Official Indie Hackers request: We want to feature you on our homepage (apply within).

Hi Elizabeth, I'm interested in participating.

My name is Adrian Flitcroft and I'm the founder of PlushForums and Babble. I'm based in London, England.

Plush was a completely bootstrapped startup and launched over 8 years ago, in October 2014. I've run it with (modest) success ever since.

I developed it while I was still a full-time employee, as a project manager at PokerStars, where I held many roles over a 9-year period. I quit my job before launching my startup, without a single client.

Now I'm 40, with a family, I'm attempting to do the whole thing all over again, with a new modern forum platform we call Babble (babble.im).

Hey Elizabeth! Sounds great, I'd love to pitch and also learn from other indie hackers.
I am building Geeks and Experts and we're fully bootstrapped with one full-time founder and one part-time cofounder. We're building G&E so that you don't need to rely on warm intros and cold DMs to pick someone's brain.

We have an MVP in place which was built in a span of a few weeks on low-code and no-code tools with some tech integrations. I have been on this journey for a year now and I shared some of my biggest lessons I learned along the way.

I never knew anything about indie hacking, I had started my Twitter account 10 years ago but never used it, and I did not know much about customer discovery or MVPs. I believe I can offer some unique insights on what mistakes to avoid as a first-time founder and how to build fast, fail fast and iterate.

Hi Elizabeth,

Thanks for the opportunity!

I'm building a newsletter called Growth in Reverse. Most of the time, when we hear about top creators and Indie Hackers, we hear about where they are now, and how they're growing at the moment.

But oftentimes, we don't get to see the scrappy things they've tried or how they grew to where they are.

So I've been going deep into the bottoms of the internet to find out how they got to where they are. And publishing those as "deep dives". Then I distill that down into a few insights to help others replicate what they've done.

Like this one with Mario Gabriele of the Generalist:
https://growthinreverse.com/generalist/

Or the most recent one with Nathan Baugh, who grew to 42k email subscribers in 8 months: https://growthinreverse.com/nathan-baugh/

I have a background in helping course creators sell digital products with paid ads since 2017, but this is my new "side project" that I'm having way too much fun with.

I hope to make this a full-time thing eventually.

Hi Elizabeth,

I'm Konstantin, a full-stack dev and a professional strugglepreneur, originally from a sanctioned country, now residing in Turkey. My father always told me that it's risky to run a business in our home country but I didn't listen to him )

What I've already tried:

• running open-source community and a job board for it (have a few lessons learned here)
• running expert paid courses (made mistakes and almost burned out)
• selling my own plugins on Envato (didn't earn a lot but leaned my priceless lessons)
• freelancing for clients from a few continents on Upwork (have a bunch of stories here also)
• writing paid content (good experience but not that fulfilling)
• helping people breaking into tech (in fact 1-on-1 coaching, learned my lessons also)

What I'm doing now:

I'm learning entrepreneurship the hard way by building an app for crypto-marriages https://www.indiehackers.com/product/marrysign

Just in case you'd like to look at my writing style and confirm my experience, I blog here https://komelin.com/blog , here https://tojuniors.com/blog , and also share my insights here https://twitter.com/kkomelin

Hey @ElizabethDawber 👋

Nick here from The Designer’s Toolbox and UX Dictionary.

I never planned on doing this, but after writing about my experience as a failed designer at a startup, everything changed.

Fast forward to today and I’m building four products 👇

1️⃣ To help designers build a career;
2️⃣ and help SaaS founders succeed with good UX.

Hi @ElizabethDawber

It looks impressive!

We have developed a tool Churnfree.com that is helping SaaS businesses and membership businesses to reduce their customer churn rate. High customer churn is the major problem of SaaS business failure.

It took more than 1 year to develop this amazing tool which is helping SaaS founders in their business growth.

2. our project is completed and we are working on more features of it.
3. Development is my passion
4. Project URL: https://churnfree.com/

1. Briefly explain what you're building/have built

Bank Statement Converter, A web app that extracts transaction data from PDF Bank Statements

2. Tell me what stage of your journey you're at

I launched in April 2021, for the first eighteen months I worked on it heavily. At the moment it is running pretty stably. I'm not actively working on it. At the moment MRR is growing at $400 USD per month. At the moment MRR is at $5500.

3. Share what ‘area of knowledge’ you have unique insights in e.g. bootstrapping advice, time management tips, dev-turned-founder insights etc.

