Read about indie hacking from the trenches

Indie Hacking – building smol businesses on your own terms – is a strange beast to me. From my first experiments back in 2011 where I went from idea to sales in 3 days to nowadays where I have a full-time job but think like a consultant, indie hacking has been near and dear to my heart.

I believe this is the best and worst time to launch something.

The best because consumers are used to paying and they hate big tech. People want your thing and they want to pay you. Not a faceless behemoth that steals their data and turns users into commodities. Blech

And if you're an engineer or product manager, the swan song of easy money in tech is irresistible.

Sometimes it feels like my career is running backwards πŸ˜…

But I'll never stop tinkering on the side. Multiple streams of income are a great way to recession proof your career.

Leave your email and get the Indie Hacking Series - a series of curated essays from the trenches of Indie Hacking.

Latest IndieHacking articles from Swizec

It made me $500k but I think content is a bad business

Why I didn't become a full-time creator/educator

Coding is a brawl, not a battle of wits

Discover why coding is more like a boxing match, focused on delivering results rather than perfect technique. Learn how to navigate economic upheaval and prioritize business needs in this unexpected comparison.

The market always wins

No amount of growth hacking, investor money, or a/b testing will save you, if people don't want what you have.

What is the goal of engineering?

How can you know you're succeeding if you don't know where you're going?

Most professional engineers can't build an app from scratch

5 crazy ideas that make $1,000/month

"There's a YouTube video for everything"

Building software is a distraction

How to make what you're worth even if you're from the wrong country

Build better software with The Theory of Constraints

Q1 2019 in Swizec LLC land #open

Indie startup more profitable than Uber πŸ˜›

How I sidehustled $180k and why it almost killed my business

React for Dataviz Turkey πŸ¦ƒ sale report for the curious

Oh the things you can learn with a fun weekend hack project πŸ—

Why you aren’t drowning in recruiters, too

How I sponsored my own genius visa

Announcing: Big update to my best selling book and course, React + D3v4

The surprising benefit of hiring interns to write your code

Intern process part 2 – (my first) webinar, about React context

Tech intern job

2018 is off to a rocky start

Don't say yes when you're happy

Am I thinking too small?

How I sidehustled $72,167 last year, and what I wanna do next

My new 5K monitor – LG UltraFine 5K 😱

Teaching backend devs how to React and Redux at StubHub Boston

$2535 November sidehustle report

Why I won't be switching to VSCode any time soon

$16,863 October sidehustle report

What I learned from teaching StubHub about React and Redux

$9013 September sidehustle report – or why the React + D3v4 launch was not 6 figures or even 5

$2629 August sidehustle report

The story behind React + D3v4

$3426 July sidehustle report

How to start a sidehustle

$4093 June sidehustle report

Initial Results of my Patreon Experiment

First day with a new 2017 MacBook Pro

$2890 May sidehustle report

What happened to React + D3v4?

How I Got Boned by Taxes Two Years in a Row

$2529 April sidehustle report

$5874 March sidehustle report

Why I don't write more Nightowls type stuff

A boutique React & D3v4 workshop – and my first vlog

Why People Read my Weekly Emails

This is how I connected my Canon DSLR as a webcam

$3875 February sidehustle report

Nights and Weekends

What I learned while 6x-ing my income in 4 years

React Indie Bundle flopped. Here's why.

These 19 Words are the Only Self-Help & Business Advice You Need

Why coding is more fun than engineering

I Got Schooled

After a year, my first business diary retires

The ES6 Cheatsheet story and results

The surprising difficulty of paying the US government

Things I learned from doing my first workshop

Why I switched to making products

Does it even make sense to move to San Francisco?

React Indie Bundle report, or how we made $31k in a week

The Evolution of a Freelancer: Lessons from the Hallway Track at DYFConf

Why offices are where work goes to die

How a book I wrote in two weeks made $4,000 in its first month

It took me ten months to write a video course

Dear tech companies, this is not how you hire engineers

What I learned about freelancing by getting a haircut

How to royally cock up as a freelancer

After five months, my effective hourly rate with a publisher is 3eur/hour

Getting lucky with Bitcoin

I published a book with a publisher. Here's what the journey was like.

Lessons learned in a year of freelancing

Age

Facebook ads: good for likes, bad for sales

How Draft got me to pay for a free product

The true difference between self publishing and using publishers

Numbers that baffle

I made $730 by selling an unfinished book for 3 days.

Lessons learned after a month of freelancing full time

Do waste many a single moment

Steal my startup idea: Rent-a-mum

An evil business model that works

Selling to girls

Two business things Slovenia needs to change

Why every entrepreneur should take up boxing

Stypi - the perfect blogging tool

Why programmers work at night

Shuush - perfect tool for all my twitter followers

Why I only work with startups

"Startup rollercoaster" isn't even the half of it

Spending money online is crazy hard!

Using prime numbers to generate pretty trees

Clients need deadlines too

Today was the worst day I've ever had

Student+entrepreneur != hard

Howto convince the iStore you're from the US and circumvent regional copyright restrictions

Of London, Murphy and Seedcamp

From idea to seedcamp application in a week