1 Year of IndieHacking — Why you should start NOW!

A year ago, February 2024, I started to do Indie Hacking.

So who are they, Indie Hackers? What’s the allure around them?

I’ll try to explain how I see it.

It’s a group of tech enthusiasts who try to escape their daily jobs on the way to freedom, a better life, and creative fulfillment. These are individuals who leverage their skills to build and grow their own businesses, usually with limited resources and without external funding. They are usually against VC funding. More for a freedom than being tied to someone else’s decisions.

A year ago, I found out about them, after closing my software company after 7 years of running it. You can read about it in my previous article.

In this article I will talk about what I have learned during this year, how it is working for me, and what’s the plan for the future.

The Beginning

The first impression about the community and its members was — “Wow, dammit, I could have done this all the time, creating small projects, promote them, fail, do again”, instead I was working on the projects for months with my team, investing all the income from my outsourcing business, and still failing.

When you see guys like yourself, desperate, grinding their way in this life, you are getting inspired. You see people less experienced than you, beginners, who try hard to win this life. And they do win. Even when it’s not with successful product, they win, by getting the experience running this businesses. You cannot buy that.

I tried to jump the wave, I met a lot of new people, who were very nice, everyone wanted to help, to inspire. My first product as an Indie, PosterGPT (you can learn about it in the article above), it didn’t work. I had good ideas around it, and I could pivot it, but I didn’t. Don’t ask me why, I still regret it.

Then I saw Marc Lou, with his Starter Kit for NextJS, and I thought to make one for myself, but with Laravel. I’ve been doing Laravel for 8 years already, and I have a lot to offer to the community. So I made it. In a week.

My first sale for Larafast

It was mid February, and guess what, after 10 days of being live, I made my first sale. Out of the blue. In the middle of the night.

That was the first lesson for me — you don’t have to have a big audience, to make money online, back then I had bit more than 200 followers on Twitter. What you need is — good product, talking to customers, DM people, send emails, post on social media. Spread the word, otherwise how people will know about you and your product?

To date, almost in a year, Larafast made $65,000 in revenue.

The path

While you are building your product in public, it’s important to share your stories, your successes, your failures, share some tips that worked for you. That’s the whole idea of Build in Public, no? To share and learn from each other.

So I started to share. Almost every step that I did with Larafast, the marketing channels that worked, the SEO tricks, the sneaky marketing tactics. First time in my career, I found a community where I can ask questions about the fields that I am not skilled enough— marketing, SEO, backlinks. And people willing to help you, for free.

Build in Public taught me to overcome the imposter syndrome. Because the more you tweet, the more you are getting comfortable doing it, getting our of your comfort zone. I didn’t had problems getting out of comfort zone, but I did that in private, sharing about it wasn’t a thing for me a year ago.

I even started a YouTube channel, started to do videos, recording myself. It’s still hard to this day, but when I do, I feel revealed and happy.

Started to DM and send cold emails. And I realized why people don’t like it. We just hate to be rejected. But we should love the outcome more, than we hate to be rejected. Does that make sense? I hope so.

I found a job. Through Twitter. Twice. 
But I quit both to focus on my projects.

The Plans

My current focus is Directify — the No-Code Directory Website builder.

The idea of it came from one of my customers from Larafast, who got Directory Starter Kit and said it would be cool to have the similar, but for non-technical people.

And here is it — Directify already helps 1000s of people to create directories in few minutes, add integrations, create content, build traffic and earn money.

The plan is, to grow Directify, to compete against existing giants with more modern and easy solution, instead of traditional and heavy Drag & Drop website builders.

I need to continue recording more videos about my journey in YouTube and talk more there about Directify.

During this path, you meet a lot of great people, making some online friends, I met some of them offline, and hopefully can meet more.

This one year taught me that there can be bad days, there can be amazing days, and can be lazy days. But as long as you keep the path, you are on the right track.

I am surprised to this day how I cannot know about that community after being in the industry for 11 years.

Join me on my journey:

🎥 YouTube — @karakhanyansa
🐦 Twitter — @karakhanyans
🛠️ Directify — directify.app
⚡ Larafast — larafast.com