Where do you want to be in a years time?

For me:

• I hope I’m still here supporting the IH community 😊
• I’d like to grow the local Brighton IH community into something bigger and more meaningful
• I’m not quite free from my Ministry of Testing responsibilities. I hope I will be almost completely by summer 2020!
• I’d love to get a side project going

A year may be too short, but I hope to be meaningfully impacting lives for the better as I was in my last brick and mortar educational business.

Teaching a programming language to people who already know another doesn't move the needle much, but it is a launching pad that doesn't rely on external investors or gate-keepers.

Realistically, in a year, I want to be able to be my own angel investor for the startup I couldn't raise money for in 2017.

Get a product out there which gets a couple of hundred paid users! 🤞

Good question!

I'm terrible at 12 month goals.

It's that (not-so) sweet spot of being soon enough to be quite specific, yet far enough away for life to get in the way.

Instead, I tend to think in terms of 3 month goals and 5 year goals.

My 3 month goals look something like this...

• Graduate the whole current Sales For Founders cohort with whatever success means for them
• Refactor the content (and delivery mechanism) to be more scalable. That means finding a way to keep the quality/impact high, while being more hands off and reducing the price
• Do a better job at 'top of funnel' (just putting S4F in front of more people in the first place) - haven't set an exact goal for that yet, but thinking ~7k subscribers on the earlybird list

I don't share my 5 year goals. Maybe I will do in the future sometime :)

Setup with a company that brings in passive income, and a very clear plan about how I can continue growing it through the year.

Very modest goals here... more like wish list (for next 6 months):

• would like to have a steady stream of income, preferably from more than one source
• have that income be enough to cover our operational costs and hopefully get us a shared space office; even more ideally something left over

To be continued...

I'm gradually shortening the amount of time I need to spend contracting. I'm supporting my family on 3 days a week now and really hoping I can get that down to 0 by the end of the year.

Wonderful question

In a year's time I'd like to have generated enough business to not need freelancing to fill in the gaps in my bills. Alternately, I am open to the possibility that freelance could lead to me growing a one man development shop into an agency.

There are two things for sure built into those two options:
1.) I want a SaaS (potentially 2) to be off the ground and profitable (I'm still in the red on one product but it generate positive income monthly)
2.) I want to be living back in Texas closer to family. Bit of a stretch, but hey, you gotta set goals in order to properly plan for them.

I'd hope to be able to support myself even minimally off of a product I have made. 12 Months is a good amount of time to pump out a few more products and market a few others. I want to release a chrome extension, WordPress plugin, Shopify plugin and possibly a salesforce exchange plugin. I figure if I hit a lot of the big markets one of them has to take off.

Really simple for me:

• Grow Marketing Examples to > $5k MRR
• Taking evenings off. And also 1 day off a week.
• Get my personal unfinished writing and videos out into the world

I'm the same, I don't really plan more than a few weeks out. Talking to enough customers at this point to realize that my moon shot ideas aren't always what people want or need, so I just avoid putting in the brain cycles on that stuff.

For me and my project, this year has been about going wide. More countries, more subdivisions, more languages, etc. I'm nearing a point of "completeness" that feels good, but in a lot of ways is a bit fragile. Move fast and break things... ask for forgiveness not permission, and such.

Goal for me is to be going deeper within the next 12 months. More testing, more automation, more data accuracy (through testing and automation ;) and more resiliency. Focusing on those things will improve the product immensely while also being somewhat iterative improvement cycle on the "moving fast" that I'm doing now.

Also would like to spin up a few other services in that time. Going deeper is going to require building new systems and some of those new systems (as I have them in my head now) very well could be spun out as their own product offering. Nice to have, but not mandatory :)

Incidentally, for my personal blog, I want to be moving in the opposite direction. Right now my flagship posts are some what automated, and I'm improving that automation month over month. I'm going deep now so that in the next 12 months I can start going wider and offering more service providers in my review posts.

This is a super interesting question. I've found I constantly overestimate what I can do in a month and underestimate what I can do in a year.

My gut tells me that I'd like to be at ramen profitability with 1 - 2 employees in a year. But is that pushing it enough? Or too much? Important note: I'm starting from (close to) zero.

That's a great question, and I often wonder too about the value of planning so far ahead (people with 5 and 10-year plans freak me out).

Number one objective is to transition out of my full time corporate job and do my indie side hack full time.

I've been thinking about getting a lot more organised about it, though and have been looking into a bunch of tools. Trello helps with the task to task planning, Monday is another good overall productivity planner and tracker, but the little gem I like most is actually Heroa.co.uk. It's a journal that helps with the trifecta of solo worker issues: mental health (sorely under discussed), financial health, and your mission / objectives. I've found it immensely useful and they have an app coming out soon I've signed up to the waitlist for. Will see how that goes and report back!

Good luck with everyone's plans! See you in 1 year to hear how you did!

I would love to be financially self-sufficient or well on my way (whether through client work on Synthate or other products I may develop).

I think I'd also love to be learning as much as possible and be in a physical environment with like-minded individuals (I'll be going to Holberton in San Francisco this September, so hopefully this will be the case).

Having a thriving app in its niche. Reaching break even, and growing community of 10k users :)

For me? Same place :)

360 users. Profitable.

I've been working on a side project for a while and hope it have it up and running this time next year. With millions of happy users, of course. IH - stay tuned!

I might be jumping the gun a bit, but I would love to still be working with and for IndieHackers next year.

Editing articles for the new Learn section of the site has been a stellar opportunity, and has improved my life in ways I can't even fully explain. The flexibility and understanding of the people at IndieHackers is unprecedented, and IH truly seems like it's one of the few companies that still aims to best serve its clients, rather than shareholders.

Comparing my old day job (admin assistant at a tax resolution branch) versus IndieHackers is like night and day. Working from home is a benefit that I think tons of people in the IH community understand, and not being tied to a desk for 9 hours, 5 days a week is a blessing I could have never even imagined.

And in the classic IH spirit, working for IH has given me more free time to pursue my side jobs and business ideas. (Which are thriving under the increased attention!)

Here's to more success! 🎉🎉🎉