// transcript — 402 segments
0:00 My first startup attempt
0:01 Watching the movie The Social Network is simultaneously one of the best and worst
0:06 things you can do as a CS student because on one hand it will make you
0:09 extremely inspired to create your own business but on the other hand it will
0:14 make you very disillusional um about the actual chances of succeeding um with
0:18 that business. But I also watched the movie and so the first thing I did after
0:23 graduation was not search for a job like I should have done uh or probably should
0:27 have done but instead try to make a uh Jennai mental health startup because I
0:33 also had studied psychology before my CS degree. So I thought why not try to
0:38 combine both and create a mental health um AI. So over the next um three months
0:44 um during the summer I decided to hack on it. Eventually, I um created a Reddit
0:52 post um for it. Um and what it basically looked like was just a website um in
0:57 which you could chat with a mental health AI which you could really um
1:01 personalize yourself. I also tried to sell this to um to actual therapists and
1:07 get to them and say like okay with this way you can support your patients while
1:12 um you are not there. So that was the entire idea. I put a stripe subscription
1:17 on it. So I said like so I thought like okay I just have to promote this. This
1:23 is really revolutionary and um then I have will have my own startup and don't
1:27 have to work a 9 to5 anymore. Um but what actually happened was a bit
1:31 different because um I didn't sell as much much uh subscriptions as I expected
1:36 only like 40 to 50 over the entire lifetime. And because these
1:41 subscriptions were very cheap um I was only making like 50 to 100 per month. So
1:47 nowhere close to um not [clears throat] having to work anymore. Um
1:53 uh and also after talking to a lot of psychologists and doing some more
1:58 research, I found out that in the EU we have a lot of regulation around all of
2:02 this medical device regulation now the AI act. And basically what I was doing
2:08 was kind of illegal. So after a while, I also decided to shut it down and
2:13 actually start uh realizing that I was not really the next um Jeff Bezos. Uh
2:18 but instead had to look for a 9 to5 job, which I also got after a few months of
2:23 searching. And to be honest, 9 to5 is not as bad. Um it's way more relaxing
2:30 than actually um trying to run a a a nent idea of a startup. Um, and I just
2:37 started working and thought like, okay, the startup stuff is um behind me. I'm
2:42 not going to do it anymore. Um, I'm not suited for this. Uh but a few months
2:49 later I saw this video um on the Lex Fritman podcast and it was a it was an
2:55 interview with uh Peter Level um who actually created these um small startups
3:03 which he called or is called indie hacking because he was working by
3:07 himself and um he was basically creating very simple um things that made money.
3:13 um to create these little apps. Web apps he used a extremely simple text stack of
3:19 only PHP, HTML, CSS and um jQuery. And also the apps he was making were
3:24 relatively simple. For example, a AI photo generator. Um a a way to see where
3:32 um digital nomads can stay. Um I think this is for if you can get a remote a a
3:38 a job board for remote jobs. And by doing these relatively simple apps with
3:43 a relatively simple stack, he was making extreme amounts of money. Like look at
3:47 this like multiple apps doing some even doing 100k per month. And you also have
3:53 other indie hackers who are doing the same thing also earning a lot of money.
3:58 So I thought like okay this guy doesn't really have a extremely technical PhD.
