My indie hacking genesis story
How it all started
I was writing up replies for founder interviews, and was nice to reminiscence about how this whole indie hacking journey started.
I remember two individuals being the early inspiration for going indie hacker - Pieter Levels (@levelsio) and Jon Yongfook (@yongfook).
This was around 2014.
I read Jon’s blog post of digital nomading and building a business by the beach, and I was transfixed. I loved that. I loved travel. I wanted to create products. This felt like the perfect combination of work and life. He was probably the very first digital nomad indie hacker I know.
Then right around the same time, I read about Pieter’s bootstrapped, ship fast approach of 12 startups in 12 months challenge. His approach to building made so much sense to me, even though it was the first time I heard of bootstrapping. It was refreshingly familiar. I guess the approach was new, but the underlying values/principles of building lean, shipping fast, running quick experiments aligned. I was enamoured by tech startups but the whole VC path always felt off to me. Now I know there’s a different way.
Those ideas from Jon and Pieter planted seeds in my head, and slowly after a few years, I got the courage to learning coding, build products and start trying.
It’s wild to think that that genesis event was 10 years ago.
10 years of exploring, wandering, meandering, struggling. Now I’m at around $1k monthly revenue.
That’s how long it took.
And I feel like I’m only just starting.
What will the next decade bring?