Introduce Yourself (May 2019)

I am developing an Internet Privacy Simulator where you play as an internet company, get users, mine their data and sell data to other people. In about 3 to 5 minutes of playing, players will have a gist of internet privacy.

I have built my MVP from scratch (with very basic coding knowledge), the development time took 30 hours but it was between November to March as I have a day job.

Right now, I am spending my time marketing for this project. Most of the time, I watch videos about startups, growth hacking, pitch decks and how to get a publisher.

Reddit is the best channel to build my community as I can see lots of ideas, conversations and forums happening. This game also aims to build awareness about internet privacy.

I've been here for almost a month and so far, I have learned a lot of things with other people like launching a startup, where to find alpha testers and the financials.

I give feedback to others as much as I can. This place has a lot of brains and people full of motivation to work on their dream.

When I'm not hosting events in Tokyo for Indie Hackers, I'm either:

• working full-time as an IC in growth or
• climbing mountains (finished kanagawa and tokyo, currently hiking in gunma and saitama) or
• studying people and cultures.

More about the last point below:

Launched in 2016 for free. Started making money in 2018 with $3,000+ MRR. A referral only (side) business.

I conduct a form of ethnography, embedding myself in the lives of consumers the way Margaret Mead did among Samoans. I interviews my subjects and the people around them, itemizing the contents of their home (photographing and videotaping), and accompany them as they progress through their day. Then I sift the resulting information for weeks, even months, looking for connections and telltale behaviors.

I start by diving into the world of my client and understand the topic that I'll be studying. What do we really want to make this project about? Typically I'll be meeting with anyone from my client's workplace or desk research on the industry and technological, demographic or social changes that may be redefining my subject. I also make preparations for ethnographic field work — defining and finding the right profile, choosing the right questions to ask them, finding the newest startup pushing the boundaries of the field. Then field research, followed by meeting experts in the field of my study sharing my data and looking at a border picture with them. Then its presenting and developing insights with my client and finally making recommendations.

I charge up to $20,000 per engagement paid as a monthly retainer for a fixed duration. A project takes anywhere between two to six months. I usually remain as an advisor for a few months after the engagement ends. I take only one client per year (doesn't matter if it's free or paid).

The service is used mostly by founders or business owners. On the contrary, big companies with dedicated consumer insight teams have the budgets and patience to do this kind of exploratory qualitative research. It's not new at all and there are even startups like makersights who've taken a SaaS spin on it.

The objective is to take questions about sales figures and product lines and reconfigures them into questions about worlds, the context in which people unthinkingly live their everyday lives. The idea is that examining the beliefs and unconscious biases that people have will eventually yield profitable insights for these businesses. Ultimately what I deliver is a well-framed idea that’s going to help tell the story of what a business needs to do.

So far,

• I've done market entry for a few Chinese companies into Japanese market (specific products),
• helped an indie game design company launch a successful game,
• a boutique lingerie shop launch a new summer line,
• few street musicians, cafes and bars.

I talked about it on HN and reddit a while back. If you are curious/need more information just visit my IH profile page.

Hi! I'm a teenager who has just finished high school. I like making things for the web. I recently launched my Saas product, ReadCast (https://readcast.app) which turns your articles into a private podcast for you.

Hi all! I’m Chris, founder of https://scoops.io/ a consumer research service to help makers learn from their market both broadly and deeply. $800 in rev last 30 days!

At the moment, biggest challenge is finding a good low cost distribution channel.. been trying to post on forums (IH, PH, Reddit, FB, LinkedIn, etc) guest blogging on medium, Open to any ideas and help on ways to reach other makers :)

Hello IH family,

I'm Alex Garibay. I work full-time as an Elixir engineer at DockYard but I'm an indie hacker in my free time. I enjoy making products from beginning to end through the whole stack.

Over the years, I've made a couple products so far. My first was a flop so I shut it down. My latest venture is https://progressplum.app which I recently opened to the public.

My advice for aspiring indie hackers is to show up every day and hustle but don't to forget to relax. You'll never know if your idea can be a success if you never put something out there.

Hey IH peeps,

I'm Zack. Currently a Product Manager & Designer at Loom (loom.com) and living in San Francisco. I was previously a PM at Yik Yak #tbt.

Loving the IH community. It has given me the boost I needed to believe in launching my own project on the side and driving it to ramen profitability.

Lately, two problem spaces have captured my imagination and what little down time I have.
(1) overwhelming majority of meetings are terribly ineffective and inefficient.
(2) negotiating is a highly leveraged action (e.g. a few hours of preparation and negotiation can result in $20,000+ increased compensation), yet most people don't feel comfortable negotiating nor do they understand the basics of negotiations.

