Kudos to @jrleonr for sharing a vulnerable post on IH.
Personally I don’t think $12,000 is enough financial cushion to go all-in, start an idea from scratch and get to ramen-profitability. It’s just too short of a runway.
https://t.co/WQnwqQphat
Something that doesn’t get talked about enough is how much money do you need to become an Indiehacker?
Well here’s what my own finances looked like when I went all-in…
A thread 1/n
Kudos to @jrleonr for sharing a vulnerable post on IH.
Personally I don’t think $12,000 is enough financial cushion to go all-in, start an idea from scratch and get to ramen-profitability. It’s just too short of a runway.
https://t.co/WQnwqQphat
Here’s how much money I saved up over years of corporate work in order to take the plunge and go indie: $200,000
For context, I’m 40, single and had worked my way into quite senior positions by the tail end of my employment.
$200,000 was enough cushion for me to work on my own projects for years without drastically changing my lifestyle too much. In retrospect, I think I gave myself too much of a cushion. I basically played around for a year before getting really serious...
...but on the other hand, trying to stretch too small amount a money to the point where it drastically downgrades your lifestyle, affects the people you love and creates a constant atmosphere of anxiety is also counter-productive.
You can’t put a number on the “right” amount as it will depend on personal circumstances and living costs in your country etc
The answer is ambiguous: you need more than would cause you stress, and less than would trigger Parkinson’s law and make you waste time.
Going indie is not a linear experience.
You don’t just launch then grow predictably month after month.
You need time to launch, fail, pivot - where a financial cushion helps.
Then you need to commit and double down on something - where a financial ceiling helps.
If I had to define it more clearly, I think you need at least a year of *comfortable* runway to give it a proper shot.
You won’t do your best work if you are waking up in the morning worried about money from day 1.
More from Startups
There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.
Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.
"Who is the prototypical client here?"
A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.
(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)
"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"
I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.
On a serious note, it's interesting to observe that you can build a decent business charging $20 - $50 per month for something that any good developer can set up. This is one of those micro-saas sweet spots between "easy for me to build" and "tedious for others to build"
— Jon Yongfook (@yongfook) September 5, 2019
Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.
"Who is the prototypical client here?"
A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.
(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)
"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"
I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.
