🗞 What's New: Indie hacking as a new parent

First-time parents have a steep learning curve:

• It gets even steeper when you add in the challenges of indie hacking. Below, founders share their best advice on balancing parenting with launching and growing a startup.
• Storing and using customer data under GDPR regulations can be tricky. Check out this GDPR guide for tips on staying in compliance!
• Founder Yahia Bakour quit his job once his side project, Stock Alarm, hit 20,000 monthly active users, and $20,000 in monthly revenue. Here's how he prepared to take the leap.

Want to share something with over 100,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🍼 Parenting While Indie Hacking

by Alessandro

15 months ago, I quit my job to focus on my startup: A tailoring service specifically designed for large, tall men. I'd already been working on it part-time for about a year at that point, and it was doing really well.

Two months later, my partner and I found out that we were pregnant. We were both overjoyed! Three months after our baby boy was born, my partner returned to work. I've been staying home with our son while working on my startup. We decided that this was the best decision, since I was already working from home.

Unfortunately, I find myself constantly exhausted and frustrated, and I don't like it. I'm constantly being told how lucky I am to have the privilege of being at home, but I don't see it that way. Maybe it's the lack of sleep, but some days, I wish I wasn't a father. I know that's not something you're supposed to say. I love my boy, don't get me wrong, but I also had a perfect life before he came along. Is anyone else in the same situation? How do you juggle everything without going crazy?

Remember the 75% rule

Chris offers some thoughts as the father of a six-year-old, who has launched multiple projects since she was born:

The first 6-12 months after your child is born, you do genuinely have to reconcile with the fact that your old life is gone. Your relationship with your partner will change, your relationship with friends that don't have kids, your relationship with your parents, etc. It's okay to mourn your old life. It's normal.

But, you also have to learn to accept that change, or you'll drive yourself mad. It takes time, but just hang in there. Sometimes, that's all you need to do.

The majority of parents feel this conflict. They love their child, but parenting can be a relentless, mind-numbing chore at times. Don't beat yourself up for feeling like that. Lack of sleep truly is a killer. We paid for a sleep coach to help our baby sleep really well, and it also taught us a lot about how to get good sleep as adults.

Your business might fail, or it might survive, but your responsibilities as a parent are probably with you until you die. You have to make sure that your child thrives. Talk to your partner. Constant dialogue about this stuff really matters. I recommend setting up structure and a routine with your partner, too.

It really won't be that long until your child is in daycare, then school. After that, you'll be super grateful that you stuck this challenging time out now. With kids, no phase lasts forever, and more often than not, kids become more rewarding and less challenging.

Lastly, something that sticks with me a lot is the fact that, by the time your kids are 12, you'll have already spent 75% of the total time you'll ever spend with them. That's sort of heartbreaking in its own way, but it's the reality. I worked part-time during my daughter's first year, and on and off throughout her first six years. I often think about how, when I hardly see her anymore when she's left home, I'll love that I did that...even though it was hard!

Don't skip naps

Stan has two sons, and offers some advice:

• Don’t skip naps.
• Always carve out time for yourself. Meditate, take a walk, run, ride your bike, or whatever you need to do.
• Eat as healthy as you can.
• If someone can stay with your baby sometimes, get out and work from a cafe, if possible.
• Music helps with focus while working.

It will get easier very soon. Children grow faster than we want them to!

Schedule rigorously

Wilbert Liu is also a relatively new parent:

It's a love-hate relationship with my baby. Sometimes, I love how cute he is. Other times, he's draining my energy to the point where I can't work on anything.

Here's what helps me:

• Remind yourself that it's not forever. Your baby will grow, and you can't get that time back. You'll miss these moments. Never take them for granted!
• Schedule your time rigorously. What works for me is starting very early in the morning, before the baby wakes up. I use that time to get as much done as possible.
• Minimize multitasking. When I'm working, I put my phone far away. When I play with my baby, I totally focus on him. I've realized that too much switching contexts will drain your energy rapidly.

Enjoy the moment! Your baby will be proud of you. You're his superhero.

How do you juggle parenting with indie hacking? Share your tips below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

📱 This new social media network gives you just 100 posts for life.

🤳 Companies are warning and firing employees for vlogging about their workdays.

💋 TikTok is launching adults-only livestreams.

🌳 Uber Eats will now deliver cannabis, starting in Toronto, Canada.

🦜 Stealing parrots is a weirdly common crime.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

✅ A Guide to GDPR Compliance

by Tash Postolovski

Some founders feel that things have been getting worse on the GDPR front.

Caval Heirov said:

A GDPR guide

I've been researching GDPR compliance for my own business. Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, so please do your own due diligence!

Here are some general principles that I've learned:

1. Practice data minimalism: You should store as little data as possible about customers, and only what's required to provide your service to them. You should store this data securely, and encrypt it when possible. Avoid storing it any longer than needed. When collecting non-essential data (data that allows you to provide a better service, but isn't strictly essential), you need to give users the ability to opt-out.

2. Get explicit consent: Ask for consent for any data collection, storage, or cookies with a checkbox that explains how you'll use the data, along with links to your privacy policy.

3. Lean on your privacy policy: Your privacy policy should list all of the data that you collect, and your legal basis for collecting that data. Explain how long data will be stored. Explain individual's rights over their data, and how they can go about exercising those rights. And, of course, make sure that your privacy policy is publicly available.

