Eva

👩🏻‍💻 Indie dev and solopreneur
🚀 Building - a fun content creation tool that interviews YOU for stories and insights

[Eva @evactivate]

For those meeting me for the first time, nice to meet you! 👋

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! 🥳

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. 🙃

Allow me to share some of my greatest hits:

1. I love going all-in → Spent a year building each project. Without validation

2. I love learning new things → Spent half the time learning the next shiny new tech

3. I love building perfect products → 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! 👋

[Eva @evactivate]

So true, it’s really quite different psychologically to be on the other end, being asked a question really triggers this urge to respond 🤔

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

Haven’t really found that middle ground, a b2c AI interviewer-like app for productivity/creativity/work

[Eva @evactivate]

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 😅)

Instead, they're ONLY using the AI chat feature. Like, multiple times a day, every single day

So here goes nothing… I’m going to extract that feature into its own standalone AI chat app and see what happens 👀

[Eva @evactivate]

@rcwhiteley I feel like there’s definitely a niche for this kind of app! Especially in education or something

[Eva @evactivate]

@kelvongx I emailed them a few days ago and found out a couple are using it for creative storytelling or academic exploration and brainstorming

[Eva @evactivate]

@rcwhiteley Apparently some people like having an AI that does nothing but ask you questions 😆

It’s not a typical AI chat that you can prompt, cuz it’s an AI designed to prompt YOU for answers

[Eva @evactivate]

@ziyan_abbas Whooo, congrats! 🎉

[Eva @evactivate]

@dmytro_omelian Retention has been my biggest challenge for a while so it’s nice that there’s one thing they like 😭

[Eva @evactivate]

@Digital_Reverie Dang, make sure you get the rest you need!

[Eva @evactivate]

@tom_antok @AbdulRafey13321 Definitely planning to target LinkedIn and the other channels too! Just starting with TikTok cuz it’d be the fastest to experiment on

[Eva @evactivate]

Suddenly getting a lot of love from Google Play and I still have no idea why 😳

Users that discovered the app through Google Play literally jumped from <10 users a week to >200 a week

[Eva @evactivate]

@AbdulRafey13321 Tbh, I haven’t done any marketing for the past couple months due to working on major app updates but I’m 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

[Eva @evactivate]

@Digital_Reverie Ouch, that sounds pretty bad man 💀

How long will it take to heal completely?

[Eva @evactivate]

@b3nhatch I hated tailwind for the first 2 weeks before loving it afterward 😆

[Eva @evactivate]

@Hritik7742 @enggirlfriend 😆

[Eva @evactivate]

@Alexander_333_ And also 10x more stressful with live users around haha 😂

[Eva @evactivate]

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 😱

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 😭

[Eva @evactivate]

@ziyan_abbas 😭

[Eva @evactivate]

@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!

[Eva @evactivate]

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! 💙

[Eva @evactivate]

@itstonyhb Just saw this, thank you so much for reaching out! Just replied to your email