Indie hacking with a pal

Doing it all is hard

I've been indie hacking for about 3 years now. In that time, I've built and released Flurly ($200 MRR) and GraphJson ($1500 MRR).

I built, launched and marketed both products solo. Obviously there was a lot of support and encouragement, but as many indie hackers know, it's tough doing everything alone.

What gives me energy?

As many of you know, a good test of how to spend your time (and who to spend your time with) is to ask what gives you energy.

I'm an engineer. I enjoy writing code. In launching those two products, I've I enjoy using Twitter to meet new people, learn and do marketing.

But there are a lot of things that just take me a long time to do. And they suck the life out of me.

I don't like writing - blog posts, tweet threads, customer emails etc. All of these things are so important. But motivating myself to do these things after writing code and tweeting, it's tough.

Reflections & actions

I thought about the ups and downs of Flurly and GraphJson too. It also just wasn't super fun working on it alone. I like talking about product and GTM strategy. But alone, there was nobody to talk to! I just had to live through the emotional rollercoaster alone, and there wasn't a consistent voice to question me, or cheer me on.

When I found out an ex-colleague was also looking to get into Indie Hacking, I figured he'd make an ideal co-founder. He used to run product at Codecademy, and lead MongoDB's cloud product. He doesn't write production quality code but the key is that our skill sets are complementary. Equally importantly, we had shared goals, time commitments and working styles.

How has it worked out?

It's been even better than I could have hoped. We fumbled around for a few months experimenting with a few ideas that went nowhere. But because it was fun talking nonsense and ribbing each other, it didn't matter. And then we came across the idea of a GDPR compliant Google Analytics alternative and we were off. We knew there were many such alternatives, but he came up with a really clear product and GTM strategy.

We would offer two extra product analytic features - funnel analysis and cohort retention. And our pricing would be way cheaper. We built on top of Tinybird which gives us predictability in our unit economics. Alone, all of this would have taken me 6-9 months. Together, we launched in only 3 months with a number of blog posts, tweet threads, and distribution channels.

Final thoughts

He asked me recently if it was really worth giving up 50% to work with someone else. For me, it definitely has been. Working with someone you trust and can rely on makes the process so much more enjoyable. As an Indie Hacker, I think the biggest challenge is giving up because you finally just run out of energy.

Working with my co-founder has been the opposite. We work well async. We enjoy our sync meetings. We laugh and it's efficient. If you can find yourself the right pal to indie hack with, I highly recommend it.

If you're interested, I'd love to have you check out my new product here Beam Analytics