Is your indie project generating revenue?
I always wonder how other people doing indie or side projects doing and wether they are making revenue are positive and the journey on how they achieved that! Share it with me!
Little side not, i haven’t made a dime with any of my indies
I started Indie Hacking in 2012. Was able to quit my day job in 2014. I’ve launched 5 products over the past 10 years, and today 3 of them are still around. Generating a bit over $2M in yearly revenue between the 3 companies.
I’ve seen a lot of Indie Hackers start something really cool here, then find success, and they kinda just disappear. I understand why they do, because there is so much more value to be held in some of the private groups that exist for midsize SaaS. However, it’s important to me to stick around and offer the same value, that others gave to me when I was pre revenue.
I’m really excited to see the Allen brothers take back Indie Hackers. The energy around here has been really cool! Reminds me of the early days when I first joined.
wow that is really motivating!
I was able to generate revenue from my side projects right from the start.
While it may not be enough to make a fortune, I am still satisfied with the overall outcome. After all, I learned a lot during this journey.
would you mind sharing more of this journey with us?
Not yet. I worked part time on my project for the last 2 years, built an MVP. Now it’s time to either finally find a product market fit or to pivot/shutdown. The next months will be fun.
Sounds cool, have you set some kind of threshold or red line where you would stop? Or some goal which would tell you yes it is worth doing?
This is an excellent topic for discussion. From what I see, there are no standard rules for measuring Product Market Fit (PMF). Apart from I'd say constant growth that is required (metrics and KPI may vary). They say, "You will feel it", seriously :D For now, I've switched to full-time founder this week. And the next three months will be doing marketing and sales mostly, I think. And track KPIs weekly/monthly and analyze them. If in these three months, there is still no interest, I need to pivot or shut down.
My first goal is very basic - 10 paid B2C customers. Then simply add a zero, and you get the next goal automatically :)
I think I will say it was worth it when I reach 1000 monthly active users. I feel like it should not be a very hard goal. Let's see.
I am wishing you all the luck! That is a really bold move to go fulltime. i couldn’t bring myself to this point yet, I need more security
Thank you, and likewise, good luck with your project! I was planning my switch for at least a year :) So it's never too late to try, I guess. You will have your moment yet.
just started a side project last month, it seems that nobody like my tool，very depressed
It's not that much an indie project as it is a well-established company. But yeah, we generated revenue from week 5 (we are a B2B Enterprise SaaS so our sales cycle is 5 weeks).
Does one paying client count? Because Keenforms has one paying client.
https://keenforms.com
sure, small steps always lead to something!
Yes! I have a contact info sharing/updating app and to bring in revenue I added support for NFC tap tags, which people can buy on my company's website. They have only been available for a couple of weeks, but so far the feedback has been good and I'm really pleased with how they turned out.
Wow that sounds really great! Would you mind sharing your revenue sofar?
Just enough to buy a pizza :)
haha that is a life goal :P
what is your project? as @ahmedhossam01 says use ssg to geberate your site and host it for free on cloudflare pages. ssl is automatic, you will also get version control for free with ssg.
My project is https://memoiri.app it is a simple journaling app
Hey! I've just tried "memoiri" app and it looks promising. I was searching for a diary app just a couple of days ago and installed Day One back then. But I'll try memoiri also, maybe will do a switch. By the way, do you plan to introduce sharing account data between devices? It would be great.
Thanks a lot for your feedback! Really appreciate it! Yes I am working on adding cloud sync, one of the main drivers for memoiri was privacy but i understand that people would love to have the option to switch between devices. I was thinking of adding cloud sync only for subscription to cover the server costs.
Ah, security-wise, moving to the cloud sync isn't the best, indeed. Privacy can actually be a selling point, but then you could try promoting it accordingly. Or if you see that more users need cloud sync, go that way. It's probably will be difficult to take both seats :) Anyway, wish you to find your audience!
thanks a lot! I will try. any further suggestions you would like to see in memoiri? Would you mind leaving an appstore review with a few nice words? That would help me a lot! thanks in advance
I just left a review on the AppStore. All the best with the app!
Not at all!! I only finished my MVP a day ago and am currently going through the slog of getting people to visit my landing page. Having a ball with it either ways
Marketing is so tough
I feel you there - I'm trying out content marketing but the way I have my proxy set up is making wordpress cause SSL issues, i'm half tempted to hard code the blog posts in the react app
Blog posts in react app? You must be using SSG or SSR for that matter right? Because React and single page apps aren't SEO friendly.
Also I recommend looking into Jekyll as a wordperss alternative. Or Ghost if you want a full solution with hosting and everything set up.
Oh cool i'll check it out!
The working solution I have ATM is I'm running a wordpress docker image in the VM and just pointing to it at domain/blog in the reverse proxy. Hoping that I get a little bit of an SEO bump that way, but still fairly new to it all haha