4:03 Um he doesn't use an extreme technical stack. So I decided um okay for the next
4:08 few months I'm going to do this. But first let's search a bit online about
4:12 what this indiaing is about. And the thing is Peter is basically like the god
4:17 of of indieing I would suppose and he has a lot of uh posts about how to do
4:22 this. So um you can read for example it but it basically comes down to um you
4:27 first find a problem. For example, a lot of people have problems with naming
4:32 their pets and you even find subreddits um that are entirely dedicated of people
4:39 creating posts to name their pet. So um by finding these kind of problems, you
4:43 try to find a need of people and then you're going to satisfy this need by
4:48 basically creating a web app or yeah software as a service. For example, you
4:54 create a web app called capnamer.ai AI in which you upload a picture of your
4:58 cat or your pet and then an AI model will spit out a name. Then you put a
5:05 stripe subscription or stripe payw wall on it. Then the magic happens and
5:12 finally you will have a new star indexed startup gaining hopefully a lot of money
5:17 per month. Something unique about indieing is also like um you take kind
5:23 of a shotgun approach in that you try to release as many um of these little
5:28 startups as possible. Um for example, even Peter said that only four out of
5:33 the 70 plus projects he created ever made money. So the goal is basically to
5:37 release a lot of these little apps as much as you can and then hope for the
5:41 best and that some of them actually are making any money. As you have noticed,
5:45 this is completely different from a normal startup in that first off you
5:51 work by yourself, not in a team. Um, you also work on one, you also work on many
5:56 products instead of one. You don't raise outside capital because the things you
6:01 work on are very simple and cheap to host. And you also don't have to move to
6:05 San Francisco, but instead you can work on a remote location like Bali or um
6:10 somewhere where the prices are cheap and the weather is nice. So all of this
6:14 sounded extremely good. So I decided for the next few months I'm going to release
6:19 as much things as possible and see where it brings me. So my first product was
6:25 actually um Cref which is a command line tool for AI code reviews. And this was
6:33 before um AI ids or coding CLI agents existed. So to get a review of your
6:38 codebase or to ask things about it, you basically had to copy it into um chat
6:42 GPT and I thought I don't want to do this manually. So let's create a CLI
6:47 tool which will bundle my codebase into a single file. I can just paste into
6:51 chat GPT. This part was free. Um but there was also a review command which
6:57 actually um yeah then reviewed this this this your your codebase and gave you
7:02 things you needed to improve on. So this was the Cref CLI startup. you can still
7:08 find it online. And um it wasn't the success I hoped for. Um I only sold one.
7:15 Um yeah, I s I only had one customer who paid for a few months, so I only gained
7:21 like 70 in total. Um but one day I noticed like, okay, damn, I'm suddenly
7:25 getting a lot of subscriptions. And suddenly my MMR spiked up to 500 per
7:31 month. But was what was actually happening upon further inspectation was
7:35 that some criminals were testing out credit cards. So what I had to do was
7:40 cancel all of that manually and refund them to not get into any um problems
7:46 which of course was a negative. Um and also I found out that distribution is
7:51 actually very hard because I thought I made a coding CLI tool so people will be
7:56 glad to learn about it and I started post posting it in programming
8:01 subreddits, command line tool subreddits and the Golang subreddit because it was
8:06 created with go. Um but I just got downvoted and even um blocked from
8:12 certain subreddits. So promoting your tool is actually extremely hard. But
8:15 there are of course some positives. I learned how to use Go, which is a very
8:20 nice um language. And this was also the first time I decided to take my GitHub
8:24 seriously, create a nice profile and actually release um the open source part
8:29 to GitHub and I gained some stars on it which is always um motivating. I also
8:35 learned to work better with Firebase which basically allows you to deploy
8:39 your project which ultimately helps me to ship uh faster for my next product.
8:45 And actually my next product um I was thinking for a while and um the thing is
8:51 you often have to think a lot about what am I going to build next and the advice
8:56 you hear online is always look for your own problems. So my next idea was going
9:02 to be very original, a tracker um where in which you could input your daily
9:07 problems and then have an AI turn them into startup ideas, a problem tracker.
