5 ms·
I've been doing the solopreneur / indie hacking thing on the side for the last 4 years, including meticulously tracking my time spent on each project. I find t
by czue 6y ago
I've been doing the solopreneur / indie hacking thing on the side for the last 4 years, including meticulously tracking my time spent on each project.
I find that seeing the data to be a useful reminder that product businesses can take a long time to get off the ground, but can really pay off eventually. I hope maybe this inspires others to take the plunge and not give up!
- alexanderjchun 6y agoI just wanted to let you know that (as someone beginning their journey) this was incredibly inspiring. Thank you for sharing!
- czue 6y agoThanks!
- blackrock 6y agoNice. What’s your next project?
- czue 6y agoI'm convinced my SaaS starter kit Pegasus[1] still has a ton of potential, so am planning on keeping it the focus of 2021 - and possibly building some adjacent products for the Pegasus audience/customer base (e.g. Django educational content). I'm also interested in using Pegasus to build a proper subscription product. I have a few ideas brewing but no concrete plans as of yet. [1] https://www.saaspegasus.com/ https://www.saaspegasus.com/
- systemvoltage 6y agoHow have you reached your audience (outside of posting on HN/Product Hunt). Do you actively promote or pay for advertisement? This thing is awesome, kudos for launching!
- czue 6y agoI reach people mostly via SEO and content marketing. I started publishing articles about Django development back in 2018, and this year I spent a lot of time working on a series of guides to building a SaaS with Django[1] - basically documenting a lot of the things I had to do to build Pegasus. These serve as lead-generation and for SEO. Many of the guides have gotten picked up in Django communities/newsletters, etc. and bring nice traffic and product awareness in the community. In the last month I've started my first experiments with targeted paid ads in relevant blogs. Still a bit early to say how well they're working. [1] https://www.saaspegasus.com/guides/ https://www.saaspegasus.com/guides/
- xupybd 6y agoDo you track time spent writing as time working on your side projects? Just wondering if you are counting this as marketing time?
- czue 6y agoI track all writing that I do specifically for content marketing (e.g. the guides I linked above) as marketing time toward the product. I don't count time writing on my personal blog on this chart - though I do track it - since it's less clear how it benefits any individual product if at all.
- rantwasp 6y agoweird question I know: but how do you take the payments, report them for tax purposes? As someone who has done some things that were orders of magnitude smaller and decided not to charge for them because of the headaches involved I’m genuinely curious. Thanks!
- hackily 6y agoHi Cory, I've seen you post Place Card Me a couple times on the passive income project threads on HN. I'm really happy to see that your efforts on that project and others are paying dividends, and I find your story and stats here really inspiring! Thank you for sharing :)
- czue 6y agoThanks!
- kierangill 6y agoReally cool! Do you mind sharing how much of this money was reinvested into the business (a breakdown of the expenses)?