For those meeting me for the first time, nice to meet you! π
Here's a little background on how I ended up here:
I decided to become an indie hacker 6 years ago
So I packed my life into 2 suitcases, quit my SF tech job, and off I went to Taiwan! π₯³
Why? A few reasons:
1. Autonomy. I wanted freedom over my time & future
2. Creative freedom. I wanted to build my own projects after years working in B2B
3. Future-proofing. I have profound and progressive hearing loss. I didn't dare gamble my future on employers
So no matter how I sliced it, indie hacking was the path that made the most sense to me.
And I had some craving for Taiwanese lu rou fan too
As for the next 6 years......ummm, yeahhh, I wish I can say I have a bunch of success stories and hacks to share.
But it's just me making every classic dev mistake. Several times over. π
Allow me to share some of my greatest hits:
1. I love going all-in β Spent a year building each project. Without validation
2. I love learning new things β Spent half the time learning the next shiny new tech
3. I love building perfect products β Never shared my work until they're nearly "perfect"
I know, I know, I want to go back in time and smack myself too.
Anyway, here's my track record so far:
4 failures
1 small win (took 4 years to reach $500 MRR)
1 in progress (Conteflow)
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
One thing I did different this year was make an X account.
For context, I am a super introvert who avoided social media for over a decade.
But I was really tired.
Of building stuff no one wants
Of projects not getting any visibility
Of not having any feedback
So yeah, screw my comfort zone.
I'm not the most prolific poster
But I LOVE chatting with people who comes by my little corner and becomes a friendly face.
So feel free to drop a hi sometime! π
So true, itβs really quite different psychologically to be on the other end, being asked a question really triggers this urge to respond π€
Closest I can think of would be like b2b AI chatbots to collect data from users or b2c AI companion apps but these are still pretty different haha
Havenβt really found that middle ground, a b2c AI interviewer-like app for productivity/creativity/work
Since a month ago, I noticed a tiny but extremely engaged group of users using my app differently
They've basically ignored all the social media & content creation features (you know, the whole point of the app π )
Instead, they're ONLY using the AI chat feature. Like, multiple times a day, every single day
So here goes nothingβ¦ Iβm going to extract that feature into its own standalone AI chat app and see what happens π
@rcwhiteley Apparently some people like having an AI that does nothing but ask you questions π
Itβs not a typical AI chat that you can prompt, cuz itβs an AI designed to prompt YOU for answers
@tom_antok@AbdulRafey13321 Definitely planning to target LinkedIn and the other channels too! Just starting with TikTok cuz itβd be the fastest to experiment on
Suddenly getting a lot of love from Google Play and I still have no idea why π³
Users that discovered the app through Google Play literally jumped from <10 users a week to >200 a week
@AbdulRafey13321 Tbh, I havenβt done any marketing for the past couple months due to working on major app updates but Iβm planning to start with TikTok soon.
Currently, most of my traffic is coming from play store search and the rest seems to be organic word of mouth on various social platforms
Currently writing an apology email to some users because of a dumb mistake
Being the cheap person I am, I tried to stay on inngest's free plan for as long as possible until I couldn't
So I finally upgraded to their pro plan
and unleashed thousands of backlogged scheduled events that I didn't even know were there π±
Thank goodness I had SOME guardrails so only 24 users were affected instead of hundreds
But they got flooded with like 20-40 push notifications from my app in minutes
So yeah, personally emailing every single person right now π
@wilbertliu Thanks Wilbert, it's all good now!
inngest also later reached out with generous credits + looking into root cause too so that's really nice of them!
Well that escalated quickly (in the best way!)
@itstonyhb (inngest founder) reached out personally with 6 months of credits and looking into root cause.
I already liked inngest a lot as a product but your founder customer support is amazing too! π