9:14 Um so I thought this needs to be a mobile app. I've never I have never um
9:19 released anything on mobile before. So this was also going to be a challenge,
9:23 but I thought I had the next big idea. So I decided to work on it for the next
9:29 few months and um after releasing it I quickly found out that this was also not
9:34 the success I hoped for on the lifetime. I only got like 170 downloads. I also
9:44 only sold like um 13 u dollars of it. But the positive side is I learned how
9:48 to release mobile apps. But even though I knew from the start that this was
9:51 going to be a long ride and that I had to take a shotgun approach, working a
9:57 full-time job and at the same time um releasing a product almost each month
10:03 was very tiring and I became kind of burnt out after these two things,
10:07 especially because if I spend so much time building something and then I
10:11 decided to promote it on Reddit, I would just get banned or downfooted. So I
10:16 instead decided to take to take a little break and instead try to create some
10:20 YouTube videos because I was a YouTuber before um I made Counter Strike videos
10:25 and I really enjoyed doing that but now my interest has changed to AI and
10:29 technical stuff. Um, why not create some YouTube videos? Because this way I could still create
10:36 some technical side projects and some applications without having to worry
10:40 about monetiz about the monetization or um the promotion of it. Um, but after a few
10:51 months um I saw that I was asking CHP a lot about my YouTube channel. I would
10:55 ask it for its opinion about um the videos I had uploaded. Um also I was
11:01 brainstorming about new ideas but the problem was that Chach didn't have any
11:06 context of um what my YouTube channel was about. So I had to once again paste
11:12 it in manually. So I thought um why not create a solution for that. And I also
11:16 saw some people online um a lot of people are asking reviews of their
11:20 YouTube channel. So I thought why not combine both of those ideas and create
11:26 some kind of AI um YouTube platform. And this is also what um the Finsite thing I
11:30 created was about because what it did was uh after you logged in it would
11:35 basically um scrape your YouTube channel um with the YouTube data APIs and then
11:42 um this was taken as a context for a AI agent which could then um be used to ask
11:47 questions or um give advice about your YouTube channel. But once again, um this
11:54 was even the worst um paying thing I ever did because no one wanted to pay
12:00 The truth behind indie hacking
12:00 for this. Even though I saw a lot of people asking for um reviews on the
12:05 subreddits. Also, promotion is very hard. Once again, um people always say
12:10 promote on Reddit, but this almost um never works. The good part is I really
12:15 learned how to use Google Cloud with this because for the YouTube data APIs
12:19 you have to use Google Cloud. But after all these um failures, I started to
12:25 think more critically about indie hacking because like online or on X, you
12:29 see all these people creating very simple apps like um image generation,
12:36 um post syncers to multiple apps, video generation, um some kind of X platform,
12:42 I think something similar to what I was trying to do for YouTube for X. But um
12:48 the thing is if you look online you see them creating generating like thousands
12:53 of revenue uh thousands of dollars per month but everything I was attempting
13:00 which was very similar to what these um apps are doing was just failing
13:07 extremely hard and um it's also because after closer inspectation and after
13:13 living in this world for almost a year you notice is that um a lot of the indie
13:18 hacker community has a lot more similarities to the drop shipping to to
13:22 the drop shipping community than actually a a community of people
13:28 creating technical and useful products. Um because you will you will see that um
13:32 and I also noticed that a lot of indie hacking is basically a scam I would say
13:39 in that there are a lot of fakers um going around and you see on X people um
13:44 saying they have so much revenue and after you go to their website it's these
13:50 are it's either broken or very simple or released the next uh the the previous
13:57 day and yet they claim so much revenue. The thing that's kind of telling is that
14:02 there is also, for example, this um app, Fake It Till You Make It, which was
