How I Closed My Company and Started Indie Hacking

Hello dear subscribers,

First of all, don’t be surprised by the name of the newsletter, I renamed it from Sergey’s Newsletter to a more general name - Fast Makers as the newsletter will be not only about me but also about some technical topics, entrepreneurship, and marketing.

For those who recently joined my newsletter, you can read about me in the previous issue: Welcome to My Newsletter

At the beginning of this year, to be more specific in February, I closed my 7-year-old Software Outsourcing company, due to lack of clients and income. But everything started way earlier than that.

I started to see a decline in my business in 2020, since covid hit. At that time we lost our biggest clients, as they started to lose funding, and it started to become harder and harder to land new ones. By the end of 2023, I realized that I was no longer able to keep the team. I had a full-time job and was using my salary to cover office expenses and salaries, but I got laid off. I cut half of the team.

At the beginning of 2024, we lost our last client, and I was forced to close the company.

It was a hard decision. I was so used to the “Founder” title, that I could not imagine myself doing something else, that option was off the table. But when you are not able to pay salaries, you have no other choice.

As you might know, when you lay off someone, you have to pay for a few months of their salary, so I took a loan, to be able to afford that, and ended up in debt. Paid the salaries, and now it’s time to pay the loan.

At that time I had already started to create my new product, PosterGPT, it was a tweet automation tool, based on RSS newsfeed, powered by ChatGPT. You set the RSS feed, choose the schedule and the tool will publish tweets about the latest news for you. I posted about it on Linkedin, and I started to see some posts, one of them stood out - it was a post from Tibo, about how he made 13 startups and only one of them worked. He also posted about marketing channels, and that’s how I came to Twitter and accidentally found out about Indie Hackers.

Indie Hacking

During my career, I always loved to create things, open-source packages, some free tools, etc., and my dream goal was to have my own startup, that can bring money and that my team can stop doing client work.

I started to post on Twitter, telling my story, and experimenting. And I saw Marc and got inspired by his ShipFast. I thought, okay, we need the same for Laravel too.

That’s how Larafast was born.

In the next episode, I will talk about how and when I’ve got my first sale for Larafast, which marketing tricks I’ve used, and how being authentic in social media is important.

Cheers everybody,
Serg
from Larafast