4. Give users power over their data: None of these processes are required to be automated. It's totally fine to list these rights in your privacy policy, and instruct users to reach out to you for assistance with any of them. You can fulfill requests manually. Your users must, at any time, be able to:

• Review the data that you've stored about them.
• Fix errors, or update the data.
• Erase the data, unless this right is superseded by your need to retain certain data for legal reasons. Keep in mind that this is rarely the case.
• Download their data.

5. Check GDPR compliance of the services that you use: Review the services that you're using to store and process user data. When it comes to GDPR, every service that you're using is seen as an extension of your business. At the moment, this is the most challenging aspect of GDPR compliance. Some companies, like Google and AWS, exist in a gray area. They argue that they are GDPR compliant, even when hosting and processing data in non-EU data centers, under something called the Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs), which state:

However, some commentators argue that US-hosted data falls outside the SCCs because the US has weaker privacy laws. In addition, Austria, Italy, France, and Denmark have each ruled that the SCCs don't cover the transfer of data to the US. There hasn't yet been an EU-wide ruling, though.

If you are highly risk averse, you should host your data in the EU, at least for EU-based users. You may also choose to use GDPR privacy-focused tools and services to minimize your risk.

6. If your user data is leaked or breached, communicate that immediately. If data is leaked, you need to let your users know as quickly as possible, usually within just a few days. Provide information about what was compromised and how to mitigate risk!

Gray area

Storing EU data in US regions is generally thought to be against the spirit of GDPR. Using US cloud providers to store data in European regions is more of a gray area. If you want to be super safe, the only way to be guaranteed compliant is to store data with an EU-owned cloud provider in the EU.

I think that most bootstrappers are willing to operate in this gray area because AWS and Firebase are too powerful and convenient not to use. (If anyone can recommend an EU cloud provider with a similar developer experience, it could help a lot of us founders!)

Google Analytics has essentially been found not to be GDPR compliant for the above reason: User data is transferred to the US. If you're trying to be GDPR compliant, I'd recommend against using Google Analytics.

I'm actually not collecting any data on my site yet. I'm trying to avoid cookies altogether. When I do collect data, I'll add a simple consent checkbox with an explanation of how the data will be used.

How do you stay GDPR compliant? Share your experience below!

Discuss this story.

🧠 Harry's Growth Tip

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

“If you can't reduce your argument to a few crisp words, there's something wrong with your argument.”

— Maurice Saatchi

Go here for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.

⏰ Yahia Bakour's Big Leap

by James Fleischmann

Yahia Bakour, founder of Stock Alarm, quit his cushy job a couple of weeks ago to focus on his side product. He took his time, waiting until he had 20K monthly active users and $20K MRR. Indie Hackers caught up with him to chat about how he did it!

On taking the leap

I worked at Amazon as an SDE II (senior software engineer), making about $250K per year. I’d been thinking of going full-time on Stock Alarm since I graduated college, but always managed to talk myself out of it. I realized that my list of reasons was growing with time.

So, I finally decided that it was now or never. The opportunity to fully focus on a profitable product which was poised to grow, coupled with my circumstances as a 23-year-old with no kids, no debt, and an unreasonably high risk tolerance, was too good to let slip by.

I met a lot of folks at Amazon who told me that they wanted to do something similar, but never got around to taking the chance. Now, they have too many responsibilities to take such a risk.

In my opinion, the right time to take the leap depends on where you are in life. Do what you need to do to ease as much of the risk as possible.

On quitting his day job

Stock Alarm is a real-time stock market monitoring platform. We started working on it over two years ago, and I went full-time on it two weeks ago.

I did a ton of planning how much runway I would have in all scenarios, so I'm hoping that this further de-risks the decision.

At the end of the day, it is downright nerve-wracking to actually quit a comfy corporate gig. Also, those close to me provided their well-meaning (yet unsolicited) opinions on the matter, and it created some self-doubt.

But ever since I quit, I’ve somehow felt more confident and calm than ever, even in the face of so much work that needs to be done.

On how he grew to $20K MRR

Our best acquisition channel has been organic SEO, and referrals from existing customers. Simply building what our customers ask for gets everyone hyped up, and has netted us some really good ambassadors that spread the word.

I think what’s helpful is for indie hackers to think of the first 0-10K users as a completely separate process from 10K-100K+ users. Here are some of the things we did to get the word out there early:

• Answer relevant Quora questions about our service.
• Launch on Product Hunt, BetaPage, BetaList, Reddit, and Hacker News.
• Post relevant blog content early on. It takes a few months to see SEO results.
• Send monthly newsletters to our existing users, sharing new features and asking them to spread the word.
• Repurpose our infrastructure for growth purposes. We automatically post top gainers, top losers, and upcoming earnings on our Twitter.

On structuring his days

I’m definitely working more now than I did when I was employed, but I also have way more flexibility. Some days, I clock in around 12 hours of work, while others are four or five.

I usually wake up around 7:30 AM, shower, and get dressed. I then scout for fancy, overpriced (yet aesthetic!) coffee shops to work in. Sipping on a cup of coffee, I'll bang out six good hours of focused work before taking a break to hit the gym or go on a run. After that, I get in another two to five hours of work before unwinding for the day. Sometimes, I see friends in the middle of the day, or at the end.

This work is truly, deeply fulfilling. All of the extra hours I put into my own business is investing in my own success. I'm no longer selling my time to another person.

Truthfully, I didn’t expect to enjoy it this much. I was worried about the stress of riding everything on a single startup, but I’m a lot happier now.

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Alessandro, Priyanka Vazirani, Tash Postolovski, Harry Dry, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing