, it was a free community, mostly just a monthly video call. I wanted to increase 1:1 connections between members, so I started making introductions over email. A few members told me I should charge money because the calls were so valuable for them, so I did. Suddenly Indie Worldwide was a side-hustle.

By the time I started the newsletter, we already had a list of over 2,000 indie founders who’d joined at some point or another. I would occasionally email updates, but didn’t think about publishing a newsletter until we got a sponsorship offer. Someone cold dm’d me to sponsor the Indie Worldwide newsletter, despite the fact that no such thing existed. Of course I said yes, and suddenly we had a once-every-month or so newsletter.

For a long while I tried to avoid making Indie Worldwide fully into a business. It was nice that it was making some money, but it still felt like a launchpad for my “real business” whenever I figured out what that was supposed to be. It wasn’t run in a lean or easy to maintain way and of course I was still consulting almost full-time. That meant I’d sometimes struggle to keep up with Indie Worldwide tasks, or even put the community aside for months at a time to focus on the business that actually made significant revenue.

After finally going in full-time, a good portion of this year was spent un-coding (replacing things with no-code solutions) and so far, Indie Worldwide has made $18,079 in 2022. On track to at least double from 2021!"

Go ask Anthony any questions you might have ↓ 👀

Link: ctrlalt.cc/profile/anthony

I wanted to find out "what made him pull the trigger & go full time on indie hacking"- can't wait to hear the answer!