I'm a dev turned founder. I've worked a lot of programming jobs. Games, embedded, consulting, mobile, finance and even... crypto. I think my biggest skill is launching quickly and improving the product based on user feedback

4. Add a link to your product/website/blog etc. (where relevant).

https://bankstatementconverter.com/

Hey 👋

I'm building Testkit, and I started working on it as a side project in March 2021, stopped working on it in between until January, where I've joined an accelerator (ODX by OnDeck) and got $125,000 in exchange for 7% of the company. Since then, I've talked to a bunch of potential users, launched, failed, pivoted, failed that too, and pivoted back to the original idea, but this time with way more knowledge and learnings I've collected along the way.

I've started rewriting the entire app in August and I've been in private beta since October, now launching the public beta in the next few days - along with a Product Hunt launch, and basically listing myself everywhere possible. One thing that I've learned the hard way during this year is how valuable focus is.

I focused too much on shipping too quickly in order to get customers and fundraise, and the big problem with that: I've shipped an unfinished, buggy testing platform - hence why the launch failed, and I still pivoted for the same reason - to get paying customers to have something for potential investors.

Since the rewrite I've been heavily focusing on shipping a product that I truly love, and that my customers also truly love and taking my time. No rushing for funding, no shipping unfinished features.

Oh, and I've been solo during this entire time. Only had two part-time freelancers help me for two months in the beginning of this year :)

Excited to talk soon!

Hi Elisabeth,

What a great idea. Although I have wanted to be an entrepreneur for a long time, I launched my first project very recently. Two months ago I launched Lima, an app designed for people who are not able or prefer not to use their mouse, which allows controlling the PC mouse cursor with head movements and voice commands using only a standard webcam. I will be happy to contribute with the short experience I gained during these months, if it may be useful to other people at their very early stages.

Thanks,
Fidel

Hey - would love to chat!

I'm a marketer by background, and spent the last 2 years working as a consultant for brands that wanted to use GPT3 to build programmatic SEO campaigns (think: a guide to every Excel function, or 100s of pages comparing commonly misunderstood financial metrics).

I saw that demand was quickly growing for this type of work, and outstripping what I could handle myself, so have spent the last few months productising my work into: https://byword.ai. I don't really have any technical background so built the whole app on bubble.io, with cloud functions doing the heavy lifting in the background.

The product has been publicly live for around a month, with 600 users so far. It's generated over 2,000 articles, and 3 million words of content.

Even though I've been using transformer models for a few years now I won't pretend that's my area of specialism (I'll leave that to others!). Instead, my advantage is coming from a marketing background. Very few marketers have the technical skills to put products together, which is always a great shame given that:

• They have unique insight into a huge range of problems needing to be solved
• They've often got good intuition for what'll resonate and what won't
• They're also (hopefully!) decent at marketing any products they build too

I think Byword is a really nice example of productising yourself/what you do. It's good enough now that there's really no meaningful difference in the output from it versus what I do as a freelancer (but one is much quicker!)

Lastly, on the note of "What unique strategies do you utilize when it comes to productivity": I'm a competitive triathlete racing for my country, and spend a few hours a day running/cycling/swimming. It's easy to see this as taking time away from working on Byword, but I actually think it's a huge advantage. It's completely interruption-free time to think deeply, which I think is ordinarily very difficult to motivate yourself to do.

Hi Elizabeth,

My name is Ahmed El Aamrani, I am a MIT alum and founder of Kaisdaq, a financial technology startup that helps developers interact with financial brokers. We have recently launched our product. You can check our website at https://www.kaisdaq.com and product demonstration at https://youtu.be/nIR8SFfdVzw

The idea behind Kaisdaq is the result of my own trading journey. After developing an automated trading bot for ETH and BTC using Coinbase, I wanted to apply the same strategy for a different broker.

Unfortunately, I had to adapt my whole code for a different broker and I encountered lots of developers who also spent lots of time and effort with integration. That's why I started developing a prototype, turned into a product. Our mission is to empower anyone to develop their trading application.

I have an experience working in a big high-tech company (Amazon), a research laboratory in Singapore and a startup (MapMyRun which was acquired by UnderArmour). I am a dev-turned founder after leaving my position 5 months ago to work full-time on Kaisdaq.

Would love to take part in the interviews and answer any questions you have.

