Introduce Yourself (June 2019)
Are you new to the Indie Hackers community?
Or have you been lurking for a while without making a contribution?
This is your opportunity! It is never too late!
Let us know who you are, and where you are on your journey to becoming (or improving as) an indie hacker.
If you have any advice or feedback to offer others posting in this thread, please do!
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Hi there! My name is Shun.
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.
Feel free to ask me anything :)
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Good to hear that. Let me know if I have something to help you :)
Hi! I'm Gene, I've been on IH for a while, you probably see my comments all over. A bit of background:
Let me know if there is anything I can do for you!
Oh wow, that's really interesting seeing the whole timeline. I think a timeline thread could be really interesting for IH. I wrote up a timeline before I did the IH podcast, it was an interesting process to go through!
Hi! I'm new to the Indie Hackers community - just joined 10 days ago.
I'm very fresh on my personal journey - still very much taking stock of my wants and needs, strengths and weaknesses. I'm gathering together a number of ideas for potential startups, and will likely begin the process on two ideas in parallel.
I've been getting paid to code in one way or another for about 25 years, and have worked on everything from embedded systems to operating systems, 3d browser rendering plugins, compilers, desktop graphics editing software, developer tools, and for the last 5 years, primarily web apps of a few different flavors.
Most recently, it's been React, React Native, and Node.JS. I'm currently picking up Rust, and plan to spend a little time with Flutter.
I have a ton to learn for getting my own businesses off the ground, but I'm excited about it. I'm so glad that I found Indie Hackers - this is such a phenomenal repository of knowledge and connections.
Here's looking forward to meeting more of the community, and hopefully sharing whatever knowledge I can to help my fellow IHers on their own journey.
Welcome! Tons of super helpful stuff on IH and cool people! Glad to have you here.
After many clicks of the "load more" button on my posts, I have confirmed that I never actually did a #hello-world post and just dove into participating after a long stint of lurking.
I'm Josh and I don't call myself an entrepreneur. I'm just a guy that likes to build things.
I'm a self taught developer with 20 years experience in technology. I've held a ton of positions ranging from technical support all the way up to CTO.
I've had quite a few ups and downs in my life around my ventures, the recent failburger helper was a startup with my buddy @jwd2a that ended last year. One of the best experiences thus far for us as a duo which had led us both down similar but different product paths where I know we'll meet in the middle again soon enough.
Past experiences include building daily deal platform that was transacting $2mm monthly and eventually sold for 7 figures. I've also built a niche social network that recently hit $320k in all-time Adsense revenue, which I'm still pretty floored by. I don't believe in luck, but damn if that one didn't feel like a perfect storm.
I blog weekly for my personal brand as well as another site. Current blogging streak is 328 weeks. Oh and I love to track a bunch of crap about myself.
Currently I'm a senior engineer at a cold email company and have been focusing nearly all of my free time in building the best damn algorithm for generating holiday data on the planet, a/k/a HolidayAPI.com
I'm at the part of the journey where a lot of the hard work is nearly over on the product and I've been focusing a lot more of time into improving marketing and talking to customers.
I'm here (by recommendation of a few other friends) to not only learn from y'all but to also share my own experiences when applicable.
"I'm Josh and I don't call myself an entrepreneur. I'm just a guy that likes to build things."
+1 on that
I saw the API offered by HolidayAPI. Its free tier offers 10k monthly request. Given it offers just one API to list holidays in an year for a particular country, assuming 200 countries, I can just cache holidays for 50 years for all the countries in one month free tier. Wondering, why would anyone buy this? Am i missing something ?
Yeah, you're missing a ton.
The free tier is limited to historical holidays and the terms state that offline caching is to be limited to 24 hours.
The paid tiers offer indefinitely offline storage during the tenure of your active subscription.
The data actually changes more than people realize, so while you could do everything you said, you'd have stale data pretty quickly.