I know software can help both (1) and (2). I'm exploring how that might happen.

Always up to meet interesting, passionate, and humble people. Technical people especially -- great complementary skillset to pair with mine :) If either of the above problem spaced interest you, let's chat!

Hello there!

First post here on IH, I just found out about your community on the Syntax.FM Podcast. Let me introduce myself first:

I'm Marc, a Full-Stack Developer located in Quebec, Canada. I've been doing development for almost 10 years now and I just started working on my first major side project at the end of 2018. This project is named Collabd. It's a “Collaborative Database”, allowing teams to keep all the communication data in one place, avoiding you from crawling all your mailboxes and instant messaging app to find important details when you really need them. It lets you build your team, invite your clients and consultants and then manage the projects together. The main focus is to allow your collaborators to use their current tools (Slack, Trello, Outlook, etc) to keep them focused on their speciality while you manage the project in Collabd. Collabd is still in an active development process, so the best way to be kept in the loop is to subscribe to our mailing list here: https://collabdapp.com/

I mainly work with the MERN Stack (Mongo, Express, React, Node.js) for my current projects but I've done (and still do) my part with PHP and MySQL.

Hope you'll enjoy my project, and I can't wait to get into this community!
Cheers!

Hi IH amazing guys! My name is Shun.

I'm a startup guy with a passion for startups, indie makers and entrepreneurship. And I love working with React, Rails, and Firebase.

I grew up in Tokyo, Japan. When I was 23 years old, I visited the United States the first time. I have started shooting a Youtube series of founders interview, it's called Silicon Valley's FREERIDER. After this, I have started my own company in Japan & the US. Since 2019, I moved to San Francisco.

I'm working on STARTUP GRADE, an exclusive community for solo founders where a successful founder mentoring them to grow their own startups.

Howdy, I'm an electrical engineer who works full time for Intellectual Ventures in Redmond, and in my free time I'm trying my hand at building businesses for the first time. Some ideas I've worked on that have never quite made it of the ground are:

• USB 3.0 flash drive business card
• Wireless keyboard that remembers what you type away from a host computer (as a creative writing exercise)
• Hi datarate low noise DAC units meant for industrial applications

The road block I keep hitting with these products is lack of capital, and lack of previous hardware success history for loan applications.

Thus my hope is to attempt to begin a passive income through programming in my free time. Joining this community seems to be a good step toward broadening my horizons as to what kind of problems are currently out there in the software space. My hope is this supplimental income could provide me the jumping off point to achieve my true goal of being a hardware device manufacturer.

Cheers, Ya'll, and to the future with ya :)

Hi, I'm Richa - I am a founder of Coach Viva (coachviva.com) - we produce tools and services that my co-founder, @lucygliang and I wished we had in our decades-long struggle to lose weight and get fit.

Coach Viva is 1.5 years old . Our flagship product is our coaching service where we coach clients over chat for instant support and coaching.

We just started today a behind-the-scenes YouTube channel documenting our learnings and business journey publicly.

If you're interested, check us out at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY05Wa11jTSm5VX39YBnr3w

Hi All, I’m Nick, I currently live in the US - Milwaukee, WI. In the past, I have worked Warehouse jobs, but grew tired of all the sweat for little pay. Roughly five years ago I started working in IT and love it. I love anything to do with technology. I currently work as a desktop support technician for one of the US’s largest healthcare organizations. In my free time over the past year or two I have been learning some programming. Mostly front-end web, etc… I also have a little bit of a tinfoil hat and like to keep up with security related topics in the technology industry. Over the past few months I’ve been working on gearing up to start doing some freelance web dev related projects.

Over the past five years I have been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. I tend to get “like a kid in a candy store” talking about, listening to, and learning about the remote work, entrepreneurial, location independent lifestyle. Working remotely freelancing would bring me one leap closer to making my dreams a reality.

I’m sure lots of folks in the community can relate to how cool it is to be able to open your laptop from anywhere in the world and be able to make a decent living to provide for yourself and family and be able to schedule your work around life not schedule your life around work. That said… like most who are reading this I have failed at a few businesses and know it’s not all Ferrari's, wine, and gold plated roses. More like a never-ending amount of work. But the benefits greatly outweigh the work and sacrifice.

My goal in the coming months / years is to work toward making my dreams a reality like awesome like minded folks like yourselves have done. Thanks to everyone involved for creating this awesome community. I look forward to working hard to see us all reach our goals and dreams!

Take care and I wish all a productive day!

Hello everyone, I just joined IH and have been working on LegendSheet (legendsheet.com) for about 5 months now. LegendSheet is a Google Sheets add-on for engineers that adds extra functionality such as support for numbers with units. The add-on can be found in the Google Sheets add-on menu now (In the U.S. other countries coming soon) and has billing support built-in. You get an automatic 30 day free trial but if you are nice and give me some feed back I will make you an "Insider" meaning I will give you the product free for life!