Our main business is our newsletter + site in Web3, but while growing our newsletter we noticed cross collabs with other newsletters were a great way to grow fast (but took tons of time to search/filter/organize)

https://collabmatch.io/ We created a service to match newsletters based on preferences, criteria etc

We started this very recently (2 weeks ago) and already have 70 high quality newsletters and are looking for 30 more for the initial batch

For insights: we have a lot in rapid prototyping + outreach

TLDR
I’m trying to make custom kids books with high-fidelity personalised illustrations using AI and PoD.

What I’ve built:
I’ve made a sales page and now rushing to get the mvp backend built and trying to suppress without mercy thoughts about the roadmap until I’ve got some basic plumbing done and some happy customers. (Subscription book service for a monthly personalised kids book from ages 1 to 7 anyone? Ltv of a parent-customer could approach ‘number of kids x 72 books’ 🤩 )

My journey:
For the last two years, I’ve been listening to the IH podcast and a bunch of others, mostly around solopreneur stuff or sexuality, and honestly I’ve been trying really hard not to combine those two interests. So far, I’ve succeeded at not mixing business and pleasure in that way. I never wanna say “it’s been a business doing pleasure with you” with a straight face.

I’ve been reading books like The Embedded Entrepreneur, Pieter Level’s Make, and I dunno how many others… some more arcane like the amazing How To Measure Anything. I joined Jonathan Stark’s group coaching for a year, but without even knowing which audience I would be able to serve enthusiastically, I just wasn’t ready.

In my day job, I’m a soulless corporate contractor devops dork, I can’t wait to be done with it. I’ve had a couple of side projects before, one of which almost killed me (don’t accidentally open a 24h nightclub in Amsterdam unless you have good boundaries), and I worked at a doomed analytics startup that I don’t discuss in the hours of daylight (tldr bad boss), and I somehow always found my way back to the day job cash cow… so now I wanna build a better cow. And having children, and aging, and covid… and and and… have all made me more aware of mortality and how precious time is.

I’m trying really hard to not rip up any indie hacker playbooks. I just wanna follow in the footsteps of all the amazing huge awesome little giants of the indiehacker community. I don’t think I have some insight that gives me the right to ignore the collective’s wisdom.

In terms of newsworthy productivity/personal growth/mental health stuff, maybe I have something interesting for you… about three months ago, I disconnected from the internet. I cancelled my broadband, and negotiated with 2nd-level tech support to ban my mobile plan from data (there is no zero-data mobile plan available off the shelf in Australia today). I still have internet when I’m at my coworking joint (aka a grungy noisy art space), but that’s it. I can get to the internet, but it can’t get to me… for now….

share what ‘area of knowledge’ you have unique insights

Probably nothing that gpt3.5 couldn’t do in its sleep 🤪 🤣
My life has been weird and I love the wonder of words… sometimes this is mistaken for unique insight. Ymmv

The thing I’m working on since I awoke at 1am the night before last, sat down upright, and saw a tiny piece of the future[^1] is Tiger House Books: https://tigerhousebooks.com/ [^2]

Thanks for reading! X

[1] - and discovered an audience that had literally been sitting in my lap for the last four years
[2] - the “tiger house” imagery is inspired by the greatest writing since, um, humans… glory to the AI writers, long may they reign. Specifically, Bots of New York’s “I was born in a tiger house”. My 2yr old daughter lost her mind over it and can repeat most of it from memory, and my 4yr old son now devotes a little time every day to unwinding with his take on the “45 minute hate breaths”. https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=427578559403952&substory_index=0&id=100064554348395

Thanks for reading the footnotes too! 😀

Hello Elizabeth! I'd be happy to share my perspective if you think it would fit in well.

I left my previous career to get into software development because I love the idea of building and shipping products. I've spent years working as a developer and technical leader for various startups of all shapes and sizes. For the last 5.5 years I've been the CTO of a company called Stash, and grew the engineering team from 12 to 260.

My time with "hands on keyboard" diminished as the team and company grew, so earlier this year I made the decision (heavily inspired by this community) to step back from that role and bootstrap my own company as an indie hacker/solo founder. For the last two months, I've been building CodeSprout, a platform for teaching people software development while building and shipping real products. I made the site live as of Monday (!!) so I don't have a success story to share (🤞 yet), but I'd be happy to talk about some of the things I've done so far:

• creating a lean canvas / vetting my idea
• doing user research
• planning my day to maximize productivity
• writing and shipping software fast
• working with the right marketing team
• finding a good designer to work with (Upwork FTW!)
• launching with something valuable and min. viable
• giving myself daily pep talks so I don't freak out ("I LEFT MY CAREER TO DO THIS AM I INSANE?")

