i went from not knowing how to code, to making my first mobile app in less than 1 year, and getting it to
- 100,000 downloads
- $50,000 in revenue
here's my *super secret hack* for making insane progress quickly:
Where do I start…
For a big part of my life, I didn’t fit in.
At school, I’d argue with teachers because I didn’t like what I was learning.
At university, I got bad grades and drank way too much to build a personality.
At my short 9–5 job, I kept wondering what I was doing there.
I joined Twitter in November 2021.
When I discovered the indie hacking community, I felt a sense of belonging for the first time in my life.
It’s hard to describe, but I loved the idea of working on your own thing and sharing everything publicly. It felt like freedom.
So I started building startups.
1 in 2021.
10 in 2022.
It took almost a year to reach 1,000 followers.
I never planned to build an audience. I thought that if I kept building things, some people might discover my work.
In my wildest dreams, maybe 10,000 followers?
So I kept building.
10 more startups in 2023.
As I shipped many small bets, some started to take off. They paid my rent. More people followed.
Then ShipFast launched in August 2023. It reached $50k/month, and my audience started growing faster.
In June 2024, my account passed 100k followers. It felt unreal.
A few days ago, I saw my profile picture in the 𝕏 App Store screenshot.
Today, my account crossed 300k.
Now, some people recognize me in the street.
None of this was planned. None of it was expected.
I’m beyond grateful.
Thank you for being here. You gave meaning to this whole journey. ❤️
Today my boss asked me if we're "ready for AI this year".
I said absolutely. I told him we've been running "machine learning models" on our data infrastructure for the past 18 months and we're seeing "significant optimization gains."
He asked for specifics. I said, "Our email filtering system uses neural networks to detect phishing attempts with 97% accuracy."
He looked impressed.
Here's the truth: that's just the default spam filter in Office 365. Microsoft built it. We didn't do anything.
But I rebranded it as "AI-powered threat detection" in a slide deck last year, and now everyone thinks we're innovators.
My boss wants to announce our "AI initiatives" in the next shareholder meeting. I told him I'd prepare a presentation.
I'm going to take every automated process we already have—backup scripts, user provisioning, patch management—and add the words "AI-enhanced" in front of them.
Innovation isn't about building new things.
It's about renaming old things with better buzzwords.
I used to have a dream that I’ll retire at 45, and I’ll be spending my time in my house on a beach, drinking cocktails and swimming.
It took me 30 years to notice that reach time I have a vacation, I’m absolutely bored by rest after a week.
My brain craves side projects, reading papers, doing open-source, writing articles, streaming, making tutorial videos, and learning.
The ultimate goal is not have enough to do nothing.
It’s having enough to do actually something you always wanted.
Side note: I find all of the speculation around our tech stack choices incredibly weird and cringe.
I’m sharing this information because I wish it existed when I made these decisions. There’s nobody else I know of that ships at this scale and shares all their decision making processes as they do it.
I’m far from the only person trying out all of this stuff. We’re not the only team evaluating every option and migrating our tech.
We’re the only ones who share it publicly.
“hurr Theo can’t help but adopt the shiny new thing” - this is a statement that comes from a lack of experience. Makes sense, most of Reddit is unemployed.
The difference between me and other tech leads is not tech choices, it’s levels of visibility and transparency.
If I was less confident in our technical ability, the constant harassment would 100% keep me from sharing this stuff. That’s why nobody else does it.
I’m thankful to all the people who reach out to tell me how helpful these deep dives are. Y’all are the reason I still talk about it 🙏
just so we're clear:
Antigravity is a Windsurf wrapper
Windsurf is a VSCode wrapper
VSCode is an Electron wrapper
Electron is a Chromium wrapper
Chromium is a C++ wrapper
C++ is a C wrapper
C is an Assembly wrapper
Assembly is a Machine Code wrapper
Machine Code is a Binary wrapper
Binary is a Physics wrapper
Physics is a Math wrapper
Math is a Logic wrapper
Logic is a Philosophy wrapper
Philosophy is a Humans wrapper
Humans are a Carbon wrapper
Carbon is a Star-forged-matter wrapper
Stars are a Gravity wrapper
Gravity is… definitely not an Antigravity wrapper
I went through the exact same thing last October.
I grew up with no money. Everything was survival. People looked down on me for not having the nice house or nice cars.
So I thought:
If I make money, I'll finally be respected. I'll finally be enough.
I created the whole vision board high-rise apartment, designer clothes, supercars, business, expensive airlines.
Then I reached it.
And I felt… nothing.
I forced myself into years of pressure and pain for a finish line that wasn’t even mine.
And the people I wanted to prove wrong? They still don’t care in fact they people hat you more when you succeed.
So I went to therapy.
My therapist asked: “What are your values?”
All I could say was: “Money. Freedom.”
