Weeks 11-17 of 52 to Indie Hacking

Hello there! Long time no see. 🙃 As I mentioned on my last issue, this summer I took 6 weeks off for holidays to calm down, have fun and think about the future. It was great and I am now back fully refreshed and full of positive energy to kickstart the winter season. 🙏

I feel I am happy. I feel I enjoy my life. I feel blessed and I have the life I always dreamed of. I feel I am in balance with the universe and myself.

My holidays in Greece this year were great. I spent time with my family, I went on two surfing trips and took some time to think. Of course there were moments I was frustrated or not feeling well but I did my best to not let them have a big influence on me. Life is a game of focus. You can focus either on the positive or the negative side of things. Such a cliche, right? What nobody tells is that focus is a muscle. A muscle that takes years of effort to strengthen. Truth is that you can never fully focus on the positive side of things. What you can do is to just focus most of the times on the positive and build an environment that protects you from the negative ones. That’s what I am trying to do as well.

On my holidays I had two options. To focus on the fact that I don’t have an income yet, and get panicked because I am using my savings to chill at the beach, or to enjoy the unique opportunity I had to take so many weeks off. The last time I could do this, was when I was in high-school (10 years ago). I finally decided to go for the second option and I still don’t regret it.

This time, I focused on enjoying the journey I am into. The journey of creating my own products and my own future. It took me almost 10 years to learn how to not be strict with myself and give me time to really enjoy these moments without feeling guilty. To reconsider the importance of quick growth and money. I should and want to work hard but I also want to keep things balanced. Slowing down creates this feeling of balance. It helps me observe and enjoy the journey.

I am heading to a beautiful destination. The path to get there is exciting, unique and I see things I’ve never seen before in my life. What I am trying to do is to enjoy all these things by having the time and calmness to experience them, observe them and fit them into my life. If I just rush I’ll lose all the magic and all the moments that are there waiting for me.

That’s my strategy to happiness so far. To slow down, accept myself and smile.

I like to say that life is a journey. A journey consists of two things. A destination and a path to get there.

Same happens with IndieHacking. I set destinations I want to reach (goals) and then I try to find paths that will get me there (strategies). However all these paths I find, do not guarantee me that they will get me there. I have to try them out and see what happens along the way. They may take me where I want to but they may take too much time. Or they may end up to another destination that I don’t want to go. I can never be sure about them. The only thing I can do is to analyze them as much as I can, understand how risky they are, and give them a try. Experimentation is the only way to learn.

“So what’s my destination?” I asked myself. “To just do IndieHacking? This is already happening. Where do I want to be on June 2021?”. I realized that my destination or in business-terms my goal wasn’t well-defined. And because of this it was a bit hard for me to define which strategy (path) I should try out.

I took sometime to think about it and ended up with the following goal. In these 12 months I want to:

Since my goal was clear the only thing that was left, was to define the strategy that will get me there.

That was it. My goals were clear. My strategy was clear. The only thing that was left was to start executing.

The last week I had a video call with Marco one of my journal subscribers and ex-colleague at TicketSwap. We discussed about our progress, what we are working on and how life feels like as an IndieHacker. At some point during our call he told me:

His comment got me thinking. I had received the exact same comment some weeks ago from Toon, another subscriber and fellow IndieHacker. He told me he liked a lot how I treat networking and the idea of measuring my progress and having goals for it. A few minutes later I realized that Networking, could be a great topic to build a product for. Every week I experiment with new ideas and grow my network constantly. I learn a lot of things and a course like that is the perfect way for me to share these learnings and make some money in the same time.

However on my previous issue I mentioned that I was about to start an audio lesson for UX design. I finally decided to pause this idea for now and focus on the Networking course since it’s more essential for IndieHackers. It’s also something I practice on a daily basis and this makes it easier for me to bring this course into life.

“Ok that’s it. This idea came from the feedback of my audience and my approach has already been proven to work. It feels like a safe bet to take.” I spent 2 hours writting the first outline in my Notion workspace. This was the proof for me that I really had something to teach about on this topic and that it also feels inspiring enough. It was a quick and sudden progress. A few hours later I messaged Charlotte from AvidFM and updated her as well. I explained her that I want to release this lesson until end of October and we made a quick plan together.

“So that’s it. It’s now official.” I said to myself. “It’s happening! I am creating my first product.” I had no idea how to to call it but I came up with a temporary name for now.

Note: If you are interested into this course, feel free to reply to this email and I can send you the full lesson for free. The only thing I will ask in return is some feedback in order to form a better understanding of your struggles. This way I’ll be able to create more value for you in the future. 🙂

The last week, like the previous ones, I spent a lot of time meeting new people and discussing about our journeys, learnings and current projects. All of them helped me move forward and shaped my future in their own way. They are now part of my story. That’s why I decided to include them in my journal.

On Friday I had a call with Toon. I’ve been helping him a bit the last months with his product UX strategy and we had a call to catch up. At some point we were discussing about how tough it can be to follow an unconventional path during the Covid19 times. To quit your stable job to pursue your dreams and use savings for that.

During my holidays I heard the same thing. I met some friends and I got asked the same question over and over again. “How did you decide to quit your job without having an idea to work on and make money? How can you use savings to survive and not invest your savings into an idea?”

My answer was always the same and that’s what I also said to myself back on June when I decided to quit my job.

“My goal is to go the next level as an entrepreneur. I want to invest into myself and my education and not just into my ideas. To invest into learning and figure out my next steps. Ideas come and go but knowledge stays there. I find it sometimes stupid to just wait for that one big idea that will make me feel safe to quit me job. If I can quit now and pursue the IndieHacking path why not do it? I have most of the skills I need. I just need to go for it and build a strategy around it. Before I quit I didn’t know about the stair step approach nor about micro-products. I wasn’t sure that networking can bring me a tone of opportunities. I figured out all of these along the way. The only thing I did back then was to trust myself that I will find the right path to follow. And that’s how I decided to quit my job. I wanted provide me 8+ of free hours per day that can be invested into research, experimentation and networking. And it has actually worked pretty well so far! Of course it’s painful when I watch my savings being decreased every month but I need to invest in order to get something in return. That’s how assets and investments work. My knowledge, and my time are the most important assets I have. Their ROI is always outstanding.”

On top of that I was always mentioning the following metaphor.

“Why are people so comfortable into investing thousands of dollars into bachelors and masters? For some reason it makes more sense for most people to spend 50.000€ to get a master degree than spending €30.000 to buy their time and get into entrepreneurship. You could say that, what I am doing at this moment is an MBA or a master degree. Or something like that. I just teach myself in a different (and harder) way and I don’t follow the traditional path. I’ve done it again in the past when I co-founded Befoolish and it works. I decided to drop-out and never got a bachelor degree. Instead I focused on learning by doing. That’s how my brain works and this is what bring me more happiness. The result in the end is the same and even better in my case. I end up with more knowledge, more education and a bigger business network.”

Most of the times they agreed with me and liked that metaphor. Nobody can debate the importance of education. That’s why this mental model also convinced me to go for it. I am investing into one of my most important assets, my education. I just do it in an unconventional way. 🙃