14:06 actually created by by Mark Lou, which um is not a faker, I think, but he
14:12 created this app to basically fake your um Stripe payments and make you seem
14:16 more successful than you actually are. And this app was actually very um
14:22 successful, which kind of shows you that um people are trying to fake their
14:27 revenue. And the um idea behind this I think is um of course it's a good
14:32 promotion because if you claim to have so much revenue people will likely check
14:37 out your app to see what it's all about. So um people are trying really hard to
14:42 promote their app by faking their revenue and basically building their
14:48 brand as some god dear indie hacker while in reality their products are
14:52 barely working and don't make any money at all. And the thing is this is also
14:57 the largest part of the indie hacker community which really um distorts the
15:01 view. But then you also have this 4% of like elite indie hackers I would say like
15:10 Peter uh Mark and some others who are actually doing some legit revenue. But
15:16 the thing you should realize is these are like the celebrities of the indie
15:20 hacker community. They have a lot of followers on X. So what they have is
15:25 extreme distribution uh potential because everything they tweet instantly
15:30 get promoted to millions of of people and besides that because people look up
15:35 to these people and see them having a lot of revenue people will check out
15:40 their apps regardless of if it's any good or useful because um of course a
15:46 lot of people want to emulate what they are doing. So if they release something
15:50 new, of course you're going to check it out and see what's all about. So the
15:56 thing I want to say with this is um you simply can't replicate what they are
16:00 doing. Just because they are releasing something, if you would release the same
16:04 thing, you would just fail. This is a bit evidenced by that um Peter we have a
16:10 lot I have a lot of respect for of course but he this year he released a
16:15 very simple plane game which is something you would I think even in in
16:20 Roblox you have better games but it's a web game in which you can fly but um a
16:26 lot of people were playing it because of course it's it's Peter who released this
16:32 so um everyone is trying to check it out and because so many people are trying to
16:37 check it out. Some um sponsors uh spring in. Jump in who actually want to um
16:42 sponsor certain things in the game. And after a while, he was doing um he was
16:51 doing 50,000 in in MMR um which is a very simple game which is something you
16:57 can't replicate or even um yeah should look at as something that is um
17:03 realistic for you. And then finally, you have like this 1% I would say or even less of actually
17:11 useful apps um that people are willing to pay for um a subscription per month.
17:16 For example, Miro, which I'm currently using or but it doesn't have to be that
17:21 complex because you also have like a a calorie tracker for example. This was a
17:25 very successful one. And even I think the best thing is like the early Peter
17:31 products because for example this remote okay job board job board because they
17:36 are so simple and they solve a very specific problem and they actually um
17:41 show that you don't need a complex tax stack to make any money but these kind
2:45 What is indie hacking? (Pieter Levels)
2:49 later I saw this video um on the Lex Fritman podcast and it was a it was an
2:55 interview with uh Peter Level um who actually created these um small startups
3:03 which he called or is called indie hacking because he was working by
3:07 himself and um he was basically creating very simple um things that made money.
3:13 um to create these little apps. Web apps he used a extremely simple text stack of
3:19 only PHP, HTML, CSS and um jQuery. And also the apps he was making were
3:24 relatively simple. For example, a AI photo generator. Um a a way to see where
3:32 um digital nomads can stay. Um I think this is for if you can get a remote a a
3:38 a job board for remote jobs. And by doing these relatively simple apps with
3:43 a relatively simple stack, he was making extreme amounts of money. Like look at
3:47 this like multiple apps doing some even doing 100k per month. And you also have
3:53 other indie hackers who are doing the same thing also earning a lot of money.
3:58 So I thought like okay this guy doesn't really have a extremely technical PhD.