People do violate the terms, but that's their cross to bear, not mine. Since you're a Googler, probably a good time to drop the "don't be evil" line, since I'd consider terms violations to be an evil act.
The value add that I provide is not having to store anything locally at all. No scripts to write to consume the data and store it and zero need to have to maintain said data.
To take it a step further, you could very well scrape data, but you'd be in the same situation, spending more time trying to consume data and less time focusing on your own product development.
Since most of my customers are building /other/ products, a service like my own allows them to focus less on this data and more on building their product and business.
This sentiment is the exact reason that there are a ton of low budget clones in the space serving up inaccurate data. "It's just that easy", rarely is.
Got it. I missed the part that free tier does not allow caching beyond 24hrs, and most importantly I did not realise that data can get stale pretty quickly.
This is an impressive niche you have found, and you are also getting many customers. Congrats for that.
I am really curious to know your startup journey. Specifically:
All good, the terms stuff aside, people usually miss the fact that this data is crazy complex, especially if you're trying to manage it at a global scale. I'm really close to the problem and putting in a ton of work to achieve high accuracy and completeness and I tell ya, it's freakin' hard.
So the problem was initially my own, between working at the daily deal company as well as running my social network, which both used this data in different ways. The immediate problem I ran into was the fact that I absolutely didn't want to have to maintain this data, I wanted to be able to generate it on the fly.
At the time (this was circa 2011-2012) there were a few smaller open source libraries that handle this problem, but they weren't very comprehensive or global (most covered US, Canada, UK, and similar ilk). And TimeAndDate.com's product was very much geared to grabbing data and storing it locally (as you had mentioned), which I didn't want to do (that's still their model, which is also very pricey if you need more than just a single country).
Having my own problem to solve, I threw some light weight code at the problem and was able to devise a nice little library of my own that covered a ton more of my own use cases. Noticed the domain was available sometime in 2013, ended up grabbing it and then decided to open source my efforts as part of a free platform offering with code.
That project did somewhat well, actually got a decent amount of traffic and I was getting contributions from users to help expand the country coverage.
Sadly, as time went on, I realized that nearly all of the user submissions were flawed in a lot of ways and I was spending more time to fix the contributions then it would have taken me to just put them together myself. As mentioned, this data is way harder than people realize.
Somewhere further into the journey I was at Sumo Con and after watching Noah Kagan (my boss at the time) talk about how to earn $1,000 in a month, I was inspired to take the platform private (to help justify the time I was putting into it), and double down on building the best damn algorithm for generating holiday data.
I believe that was around September 2016.
Another unfortunate misstep on my part was that the original platform didn't have any user authentication, so I had zero idea on who was using the platform.
Because of this, I actually had no idea who my potential customers were if I were to start charging.
So I did something that I don't necessarily regret, but I do think was bad form on my part. I pulled the plug on the free service. If you don't have an API key, you were SOL.
By requiring an API key (which you had to register to obtain), and by putting my email address in the error that was returned, I was able to generate some inbound leads from current users that were actively using the free service.
I explained to them the situation, how the service was taking up more of my time, and wasn't free to host, and offered them some sick discounts to be able to be an early adopter.
Some of those folks are still with me and they'll be grandfathered in forever just because I felt really bad about pulling the plug on my fellow devs and putting them in a lurch.
I'm a dev that doesn't do sales, so this was definitely hard for me, but I had some solid coaches that gave me a ton of tips, helped me craft some solid emails and within a few weeks of going from free to paid, I closed some early customers!!
I don't want to say those first customers were easy, but because I was already pushing a tens of thousands of API calls a day, I already had a network of people to sell too, I just didn't know who they were until I made that drastic decision to pull the plug on them.
Thanks for sharing your story.
Your journey is perfect example of blogs I have read on building a business. You built something you needed, opened it up for validating the user need, improved on it to charge a premium. All this took you years of efforts, and your idea looks so obvious on the top but you seem to have solved a real user pain point which most would have taken for granted.
