My progress with 30x500 (including some stats :-D)

My 30x500 journey started in January with this question here on IH. I started a couple of projects before but none of them were successful for various reasons. So I decided to take a step back and look at my approach. I read a lot of material and listened to podcasts about building businesses. Luckily a fellow indie hacker at the Berlin IH Meetup told me about Amy Hoy and stackingthebricks.com. I immediately fell in love with the content. The decision to enroll in her and Alex course was quickly made.

So here I am a couple of months later. Since the question mentioned above sparked a lot of interest I'd like to share my progress with you.

Some background information: During the 30x500 course you start writing a blog. The goal is to build an email list which you can later use to launch your first product. This product is supposed to be something small like a short ebook.

What I did the past months

• stopped reading and listening to business advice except for the course
• went through the first half of the course in a couple of weeks
• picked my target audience and the topic for the blog (GraphQL & React)
• started analyzing online communities related to that topic
• started the blog at jkettmann.com
• got more involved in some online communities
• read a couple of self-improvement books

Key Learnings

• go steady and slow and make it a habit
• analyze your users' needs from questions and discussions
• build products (e.g. write content) accordingly
• getting traction for content is quite hard in the beginning
• getting users to signup for a newsletter is even harder
• building small products (e.g. writing blog posts) lets you go through the typical product cycle (build, launch, disappointment) fast and often

Stats

• 10 blog posts
• around 200 visitors per month
• 7 newsletter subscribers (of which 3 are friends of mine)

The most successful blog posts so far were about authentication with GraphQL and Passport.js and combining server-side data and client-side state with Apollo. These have an average scroll depth of 80% and time per visitor of 4 to 5 minutes.

Conclusion

I'm pretty happy with the course so far. It's probably not enough to go through it one time since the lessons are pretty packed. Since you need to do a lot of exercises you need to be prepared to invest a substantial time effort. The advantage is that you can take it slow and scatter the time effort over a longer period.

I didn't see too much outcome yet, but there was especially one comment from a user I was able to help that made me really happy:

This is a godsend! (...) I just tried it and it works so perfectly I can't express how cool that is, because it was 100 % the thing I was looking for and honestly didn't thought that I will receive an answer at all :P