Part 1 — Journey: Starting as Indie Hacker From scratch.
Indie Hacker (according to me) : One who create a bootstrapped products starting of as a small side project and listening closely to the early customers feedback, feature requests and improving the customer experience and the product itself .
My Motto.
To be creative is to keep creating
Why would i want to be an indie hacker?
I wanted to solve small problems people face in daily life. I feel Joy in finding people actually using stuff i create . It is just like people buying the art you created and hanging them in their living room that makes an impact to one who looks into it. I want to interact with people and solve their basic problems . I wanted to be indie hacker to create an impact.
My journey.
I always had my eye on art , Creating something on canvas that can put your thoughts to one place, calm your mind . In doing so I realized that it is one of the way how the art we create can help people find peace .
It was in 2013 , I was in my engineering 2nd year and as like all the other kids facing normal college life until I was introduced to web development in a workshop . I realized then as web is a huge and never ending canvas where we can portrait our art as digital products . At first I learnt basic HTML5 , but I wanted to make it colorful and neat then came CSS3 , then I wanted to animate the design then I was introduced to JavaScript .
In 2015, when during my days of love to the web as it was introduced and I started playing with it . I loved what the web can actually do , Now I was following all the web development and technology . I was fascinated with all and loved how the AI and ML could make art more even interactive , this was the time when startup ecosystem blossomed and was growing .
I was a solo dreamer so I thought to go on my own .
Applied for BITS pilani GroundUp event and presented my initial idea of a platform(which ultimately was discontinued) which helps u get all the boilerplate needed to start with an idea to launch of product .
Until 2016 , I put myself into learning and trying out new technologies from Progressive web app to an hybrid android app . The apps were basic and they helped me know how the platforms actually work.
I kept asking for questions along the way in stack overflow which were pretty basic though but it couldn’t help. I landed into a full-time Job . I felt starting a startup is not possible with the process I followed . Then I decided “why don’t I start small ” .
In 2017, i started to make google assistant, messenger bot, that helps students learn programming and interview questions on the go. It was a great idea but it need a lot of time and experience.
Until 2018, i kept trying for a small and better applications, that are tiny but much needed , above all i wanted to solve basic problems . I learned and followed people who started side projects like Dinuka Jayasuriya who has an idea to “create 20 apps in 2018”, It was when he launched tweetfast . A mac os menu bar app that sends a lightning fast tweet from any app you use or while watching movie.
Tigran Hakobyan who started cronhub.io ,i have learned how we can manage time with full-time job and still manage to do side projects that are productive. They gave me a lot of information and that helped me to think like one! .
In June i finally made up my mind to launch an app that may be small but productive. After brainstorming I came up with snippera simple code snipet manager that stays in the menu bar and helps you use it on editor you are working on .
I used learning fom other indie hackers to think in my own space(developers) that I better knew as Tigran looked into while creating cronhub . And how to build an app that solves a basic problem is a learning I took from Dinuka with his product tweetfast.
Hope this post helps you to get inspired to start your own Indie hacker journey. I will chain this series of posts on how and what mistakes and learning i got after my first launch .
In the next part I will write why I wanted to start from scratch and what was the reasons.
Thank you.
Achuth Hadnoor.
DM me on twitter , instagram .