Not a problem, always happy to share my war stories :)
Appreciate the kind words as well, let's hope my 10 year over night success story ends up with an IPO :P
loljk, would rather stay private if at all possible!
One other point I forgot to mention. The reason the free tier limits are so high is because the more common use case is to pull a day's worth of data in real time, and a bulk of data.
As a developer, the last thing I would want to happen while working on an implementation is for a loop to go rogue and end up slamming an external service a bajillion times, exhausting my limits.
While being seen as a way to "work the system", I see the generous limits as a way to benefit my follow developers during their development journey.
A lot of my free users are students and bootcampers, which gives me some warm fuzzies that I'm able to provide a service that they can use to learn and not have to be worrying about running out of requests.
Interesting background! Did you own the daily deal and social network? Curious!
Daily deal company, nah. I was the first tech hire there. May as well have been a founder, but I was taking a salary, so is what it is. Worked out well overall, regardless :)
Social network, yes, 100% on that one. I honed in on those revenue numbers but failed to mention that I was able to take 2 years off of having a full-time job while running that (which ballooned to 20+ sites in that time, one of which is still online, very nominal revenue numbers these days, doesn't even cover the server most months) while maintaining our standard of living (I'm married with a daughter, so there's a certain level of living that needs to be provided!)
Adsense revenue started to fade so I slowly crawled back to the workforce, having a job for 2 weeks that I ended up quitting (was a bad fit, wish they realized that) then another gig for 7 months (wasn't a bad job, but wasn't fulfilling) before joining the SumoMe team (I was engineer #4 on that one)
Hello.
My name is Stas.
I'm building Karmabot (http://indiehackers.com/product/karmabot/) and other cool stuff. Rated #1 designer at Gigster.com, 30+ of my products, big and small, got featured at Product Hunt.
I grew up in the far-eastern part of Russia, studied Computer Science and Nuclear Physics, made indie-games and all sorts of digital design stuff. In 2006 I emigrated to New Zealand and I've been loving it here ever since.
If ever in need of a design – feel free to reach out: http://stas.kulesh.co.nz
Just listened to you on the Podcast, Rosie. Really loved it, particularly how grounded it was. Been following Indiehackers for ages. Even spruiked IndieHackers at my Ruby local meetup in 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSJD2He23-U Finally decided to stop lurking and sign up. Planning to be active here instead of making myself cynical scrolling through Twitter :-D Very happy that the indie movement is taking off here in Australia where I live.
I've been indiehacking since 2009 and currently run Gleam.io (since 2012) which is going pretty well. Indiehacked a few other site before Gleam that went well in some cases, meh in others. This year we've taken a more active approach to telling our story. Recently did the high-level story (https://gleam.io/blog/bootstrapping-principles/). More on how we do remote work (team of 18 that are all over the place: https://gleam.io/team-map) and customer support (millions of users, founders still do support) coming soon :-)
Thanks @ponny - I realised from the podcast that there was so much I didn't say, and admittedly I can't remember much of what I said now :D
One of my biggest goals is to write/publish/make more, the more I hang out here on IH, the more I get inspired to do stuff. Dangerous!
Hi, also new here. :)
I've been fascinated by the idea of 'digital nomad' and bootstrapping startups for the past 2-3 years of my life. I finally took action in mid 2018 and launched my first product - Income Rankings (https://incomerankings.com) back in November to positive reception.
Since then, I've immersed myself in the culture until I stumbled upon the Indie Hackers community a few days ago. I'm excited to take part in this and share my future products with you!
How's Income Rankings going?
Slow and steady, but nothing to write home about at this moment.
I'm working on some cool new features (with a complete fleshing out of the community part of it) and I'm considering pushing them out with a promotion and an eventual Income Rankings 2.0 launch. Hopefully that will get things rolling!
Hey everyone! I just recently made an account on IH, but have been a long-time lurker and follower of the podcast. I've emerged from the shadows because I've finally started my journey down the IH road.