Right now I am a solo technical founder and I would be very interested in hearing from anyone who has experience with marketing a product and I would be willing to provide technical guidance in exchange. I might even be interested in partnering with a skilled marketer / marketing agency with the right skills.

Hi, all! I love building products and do this as my day job and as my hobby :) Working for startups, I tried almost every role in tech teams, and learned the hard way how many amazing ideas are falling through the cracks due to miscommunications or bad planning.

That's why I've decided to build Pointr.app (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/pointr-app) — tool for teams to better plan, discuss, and communicate their projects using simple docs that are version controlled and always stay up-to-date. I dream that this may change the way products are built by shifting feedback from "after the product is built" to "planning phase," where making changes are ten times cheaper. As a bonus, teams will get a history of all the decisions they made, so they don't need to worry about losing essential knowledge when an employee leaves or searching history for that critical conversation you briefly recall from two years ago.

In this community, I'm looking forward to finding think-alike people, get feedback on my product, and help others grow with my knowledge and experience. I'm ready to help with development, product management, and all things tracking and data analysis.

PS I need help with the one-liner explaining the product!

Hi! 👋

My name is Ignace and I am a brand new Indie Hacker. In my spare time I love creating digital products which make life easier and more enjoyable. I have an engineering background, but business interests me a lot too making IH a great fit :)

Right now, I am working on https://socialtracker.io. It's a web-based tool for analyzing and monitoring social media performance. It's aimed at social influencers and brands looking to get insights into their online presence. The project is currently in Alpha MVP stage: the basics are there, but there's still a lot of extra features in development!

Hi Folks, I'm Mark and am a newbie to Indie Hackers. Found IH through the Syntax Podcast and decided to pop over and have a look.

Like most developers, I've an idea for a SaaS that I want to build, but have absolutely no idea how to validate the idea or market it. I've been struggling with building it for the past year as I keep changing my mind about what tech stack etc I want to use. I've finally this week decided on a stack that I plan to stick with, now I just need to figure out how to get started.

Hi I am Davin and I want your most inspirational quotes at livekuotes.com

Dear fellow entrepreneurs...

I am tech writer on medium and hackernoon.

I like to tell stories about emerging as well as oldtime tech - and marriage of the two.
I like to cover exciting topics, things that drove their discoveries and passion of founders in my writing topics.

A few of my write-ups on Medium / Hackernoon:

https://hackernoon.com/curious-case-of-plato-the-cold-war-internet-785a98076737
https://hackernoon.com/detecting-disruption-anatomy-of-a-tech-gold-rush-c531b1667a92
https://hackernoon.com/where-you-could-beat-facebook-apple-linkedin-netflix-and-youtube-15ddd5ae5a69

Upon request, I also write on professional basis and turn product ideas into tech stories that are enticing read to users as well as prominent tech professionals.

Happy to be approached for anything relevant...

Hey everyone,

I'm Jamiu Oloyede. Internet entrepeneur, idea guy and developer.

I founded https://groupleads.net and other internet businesses.

A developer. A globetrotter. A hustler, with a mixed success. A tinkerer. Currently working on a debugging as a service productized service, https://257fixes.com . Figuring out how to market it best.

Hi, I'm Alex - I am a co-founder of Waydev (https://waydev.co) - the newest agile data-driven way to truly understand your engineers. It automatically analyzes your codebase and generates reports with no input needed from engineers.

According to Stripe, developer inefficiency has reached 31.6 % annually. That’s because the output is tracked manually and decisions are based on gut feelings rather than data.

Waydev closes that gap by providing reliable metrics for engineering leaders. We are reinventing the way you track engineers’ output to help you make objective decisions.

Waydev is 3 years old and in the last year, we grew more than 30% MoM.

Hi, I'm Anthony. I work full-time as an iOS engineer in San Francisco but I love making projects in my free time.

I’ve been working on an app (Humonym.com) that allows us to authentically share our stories (good & bad) in hopes that we can understand and be more empathetic towards one another.

I enjoy the product, technical and business sides of making projects and I'm hoping to learn from and with you all.

G'day everyone! 👋

I'm Graham. I live in Sydney Australia 🇦🇺and I just started my Indie Hacker journey this month. Before this I was at a startup/scaleup called Tyro Payments for 12 years where I led multiple teams building innovative banking products implemented with microservices, first as an Engineering Lead and then as a Product Lead.

My goal is to build a product that will help teams who are building & operating microservices and build a business that will provide meaningful income, excellent work/life balance and let any partners who join me share in the long-term success of the company.