4:03 Um he doesn't use an extreme technical stack. So I decided um okay for the next
4:08 few months I'm going to do this. But first let's search a bit online about
4:12 what this indiaing is about. And the thing is Peter is basically like the god
4:17 of of indieing I would suppose and he has a lot of uh posts about how to do
4:22 this. So um you can read for example it but it basically comes down to um you
4:27 first find a problem. For example, a lot of people have problems with naming
4:32 their pets and you even find subreddits um that are entirely dedicated of people
4:39 creating posts to name their pet. So um by finding these kind of problems, you
4:43 try to find a need of people and then you're going to satisfy this need by
4:48 basically creating a web app or yeah software as a service. For example, you
4:54 create a web app called capnamer.ai AI in which you upload a picture of your
4:58 cat or your pet and then an AI model will spit out a name. Then you put a
5:05 stripe subscription or stripe payw wall on it. Then the magic happens and
5:12 finally you will have a new star indexed startup gaining hopefully a lot of money
5:17 per month. Something unique about indieing is also like um you take kind
5:23 of a shotgun approach in that you try to release as many um of these little
5:28 startups as possible. Um for example, even Peter said that only four out of
5:33 the 70 plus projects he created ever made money. So the goal is basically to
5:37 release a lot of these little apps as much as you can and then hope for the
5:41 best and that some of them actually are making any money. As you have noticed,
5:45 this is completely different from a normal startup in that first off you
5:51 work by yourself, not in a team. Um, you also work on one, you also work on many
5:56 products instead of one. You don't raise outside capital because the things you
6:00 My indie hacking attempts
6:01 work on are very simple and cheap to host. And you also don't have to move to
6:05 San Francisco, but instead you can work on a remote location like Bali or um
6:10 somewhere where the prices are cheap and the weather is nice. So all of this
6:14 sounded extremely good. So I decided for the next few months I'm going to release
6:19 as much things as possible and see where it brings me. So my first product was
6:25 actually um Cref which is a command line tool for AI code reviews. And this was
6:33 before um AI ids or coding CLI agents existed. So to get a review of your
6:38 codebase or to ask things about it, you basically had to copy it into um chat
6:42 GPT and I thought I don't want to do this manually. So let's create a CLI
6:47 tool which will bundle my codebase into a single file. I can just paste into
6:51 chat GPT. This part was free. Um but there was also a review command which
6:57 actually um yeah then reviewed this this this your your codebase and gave you
7:02 things you needed to improve on. So this was the Cref CLI startup. you can still
7:08 find it online. And um it wasn't the success I hoped for. Um I only sold one.
7:15 Um yeah, I s I only had one customer who paid for a few months, so I only gained
7:21 like 70 in total. Um but one day I noticed like, okay, damn, I'm suddenly
7:25 getting a lot of subscriptions. And suddenly my MMR spiked up to 500 per
7:31 month. But was what was actually happening upon further inspectation was
7:35 that some criminals were testing out credit cards. So what I had to do was
7:40 cancel all of that manually and refund them to not get into any um problems
7:46 which of course was a negative. Um and also I found out that distribution is
7:51 actually very hard because I thought I made a coding CLI tool so people will be
7:56 glad to learn about it and I started post posting it in programming
8:01 subreddits, command line tool subreddits and the Golang subreddit because it was
8:06 created with go. Um but I just got downvoted and even um blocked from
8:12 certain subreddits. So promoting your tool is actually extremely hard. But
8:15 there are of course some positives. I learned how to use Go, which is a very
8:20 nice um language. And this was also the first time I decided to take my GitHub
8:24 seriously, create a nice profile and actually release um the open source part
8:29 to GitHub and I gained some stars on it which is always um motivating. I also
8:35 learned to work better with Firebase which basically allows you to deploy
8:39 your project which ultimately helps me to ship uh faster for my next product.
8:45 And actually my next product um I was thinking for a while and um the thing is
8:51 you often have to think a lot about what am I going to build next and the advice
8:56 you hear online is always look for your own problems. So my next idea was going
9:02 to be very original, a tracker um where in which you could input your daily
9:07 problems and then have an AI turn them into startup ideas, a problem tracker.