Right now I'm validating problems (cold outreach woohoo!) I've seen remote-first orgs struggle with to find a niche ready for a SaaS solution. If anyone reading this runs a remote-first org please feel free to reach out over IH/Twitter or just schedule time on my calendar via https://getspectre.com -- I'd really appreciate your feedback :)
We've been looking at some tooling for a shared leave calendar but everything we find is massive and pricey. I'm getting to the point where I'm thinking of building my own product that just does what I want - shows/tells me when people are away, what time it is there, and ideally public holidays. What you planning to build?
Why the name Mercurial? Thinking you'll be fighting an uphill SEO/name recognition battle with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercurial
Totally agreed with your feedback on using the name mercurial and would love to chat with you to go deeper on the problem you described. I'll follow up on Twitter!
Is it just me? The link isn't working for me.
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Ah, sorry @rosiesherry & @VictoriaKleinCo -- I actually went through a domain change today to https://getspectre.com. I owned the mercurialapp domain from a previous project and was using it as a placeholder while I came up with a real name / domain.
Apologies for the inconvenience!
Hello! My name is John.
I have just joined IH today!! The IH podcast came onto my radar a few weeks ago and I have been binging it a bit. I decided that today was the day to signup and begin to explore the community further.
I am a boot camp grad and have been working as a full stack JavaScript dev for the last 4 years or so. A recent life movement led me to really take stock in why I entered this field to begin with. Creativity, craftsmanship, autonomy, etc. In short, I realized I have a strong desire to work for myself and get out of the 9-5 as soon as possible. This has led me to explore many different avenues that may allow the flexibility, autonomy, and creativity that I am looking for. Which led me here, of course :)
I have really been just slinging code over the last few years. I have picked up a bit of periphery knowledge/insight just from spending time in the industry, but I don't know what I don't know. I speculate I don't know much! I was very excited to have found this community. I hope that I can contribute in some way as the journey unfolds. Much thanks. Peace
Welcome aboard, I find the more I hang out here the more inspired I get to crack on and do (more!) stuff.
Hello there,
I'm Engin. I've been lurking for about a year at IH. I recently got laid off from my well-paying tech exec job and decided to go all in on my side projects.
I'm focused on growing CallTap, the missing call recorder on your iPhone (https://calltap.app). The goal is to be the high-quality app among the scammy competitors ($8/wk subscriptions! 😱).
Coming from a very tech background especially looking for advice on growing niche products and support to improve my hustle!
Cheers!
Congrats on unlurking! :)
Calltap is something I never would have considered, is it generally used for interviews? Or are there other use cases? I'm curious!
There are two broad use cases: consumer and business. consumer is usually recording various disputes, especially recording customer service calls is something very popular among users. The business case is mostly three broad areas: interviews (journalists/podcasters), user/marketing research and sales calls. I'm planning to focus all communication and hustling on sales calls: review your calls and improve your sales success.
Hello, I am a software engineer residing in NYC. I just joined IH last month. My main skill is JavaScript (front end backend) and Rust (good enough to be dangerous but not ninja yet). I also played with various programming languages over the years, but like JavaScript/TypeScript/Rust/Elixir the most.
Language that I speak: Indonesian (native), English (fluent), Japanese (beginner tourist)
My hobbies: playing guitar (electric, acoustic), electric bass, singing, aquascaping, programming, karate, reading books on random topics (theology, philosophy, economy, finance, investing, programming, martial art, software engineering, game theory, aquarium plants/fish, and whatever fancy my interest on that particular time), watching comedies/gaming/random facts that interest me on youtube/9gag/reddit.
I am an indie hacker lurker wannabe, aspiring to create my own company but lack the soft skills needed (marketing, business, finance, sales, design) and currently working to fill that gap by a lot of reading. I still don't know what I don't know and what I need to know.
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Well done on joining. Do you have a project in mind? Or is that your book?
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