🗞 What's New: Is it time to go full-time?

Do you have what it takes to go all-in on your side project?

• Before quitting your day job, get real about your strengths and weaknesses to give yourself the best chance for success. These questions can help you evaluate whether it's time to go full-time.
• Looking for some quick, easy growth tactics to try? The list below has you covered. Hint: Take advantage of the fact that social media influencers love promoting free tools to their audiences.
• Founder Minh-Phuc Tran built 6 startups in 6 months, sold one, and tripled his revenue goal. Here's how he decides what to build next, acquires users, and ships quickly!

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

⏱ Is It Time to Go Full-Time?

by James Fleischmann

Do you have what it takes to quit your day job and go all-in on your side project? It's a good idea to get real about your strengths and weaknesses before going all-in.

These crucial questions can help!

Question quest

First off, it's important to ensure that your circumstances are set up to support you. Ask yourself these questions:

• Do I have the necessary finances? See my recent post about runway.
• Do I have the necessary backup plans? Will it be easy to get another job or freelance gig?
• Are my responsibilities covered? Food on the table, bills paid, etc.
• Do I have the backing of my friends and family? Their support is not necessary, per se, but it is so helpful.
• Do I have a following? It's fine if you don't, but consider building one. Building in public makes for quick, easy content, and it's a great way to grow an audience.
• Am I able to handle stress when I feel it?
• Am I able to commit to one thing long-term without being distracted by shiny object syndrome?
• Am I willing to ship early and keep shipping?
• Am I good at managing my time and finances?
• Am I able to admit defeat?
• Am I able to survive defeat without having a mental breakdown?

These questions pertain to your skillset:

• Am I an expert in my industry?
• Do I know how to build a business? I majored in both entrepreneurship and business management, but starting (and failing) businesses, and reading posts on Indie Hackers have been the best education I've received. Try to absorb as much as you can from other indie hackers. The truth is, you won't really know what you're doing at first, but you'll have a better sense of it.

Advice on going full-time

I think it's probably safe to say that the more you said "yes" to the questions above, the better your chances for indie hacking success. As long as your product is validated, your responsibilities are covered, and you're confident that failure won't break you, it's worth a shot. You may not succeed, but you'll definitely learn a thing or two! (And hey, you might succeed!)

Here's a bit of advice about taking the leap:

• Take a paid vacation before you quit, and use it as a trial for working on your project full-time. See if it's productive, and if you like it.
• Work on your project as much as you can before quitting. The product should be in good shape, and validated. This will help you hit the ground running.
• Get organized before you quit. What is your roadmap? What are you going to do first? How much time will you spend building vs. marketing? What tools will you use?
• Optimize your development speed.
• Phase out of your job slowly if you can, or do a bit of freelancing on the side at first. Ease into it. This will extend your runway, take some pressure off, and ease the transition.
• Become hyper-efficient. At a minimum, time-block your day to increase productivity.
• Set goals, metrics, and deadlines. Refer to them every day.
• Make a commitment. I like to commit to something for a set period of X months, no matter what. At the end of X months, I can reevaluate, but I've got to keep going for that long, even when things aren't looking good. I can pivot the product, but I can't quit it.

How did you prepare to quit and go full-time? Let's chat below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

👀 Startups are seeing new opportunities as Twitter reels with chaos.

🌎 Next week, the global population will hit 8B.

🧢 Laid off tech workers are posting "get ready with me" TikToks.

🗳 The US midterm elections could be bad news for Big Tech.

🖼 Burning a Frida Kahlo drawing to sell NFTs is probably not a good idea.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

📈 Quick, Easy Growth Tactics

by David Bressler

I built ExcelFormulaBot, a website that uses AI to transform your text instructions into an Excel formula within seconds. I've been incredibly fortunate to grow the site from $0 to $20K in just a couple of months, while working a full-time job.

These growth tactics helped me get there!

The tactics

1. Take advantage of the fact that social influencers love promoting free tools to their audiences. TikTok and Twitter are full of productivity hackers who freely promote websites that can help people be more productive.

Some people advise never giving your product away for free, but that's not the best strategy in every situation.

My website has been shared by several hundred influencers and top internet personalities, often included in posts like:

• "It Should be Illegal to Know About These Websites!"
• "Top Five Websites That You Can't Believe are Free!"

Whether it's freemium, a free trial, or other free offerings, give people a free appetizer of what they'd be getting.

2. Automate an email drip campaign with a free trial of your product. After you give them a taste of a limited version of your product, give them the real thing. Require a credit card to test the full experience. Currently, my trial conversion rate is at 80%!

3. Engage in social listening for your industry. If someone posts about "excel formulas" on Twitter, I'm there commenting through my business account, engaging with the user. Whether it's sending a funny GIF or solving a problem for them, I am constantly engaging.

4. Engage with users when your brand is mentioned. There's no "excelformulabot" mention on any social site that I haven't responded to. If people are talking about it, I'm responding. Leaving a comment only increases post engagement and reach, resulting in more eyeballs on it!

