Growth isn’t always visible
The hardest part of growth isn't the work, but not being able to see progress even when there is
Saw this on my LinkedIn feed, couldn’t agree more:
This is both my observation and my hope.
Observation because behind every successful indie hacker I see on Twitter is a long grind nobody heard of. Every single one whose MRR is on the tens/hundreds of thousands and above, didn’t get there overnight. If it seemed overnight, it was because they were toiling away in obscurity for YEARS before they got internet famous. Ten years is a common story arc. They ran through 10s or not multiples of 10s of products before they hit the jackpot. They hustled and worked hard at their skills—development, marketing, design, network—before it all came together in one knockout product. They were all barely making any money, with MRR charts that were flatlined for forever, before the chart suddenly and decisively trended up.
And the common thread to them all – they never stopped, they never gave up, even when things didn’t look like it was moving on the outside.
Like the tree growing roots.
They were growing roots through all those years. So that when the season came for it to finally grow its trunk upwards, the roots were ready.
I kinda lost count of just how many years I’ve been indie hacking. Every time someone asks me, I come up with a different number, off the top of my head. There’s different start dates if you consider different factors. The first time I launched something? The first internet dollar? The first MRR dollar? Or first product I coded myself? But if I really trace back, it probably started around 2018 when I started launching on Product Hunt.
That’s around 6 years already.
This is were I come to the second part - that “growth is not always visible” is not just my observation but also my hope.
I hope what I’ve been doing these 6 years were me just growing and deepening roots.
I hope I’ve been learning and growing in skill and resources as an indie hacker.
I hope one day it will all come together in one or a few products.
I hope I will get to ramen profitability of $10,000 per month.
I hope I will get to my “eff you money” profitability of $100,000 per month.
One day, I hope.
Until then, I’ll keep growing roots.
Even when growth isn’t always visible.