I've very well read on startups and product, so I'm attacking the business from a hypothesis testing angle. My current 6-week goal is to do customer research interviews with 20 different companies to confirm/deny and dig into my problem hypothesis. I'm almost 1/4 of the way through the time but only have 1 interview done and 4 more booked. Any tips on getting people to agree to talk to a startup founder for an hour would be much appreciated!

Joined just a little bit ago. I'm an Engineering Manager and have decided to focus on building a tool (or tools) to help myself and other EMs and Product Managers. Currently working on a pain point I see around status reports, specifically on multiple projects to upper management. Going through Customer Validation now and some ideation on the problem space and possible solutions.

I'm Dragos an indie hacker from Bucharest, Romania.

I build a product (https://archbee.io) that helps dev teams improve their knowledge sharing.

I'm active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/theonlydragos and LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dragos-bulugean-59484650/

I'm 17 years old programmer, coder or something else from Azerbaijan. I'm developing products to earn some money to pay my server bills but unable to make revenue.

I can make apps (for any platform except MacOS bcoz I don't have a machine for testing them.) I'm also full stack web developer. I'm creating websites using php (a year ago) and nodejs (now).

I have created a lot of projects (+10) and earned 0$ totally revenue 😭.

And I can also make games (and made some).

Now I'm working on https://pay.uviba.com and https://fonibo.com .

I own a Shanghai based professional services company going on 4 years. We provide support services for individual job seekers around the globe including drip email courses and full editing for English resumes, LinkedIn profiles and interview preparation. Previously I was on/off Wall St. for 24 years.

I love my work as helping clients is very satisfying. Still there is an inherent non-scalability factor which I knew when I started. At the time I opened, I was trying to gain a foothold in China after moving from the US. Currently, I combine the bespoke client work aspect (sans scalability) with back-end automation using typeform, zapier, trello, invoice ninja, etc. Still B2C is not really enjoyable; lead generation, constant pounding away at message that resume and linkedin profiles are vital and yours probably is terrible (90% I see are). My generally young targeted audience doesn't really understand the need for these documents to be excellent. What makes it additionally difficult is some of the best platforms for lead gen, BPM, etc., are banned in China (think Twitter, anything with embedded google code, IG, FB, etc.) where I get about 65% of my clients.

And so 6 months ago, I started on the road to find some good B2B concepts. I am mesmerized by the capabilities and business process leverage of things like AWS universe (with lambda at its core), serverless.com's framework, reactjs, gatsby, graphql. Still studying all like mad when I find non-client time.

For a liberal arts major (as I like to joke), these technologies are intellectually reachable and provide incredible (limitless?) power relative to past client/server and even docker based applications.

Love the IH community. On my good business days, after reading, I am motivated to be more creative. On bad days, I am re-energized to keep pursuing the hard road of bootstrapping side projects because happiness is on the creator side.

I remain in awe of the entire community's insights, energy, creativity, drive, and desire to change the world for whatever reasons. Be well all!

Hi IH folks!

I'm Guto Sanches from Brazil (Curitiba). Been an IH member for some time now, never posted anything. Hoping to get more active and contribute!

Aside from my 9-5 job (lead dev at staycircles.com), I'm at the early stages of building Calmer Finances, a (paid) personal finances app for people looking for help to cope with their financial anxiety, and for people like me who feel overwhelmed by other finances apps.

The finances management category is a crowded space of course so right now I'm looking for a niche/market to focus on ("people with finances anxiety" is still too broad I think). Focusing on a niche allows you to provide a really valuable service for a very specific type of people that big players would never target because of their need to be more general purpose in order to be hugely profitable.

Hopefully, Calmer Finances will be one of the many businesses I will start. My focus has been products that can improve people's mental health in different areas (being the husband of a psychotherapist helps 😆).

I did launch another app (not business though) just the other day, it's called Yearmarks (yearmarks.app) and it's just a way for you to track and celebrate activities you like doing, and that by the end of the year you can look back and see how far you went. It's just a web app right now (works offline btw, feel free to Add to Home Screen on your mobile browsers) but I have the mobile apps built, just didn't take the time to put them on the app stores yet - btw web/ios/android share 99% of the code, it's open source so you can see it here if you're curious.

I also have Just Plants, a Chrome extension that replaces new tab with pretty pictures of plants. I use it, it's pretty nice.

I hope to start contributing and giving back to the community more from now on. Also, I'm a senior frontend developer so if there is any way I can help you out just let me know.

Have a nice weekend everyone!

I'm the founder of Almanax, a tool to draw, search and visualise graphs. You can try it out for free here: https://alman.ax

My main focus now is in finding new customers.