I have a tendency to be consumed by a niche interest or hobby every now and then. In the past it’s been disc golf, counter strike, yo-yoing, hot sauces, coffee, apologetics, and even card magic. Now I’m introducing the latest interest that my free-time has fallen victim to: indie hacking.

What is Indie Hacking?

Despite having “hacking” in the name, indie hacking is not nearly as nefarious as it seems. It does not involve late night attempts to crack the access code to a terminal while 80s synth wave music surges in the background.

Indie hacking is building software products without a large team and without investments from venture capitalists. Many indie hackers set up their businesses as “lifestyle businesses”, which means that they optimize for time freedom instead of financial growth. So instead of hiring a bigger team to grow the business to infinity and beyond, an indie hacker might set up process automations to make their business run on autopilot so that they can have more time in their day.

My Introduction to Indie Hacking

I started down this rabbit hole after listening to Lex Fridman’s podcast with guest Pieter Levels. Pieter is notorious in the indie hacker community, and has set up several lifestyle businesses for himself, such as nomads.com. After being inspired by his journey, I took a look at his blog and a couple of his posts gave me more to look into:

Looking at these posts then led me to Show Hacker News, Indie Hackers, and Product Hunt. Show Hacker News is a great place to see what other people are building and to see how the “hacker community” responds. Indie Hackers has all sorts of articles and resources with info on getting started. They also have a podcast I just stumbled on today! I had never heard of Product Hunt before, but it’s a place where each day new apps get launched and then voted on. The most popular apps rise to the top, so for the early-adopter community it is a way to see what hot new apps are available, and for makers it is a great way to get visibility and users for a new product.

What Indie Hacking Means To Me

I’ve been inspired by all the stories I’ve read and the products I’ve seen. My day job is fun and rewarding, but it has become removed from coding. I miss the tight feedback loop of having a small feature in my head to build and then bringing it to life. To reconcile that, I’m moonlighting as an indie hacker. I have no grand monetization scheme, no clearly laid out plan, and little free time as a new dad working a full-time job. But I’m building nonetheless. My latest creation is fedmeetup.com, and I just pushed some new updates to it over the last week.

I’m still a bit embarrassed by how wonky the interface looks (need to work on my design skills) but I’m trying to embrace the indie hacker mantra of “ship early, ship often”. Fed Meetup solves a problem (Where should I host a federal in-person event to maximize savings of taxpayer dollars?) in its current form, so I’ve released it into the wild and will build it alongside those using it. I know of at least a couple of people at NASA who have started using it and I plan to broadcast it more widely through NASA. Once it has had success at NASA, I’ll start outreach to other agencies.

On top of Fed Meetup, I have other ideas that I’m itching to build:

  1. I want to make an app for prayer that combines the best elements of Duolingo and Readwise. I often tell people I will pray for them and then forget, so I want to build something that solves that. A place I can store the things I want to be praying for, that also reminds me to pray and maybe even has some gamification to encourage me to keep engaging with my prayers.
  2. I also want to make a quick capture app. What I really want to make is a widget for an android or iPhone, that makes it dead simple to capture quick notes and have a running log of these quick notes. I haven’t found a satisfying solution for this yet.
  3. I’ve also considered writing a weekly email newsletter that either has a paid subscription option or a donate option. It would have to be something that provides value… I was thinking either “hacks” for the average office user to use their computer better, or a weekly interview with someone who works at NASA, highlighting the person and their work.

This is just the beginning of my ideas, so I’m going to create an /ideas page on this blog to store all of them. I want to share these publicly partly for accountability and partly because I think they need to be built, so I welcome others to build them too! If you have any interesting ideas you think we could work on together, I would love to hear them.

The Piece I’m Missing

The main way I differ from other indie hackers is that I don’t have an intense focus on monetization. I’m more of an indie hobbyist, who may one day metamorphose from hobbyist to hacker. Indie hackers are usually very focused on their Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) which is the key measure for a subscription based business. After reviewing my financial situation, my MRR between my blog and Fed Meetup is -$7. I pay $5/mo for blog hosting, and about $1/mo each for my domain names. And none of this is pulling in any money.

For now, I am content with that. I’m enjoying the craft of both writing and building software products. It brings me immense joy to write these blog posts and to build things like Fed Meetup. However, I do dream of a day when the side projects I’ve built over time could support my family financially. I am quite happy supporting my family through my W-2 job, but I am attracted to the romanticized freedom that having my own business(es) would afford. I know it won’t be all sunshine and rainbows, but I think it would fit my personality well.

In my mind, the key to all of this is experimentation. This is not a big announcement of a shift in focus or career for me. Rather, this is me sharing a potential future path that I plan to experiment with. I plan to start small with my hobbyist projects, giving some more thought to how I can monetize them. Actually, I’m quite excited about experimenting with monetization and value. Stories like the Zappos founder, Nick Swinmurn, fuel my imagination. He set up an online shoe store before having any inventory. While he was validating the company’s value proposition (would people buy shoes online without trying them on?), he would receive orders and then go out himself to local shoe stores to buy shoes and ship them out. Finding opportunities for this kind of “Wizard of Oz” testing to validate business viability is exciting and fun to me.

So why am I sharing all of this? Because you can expect to hear more from me about what I’m building. Building in public is about authentically sharing the journey from idea to product. I hope to do just that and I invite you to join me and follow along.