He said:
“Humans aren’t wired to chase money. They’re wired to serve. That’s where fulfillment comes from.”
And:
“If you run your own race, you can never lose.”
That broke me.
I realized I was running a race built by society, not by me. I was an NPC in my own life.
So I rewired everything.
Wrote down my top 10 values... defined them my way.
Unlearned everything society taught me about worth because your value isn’t money, status, fame. It’s kindness. Wisdom. Courage. Virtue. How you treat people who can’t give you anything.
I paused the business. Took the revenue hit. Healed my inner child. Because losing yourself while making millions is the worst kind of failure.
If you’re in this chapter: pause.
Stop running a race that isn’t yours.
Fulfillment will never come from money, metrics, optics, or status.
Those are byproducts of becoming a better human of serving, healing and having faith.
That’s where real peace is.
Should I turn https://t.co/lo8UoR1imT into a community project so no more fake MRR? 🤔
- Anyone can verify startups with Stripe for free
- Ask @IndiePageApp bot “is it real MRR”
- Make it profitable with sponsors (instead of a one time payment curently)
You can enroll in my animation course for the next 10 days!
It's the perfect way to learn the theory behind great animations, but also how to build them in code.
We'll cover all of these components and more, source code included.
if you default to betting that any new technology or product is overhyped, you'll almost always be right
this might seem like an outlandish statement because lately AI breakthroughs seem to be the exception to this rule, but broadly it's still true
the problem is, although you'll be correct 99% of the time, you could lose out big on the edge cases when society does fundamentally shift
so my general rule is to always have a small hedge when new things happen, but to never actually emotionally engage with these things
for example many people think that traditional UGC is dead now that sora 2 has been released
it's probably not going to kill traditional UGC, but we want to be in a good position if that ends up being true
so we'll run a small experiment with sora 2 and see how it goes, but otherwise we will continue to stay on course with our human UGC engine
the problem is that most people choose the two (in my opinion) worst paths whenever there's a big announcement
1. freak out and overindex hard (for example spending weeks/months solely focusing on using Sora 2 for UGC rather than doing the existing highest leverage tasks that you know will 10x your business)
this is an exhausting way to live in my opinion, but could still lead to huge outsized results if you are early and double/quadruple down when you see positive results
2. freaking out and then not doing anything about it (posting and believing that Sora 2 can 100x your business then not implementing it in your business)
this is just clearly the worst of all options, only costs you emotional bandwidth and your expected outcome trends downwards
not trying to be a buzzkill, i am generally an optimist for all things, but i just fear some founders are tempted by the illusion of progress by being 'in the know' about every little announcement from every sector of tech
best to stay heads down and focus on the things you know will make your product better and set the bar very high for external distractions imo
Every massive following starts at 0 👇
I broke down @marclou's journey to 200k+ followers
Here’s how his growth exploded:
Nov 15, 2021 - ~0 followers
Apr 12, 2022 - 200
Jul 18, 2022 - 1k
Aug 24, 2022 - 2k
Nov 14, 2022 - 4k
Dec 16, 2022 - 6k
Jan 5, 2023 - 8k
Jan 13, 2023 - 10k
Feb 13, 2023 - 13.5k
Apr 8, 2023 - 20k
Aug 9, 2023 - 30k
Oct 4, 2023 - 40k
Nov 18, 2023 - 50k
Jan 29, 2024 - 69k
Apr 17, 2024 - 85k
Jun 2, 2024 - 100k (rock star moment 😀)
May 5, 2025 - 170k
Aug 20, 2025 - 200k
🌱 Growth isn’t instant - but it compounds
@serglotz@marclou@tinybird It confuses me as well, I used to think that Tinybird basically tracks and serves the analytics data without having to create a whole infrastructure for analytics tracking, but I might be wrong, only Marc could enlighten us 😅
"Build free tools"
But which one?
Meet — Lead Magnet Examples 🔥
We collected 200,000 lead magnet keywords.
Generators, analyzers, templates, plugins, apps.
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Ok my take on Vercel.
Do you know any other company where the CEO and devs are constantly online, listening to every little thing you need or miss?
Things I use daily from Vercel:
- Next.js: hands down the best React framework.
- Vercel Hosting: incredible, and I couldn't believe the hobby plan was free when I first tried it 2+ years ago.
- AI SDK + AI Elements: the best way to build AI apps.
Everything open source. Transparent. The list could go on and on.
That viral post called Vercel "cancer" but my experience is that it's one of the rare companies truly pushing the web forward.
Or as I like to say: they are true web dev warriors ⚔️
Forget chasing millions.
2,000 people paying $5/month = $10k MRR.
I pulled in 12,000 users off a single video (2.8M views).
You’re literally just one step away:
- 1 good video
- 1 right influencer
- 1 smooth onboarding
- 1 product that actually delivers
That’s all it takes to make it real.