5. Be the first to comment on large accounts that reach your target audience. This has been a game changer for me. I set up tweet notifications so that, when popular accounts that reach my audience post something, I'm notified.

When I'm notified, I quickly leave a comment, making me the first commenter. Hopefully, my response is witty enough to be a top comment. Some of my comments have garnered several hundred profile clicks and clicks to the website.

6. Add a time-saver calculator! This isn't applicable to all products, but it's been a big success for mine.

Does your product save people time? Add a calculator on your site where users can input their hourly wage or salary, and the average time that they spend doing what your product solves. In my case, it's time spent searching for Excel formulas on Google. On my site, users that engage with the calculator convert 3x higher!

What growth tactics have been most helpful for your business? Share below!

Discuss this story.

🚀 The Spector Report

by Josh Spector

I'm sharing growth tips for creative founders! Here's this week's:

Most creators don’t maximize the value of their creations. Here's how to do this:

• Repurpose.
• Re-share.
• Revise.
• Remix.
• Recreate.

Every creation is an asset that you can leverage forever.

Subscribe to Josh's For The Interested newsletter or I Want To Know podcast for more.

🗓 Minh-Phuc Tran Built Six Startups in Six Months

by Minh-Phuc Tran

Hi, fellow indie hackers! I'm Minh-Phuc Tran, and seven months ago, I quit my job to start indie hacking full-time. Back then, I posted about how I prepared to quit, and my plan to build six startups in 12 months. I had two years of runway before quitting.

A few days after the post, I added the goal of making $12K in 12 months. It was inspired by learnings from Jon Yongfook's video and Andrey Azimoz's hardcore year.

Today, I completed the goals! I built six startups in six months, sold one of them last month, and nearly tripled my revenue goal.

AMA!

What did you build?

1. Queue: A Twitter scheduling tool for Notion. Acquired.
2. Nora: A project management template for Notion. $8K in sales.
3. nbundle: An app platform for Notion. Retired.
4. Daily: A simple scratchpad for pretty much anything. $0 in sales.
5. Clean Mac Desktop: Allows you to clean your Mac desktop files and folders. 42 sales. Planning to hire a freelancer to develop it further.
6. Animatable: A collection of animated web components. I was a bit burnt out by this stage and couldn't really finish this. I cheated by turning it into a newsletter!

Why six startups?

I started building six startups in 12 months to force myself into the habit of launching early and shipping frequently. I did not go into it expecting any of the startups to become successful.

Instead of shooting for success right from the beginning, I spent the first year building the habits that will likely lead me to success later on, and making sure they stick.

Depending on each person's goal and situation, these habits may vary. For me, it was to ship more, ship earlier, and ship more frequently.

What were your successes?

Along with getting used to launching early and shipping frequently, I grew a lot during the process:

• I went from having one product with four customers to six products with 250+ customers.
• I grew my Twitter audience from 3K to 11K.
• I have my tech stack set up now, so I can just duplicate it for future projects. I already know how much it will cost, how to change it efficiently depending on the kind of app that I'm building, etc.
• I won't build in stealth mode for months before making a product live anymore. I'll figure out ways to make a product live in two weeks or less, and if I can't do that, I won't work on it.
• I don't feel as emotionally attached to my products anymore. Previously, if my product wasn't good, I'd feel like I sucked at building. Then, because building products is a big part of my identity, I'd carry that over to feeling like I sucked as a person. Now, when customers tell me what isn't good, I'll simply improve it. I don't take it personally!

How do you come up with ideas?

Every Sunday, I open Daily, my note-taking app. I spend a few hours writing down problems that cost me a lot of time.

For each idea, I expand the list into a few points:

• What is the the first version that I can build in less than five days?
• Who are the customers of the first version? How much would each customer pay?
• What are different directions to grow this product? Would I enjoy working on it then?

After repeating this a few times, an idea will resonate strongly with me until I can't help but work on it.

It sounds unstructured, but this exercise helps with focus. Why?

• I can get a product out quickly, and validate from there.
• I know exactly who my customers are before building.
• If it gets traction, I know exactly how I want to grow and sustain the product so I will enjoy working on it in the long run.

How do you find customers?

Twitter, friends, and Product Hunt.

Having a Twitter audience is crucial to my process. I've acquired most of my customers simply by tweeting daily.

Another big source is Product Hunt launches. I posted on Indie Hackers about how to successfully launch on Product Hunt!

Some of my customers are my founder friends. I'm in a few founder group chats, and I share my products there.

If it takes two weeks to build the first version, I'll name a few people that I know who I think will be customers. I'll reach out to them, ask about the problem and what they are doing about it, then see if I can make their current solution significantly cheaper or better. If I can make it at least 2x better, I'll build it. The person that I talked to will be the first customer, then I'll go from there!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

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

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

Forward it to a friend, and let them know they can subscribe here.

Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.

Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to James Fleischmann, Priyanka Vazirani, David Bressler, Josh Spector, and Minh-Phuc Tran for contributing posts. —Channing