9:14 Um so I thought this needs to be a mobile app. I've never I have never um
9:19 released anything on mobile before. So this was also going to be a challenge,
9:23 but I thought I had the next big idea. So I decided to work on it for the next
9:29 few months and um after releasing it I quickly found out that this was also not
9:34 the success I hoped for on the lifetime. I only got like 170 downloads. I also
9:44 only sold like um 13 u dollars of it. But the positive side is I learned how
9:48 to release mobile apps. But even though I knew from the start that this was
9:51 going to be a long ride and that I had to take a shotgun approach, working a
9:57 full-time job and at the same time um releasing a product almost each month
10:03 was very tiring and I became kind of burnt out after these two things,
10:07 especially because if I spend so much time building something and then I
10:11 decided to promote it on Reddit, I would just get banned or downfooted. So I
10:16 instead decided to take to take a little break and instead try to create some
10:20 YouTube videos because I was a YouTuber before um I made Counter Strike videos
10:25 and I really enjoyed doing that but now my interest has changed to AI and
10:29 technical stuff. Um, why not create some YouTube videos? Because this way I could still create
10:36 some technical side projects and some applications without having to worry
10:40 about monetiz about the monetization or um the promotion of it. Um, but after a few
10:51 months um I saw that I was asking CHP a lot about my YouTube channel. I would
10:55 ask it for its opinion about um the videos I had uploaded. Um also I was
11:01 brainstorming about new ideas but the problem was that Chach didn't have any
11:06 context of um what my YouTube channel was about. So I had to once again paste
11:12 it in manually. So I thought um why not create a solution for that. And I also
11:16 saw some people online um a lot of people are asking reviews of their
11:20 YouTube channel. So I thought why not combine both of those ideas and create
11:26 some kind of AI um YouTube platform. And this is also what um the Finsite thing I
11:30 created was about because what it did was uh after you logged in it would
11:35 basically um scrape your YouTube channel um with the YouTube data APIs and then
11:42 um this was taken as a context for a AI agent which could then um be used to ask
11:47 questions or um give advice about your YouTube channel. But once again, um this
11:54 was even the worst um paying thing I ever did because no one wanted to pay
12:00 for this. Even though I saw a lot of people asking for um reviews on the
12:05 subreddits. Also, promotion is very hard. Once again, um people always say
12:10 promote on Reddit, but this almost um never works. The good part is I really
12:15 learned how to use Google Cloud with this because for the YouTube data APIs
12:19 you have to use Google Cloud. But after all these um failures, I started to
12:25 think more critically about indie hacking because like online or on X, you
12:29 see all these people creating very simple apps like um image generation,
12:36 um post syncers to multiple apps, video generation, um some kind of X platform,
12:42 I think something similar to what I was trying to do for YouTube for X. But um
12:48 the thing is if you look online you see them creating generating like thousands
12:53 of revenue uh thousands of dollars per month but everything I was attempting
13:00 which was very similar to what these um apps are doing was just failing
13:07 extremely hard and um it's also because after closer inspectation and after
13:13 living in this world for almost a year you notice is that um a lot of the indie
13:18 hacker community has a lot more similarities to the drop shipping to to
13:22 the drop shipping community than actually a a community of people
13:28 creating technical and useful products. Um because you will you will see that um
13:32 and I also noticed that a lot of indie hacking is basically a scam I would say
13:39 in that there are a lot of fakers um going around and you see on X people um
13:44 saying they have so much revenue and after you go to their website it's these
13:50 are it's either broken or very simple or released the next uh the the previous
13:57 day and yet they claim so much revenue. The thing that's kind of telling is that
14:02 there is also, for example, this um app, Fake It Till You Make It, which was
14:06 actually created by by Mark Lou, which um is not a faker, I think, but he
14:12 created this app to basically fake your um Stripe payments and make you seem
14:16 more successful than you actually are. And this app was actually very um
14:22 successful, which kind of shows you that um people are trying to fake their
14:27 revenue. And the um idea behind this I think is um of course it's a good
14:32 promotion because if you claim to have so much revenue people will likely check
14:37 out your app to see what it's all about. So um people are trying really hard to
14:42 promote their app by faking their revenue and basically building their
14:48 brand as some god dear indie hacker while in reality their products are
14:52 barely working and don't make any money at all. And the thing is this is also
14:57 the largest part of the indie hacker community which really um distorts the
