My Third Year as a Full-Time Indie Hacker

I already replied on Twitter but it's super cool to see this one outsized success after the others didn't quite stick 100%. Already looking forward to the Fourth Year update :)

I remember reading your first post, 3 years ago, and thinking "Hey, that sounds like something I'd like to do!". I quit in December, and properly started exploring ideas in January. Thanks for the inspiration!

Thank you so much for sharing this, I loved reading every word you wrote! I'm also a a solo developer, former Google employee, and have been also toying around with a hardware component to my SaaS - and I'm just starting the beginning of year 3. I'd love to connect if you're open to it, will send you an email as well :)

Hey IH, three years ago, I posted on Indie Hackers to announce that I had quit my job at Google to become a full-time Indie Hacker.

I've enjoyed the entire journey, but my third year is when things finally clicked into place. My businesses earned $63k in revenue, an almost 7x increase from my previous year. I finally found the elusive product/market fit with my product TinyPilot, which represented 84% of my revenue for the year. My blog readership more than doubled, and I published my first-ever info product, a video course about blogging.

I'm happy to take any feedback about this post or answer any questions.

I like the high goal you're setting there. Your write-up inspired me to look at my own last year.

I was doing a whopping +68% month over month growth. BUT, in terms of dollars it was +100 dollars month-to-month avg growth.

I applied this 3 years forward and got immense numbers with the percentage and lame numbers with the dollars.

I guess what I mean to say is that while compounding growth is for sure where you want to go, I suppose at some point it may become difficult.

Thanks for sharing this. I just read year 1 - 3. This is really cool. I just started my own blog on my road to financial independence so this is really inspiring. I cant wait to follow the future of TinyPilot and your blog. Best of luck! :)

Very nice, I remember when you quit and was like :-O
You found a nice problem to solve. I have this problem, with a server in another room that I often have to drag a keyboard and monitor to. :-)

Very interesting read, Michael! I'll follow you here as well as on Twitter, best of luck in your future endeavors!