I'll give this a try:-

I'm Kaustubh Katdare and I founded https://www.crazyengineers.com - a global community of engineers back in 2005. I ran it successfully for over 12 years. I was into community building way before it was cool to build a community! :-) We did end up building one of the largest communities of engineers in Asia with over 430,000+ members.

I've collected very valuable lessons around building community, developing community software, SEO and building lasting relationships with people you've never met.

I currently work with a SaaS company to handle their growth and community initiatives. Would be happy to share everything I've learned.

Hi Elizabeth,

I'm interested in the interview as I have maybe another point of view than some other indie hackers. If you decide not to publish afterwards, it's also fine by me.

I'm developing desktop applications at Japplis focusing at the moment mostly on my file manager Ant Commander Pro

Since I stopped my freelance work to become a full time indie hackers in 2020, I decided my strategy would be to "go as a loser". So my expectation is to fail. My primary goal is to make something that I can be proud of. So far so good, still 0$ MRR but everyday having fun developing and improving my software. Next year probably will do less development and more marketing.

Our company, Hardskills.io, is proud to present the world's first patent-based skills database, boasting an expansive index of 29 million candidate profiles across 193 global countries and 61,500 skills areas.

Hardskills has been proven to be significantly more efficient than LinkedIn in terms of both candidate validation, with an approximate 70% higher success rate, and in terms of time spent validating, with a reduction of 92%. This is due to the fact that our search does not require users to opt-in, as is the case with LinkedIn, meaning that profiles have a higher level of detail and are easier to search.

For the past three years, our team has been dedicated to developing a cutting-edge solution, which we were able to launch in a market-ready version within the last 3-4 months. We've financed everything ourselves.

//
Rasmus Palazzi
CEO & Founder

Hi Elizabeth,

sounds interesting. We are developing ERA a note-taking and documentation tool with focus on pricacy.

We are currently in the beta stage, we have learned a lot on this journey so far, and I have the feeling that we will learn even more in the future.

I can't think of anything unique to share as I'm still a wantrepreneur, but I think this idea is fire. There's so much I've already learned being a part of the IH community and I'm looking forward to reading the stories and advice that come from these interviews. Thanks for doing this!

Hi Elizabeth,

I'd be interested in being featured. I'm still in the MVP stages for my SaaS (a software management system for SMEs) and as such don't have a website yet to link to. I have unique insights regarding being a full-time dev and managing a side hustle. I think I approach it differently from what I hear others doing. Would be great to chat further.

Hi Elizabeth,

Great initiative! Could I firstly request that we try to include women from the Indie Hacker community please? The ones that have done podcast interviews have been inspiring and there must be many more out there, but sadly underrepresented.

Having said that, I'm a guy but would still like to put myself forward (sorry, I know that's contradictory).

WHAT HAVE YOU BUILT?

• A site for watch collectors/restorers for about a year (12k visitors/month).
• Just launched a privacy-first job board.

WHAT STAGE OF JOURNEY ARE YOU AT?

In the past, I've held both programming and marketing jobs and I enjoy both aspects. Therefore I currently try to follow the coding week/marketing week philosophy to avoid the trap of just building a project without building an audience. I'm trying to play the long game of nurturing trust and looking out for the opportunities that inevitably arise.

IN WHAT AREA OF KNOWLEDGE DO YOU HAVE UNIQUE INSIGHTS?

In both my professional and Indie Hacker lives, I've learned to experiment, experiment, experiment. My wife recently told me "You don't seem upset with failure." Was that a hidden compliment?! I'm not sure, but I do believe that even a failed experiment is useful to learn from, and that with patience, eventually there'll be a successful experiment. I've been regularly documenting my results in my Indie Hacker project pages, so that other people could learn from them.

I've also learned that despite the various "I did this one thing to 10x my traffic" headlines, for most of us that's not going to happen. Sometimes it feels like we should be getting quick wins, but I want to reassure the silent majority that there usually isn't a quick win, and that's OK! You work on something, there's incremental growth, you work on something else, there's incremental growth, and that perseverance has a much higher chance of paying off than chasing immediate success.