15:01 view. But then you also have this 4% of like elite indie hackers I would say like
15:10 Peter uh Mark and some others who are actually doing some legit revenue. But
15:16 the thing you should realize is these are like the celebrities of the indie
15:20 hacker community. They have a lot of followers on X. So what they have is
15:25 extreme distribution uh potential because everything they tweet instantly
15:30 get promoted to millions of of people and besides that because people look up
15:35 to these people and see them having a lot of revenue people will check out
15:40 their apps regardless of if it's any good or useful because um of course a
15:46 lot of people want to emulate what they are doing. So if they release something
15:50 new, of course you're going to check it out and see what's all about. So the
15:56 thing I want to say with this is um you simply can't replicate what they are
16:00 doing. Just because they are releasing something, if you would release the same
16:04 thing, you would just fail. This is a bit evidenced by that um Peter we have a
16:10 lot I have a lot of respect for of course but he this year he released a
16:15 very simple plane game which is something you would I think even in in
16:20 Roblox you have better games but it's a web game in which you can fly but um a
16:26 lot of people were playing it because of course it's it's Peter who released this
16:32 so um everyone is trying to check it out and because so many people are trying to
16:37 check it out. Some um sponsors uh spring in. Jump in who actually want to um
16:42 sponsor certain things in the game. And after a while, he was doing um he was
16:51 doing 50,000 in in MMR um which is a very simple game which is something you
16:57 can't replicate or even um yeah should look at as something that is um
17:03 realistic for you. And then finally, you have like this 1% I would say or even less of actually
17:11 useful apps um that people are willing to pay for um a subscription per month.
17:16 For example, Miro, which I'm currently using or but it doesn't have to be that
17:21 complex because you also have like a a calorie tracker for example. This was a
17:25 very successful one. And even I think the best thing is like the early Peter
17:31 products because for example this remote okay job board job board because they
17:36 are so simple and they solve a very specific problem and they actually um
17:41 show that you don't need a complex tax stack to make any money but these kind
17:49 of products are like 1% I would say of the entire in the hacking space. So of
17:54 course the question arises do I regret um doing this and would I recommend you
17:59 to do um to jump in and also try to create products and the answer is I
18:06 definitely recommend you to do this and um I also don't regret it myself which
18:13 is a bit surprising but let's give me let's give you the reasons why first off
18:18 by trying to develop the products from scratch and actually also doing the
18:24 promotional part. You are becoming extremely well-rounded. You are working
18:29 both on front end, back end, the AI part, the deployment part, the actual
18:36 marketing part, the um coming up with idea part and at your regular job,
18:41 you're only working on a small uh subset of um the complete product life cycle.
18:47 So, by doing this indie hacking, you become extremely well-rounded and this
18:53 will make you a way more um valuable employee even if you work like a 9 to5
18:58 job because you actually know the struggle how hard it is to come up with
19:03 some new good idea compared to your colleagues who have never done anything
19:07 like this before. And you also get good at um aspects even technical aspects
19:12 that you would never have touched in your regular job. Also, you learn a really if if you
19:21 approach this right, um you learn a tax stack which allows you to create new
19:26 products very fast, which of course is very nice to learn how to actually
19:31 create some products and release them in the real world because you don't learn
19:36 this anywhere in college or university. And besides that, I also think like the
19:41 main ideas behind indie hacking are very good. Like it's very important to ship
19:46 fast. Don't spend months thinking about um your next product or developing it by
19:52 yourself. Just release it as fast as possible. Try to release it in one
19:56 month. And what will help you with this is to also get good at a tax stack which
20:00 you will also automatically do with indie acting even if you don't make any
20:05 money. It's also good advice. Don't chase any shiny frameworks. Um people
20:11 like Peter are using the bear. Um, yeah, they don't use any shiny frameworks and
20:17 they still out earn you by 100x. Also, you don't need to make the most uh
20:22 complex apps to create any useful apps. And of course, the most important idea
20:27 is to solve actual problems. Don't try to replicate what you see on X because
20:33 most people um have more distribution power than you. And for me, am I going
20:38 to stop? No. Even if I didn't make any money yet. I hope you enjoyed this
20:42 video. I hope I give a more realistic view about what indie hacking is all
20:47 about and why it's much harder than it
