🗞 What's New: Tips for indie hackers with kids

Are you bootstrapping with kids?

• One of the best ways to pursue your indie hacking dreams and balance parenthood is to bring your kids in on the fun! Teach them to code, or let them help with a special project. Check out more tips below for balancing your projects with family time, to avoid alienating those you love the most.
• Is anyone else who's keeping up with the crypto landscape completely freaked out by the messy crypto community? Potential unpopular opinion alert: Crypto is being taken over by jerks.
• Founder Daniela is juggling productized services and consultancy work with building her own projects, including CtrlAlt.CC, a marketplace for finding digital tools. Here's her advice on leveraging cold emails and getting paid to learn to code.

Want to share something with 90,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🍼 Bootstrapping With Kids

by Justin Jackson

While recording a new episode of the MegaMaker podcast, Joshua Anderton's boys were making noise in the background, and this quote came up:

This made me wonder: How can founders get the most out of bootstrapping with kids?

Don't alienate your loved ones

Craig Campbell offers this advice:

Indie hacking with kids can be great! But you really have to be self-disciplined and show love and gratitude along the journey, or you risk alienating the people you love most.

If you are not disciplined and don't set boundaries, you will wind up forgoing sleep, fun, and family time. It will destroy relationships if you let it. You may think it won't, but it can. Set boundaries, block out small amounts of time each day to work on your projects, focus on family, focus on your kids, and make sure they know why you spend a couple of hours a day on your computer. Make sure they know that what you're trying to accomplish is really for the whole family, and not just a selfish pursuit.

If you aren't careful, you'll look back after 12 years and wonder how you missed them growing up. Don't let this happen. You will regret it, and the business you built will not be worth the lost time.

Tips for bootstrapping with kids

Here are some tips that I wish I had followed much sooner:

• Make sure you are setting equal, or more, time to spend with your kids and spouse than you do on your projects.

• Make sure you miss less family outings and quality time than you do coding sessions.

• Make sure you tell your spouse daily how much you appreciate them stepping up when you don't.

• Get used to less sleep, and more focused coding sessions, so you get stuff done.

• Get up two hours earlier, or stay up two hours later than everyone else, and get things done while everyone in the house is asleep: Coding, laundry, meal prep, dishes, dusting, etc. Whatever needs to be done, do it when it won't affect your time with your family.

• Push out an MVP way before you think it looks good, to test the market and traction. You don't want to work on a doomed project for years, and sacrifice your time with your family for too long. If you don't gain traction, let go of the project and move on. Don't spend endless months or years cheating your kids out of your time.

• Set small daily goals for accomplishing things on your project, and walk away when you've knocked the tasks off of the to-do list.

Avoid false beliefs

Do not do what I did, and pull multiple all-nighters per week for months or years, with the false belief that there is not enough time to build your project. Not only will you burn out or cause yourself health problems, you will be a miserable jerk around your family. You do not want your kids to see this behavior and resent you. You do not want to antagonize your spouse if they are covering your slack while you chase your dream.

There is no rush. Consistently showing up every day, even for an hour, adds up more than you think. One hour per day is 365 hours of work towards your project per year. You can knock out a few MVPs per year at that rate.

Spend time with your kids every single day, and make sure they understand that you love them and that they are the center of your world. Invite them into your hobbies. Coding a project? Teach them how to code their own. Jump fully into their hobbies. Hate playing with dolls? Oh well! They're only this age once...play with them. Take bike rides, walks, hikes, or play a sport. Have multiple kids? Carve out one-on-one time with each.

Make sure they know that when you're in your office, it means that you're working. But if they interrupt you to play, take a break and play with them. Make sure they never doubt that they are your most important thing. Never let them feel like second fiddle to your side project.

Spend time with your spouse. Focus on their stresses, and make it very clear that you understand the additional strain you might be causing them when you work on your side project. Be a rock that they can depend on, and minimize stresses elsewhere for them.

What are your top tips on bootstrapping with kids? Share below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

💰 Some megacorps are taking advantage of inflation to jack up prices.

🤑 A record number of US workers have become millionaires with 401(k)s and IRAs.

🖼 Digital artwork is being appreciated as much as physical art.

🪙 Ukraine has legalized cryptocurrencies.

🤔 These two things could prevent Bitcoin from succeeding.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🌋 The Crumbling Crypto Landscape

by Prohob

Crypto is a very polarizing topic these days. Some people are trying to figure out what the heck is going on with it, while others seem to have already made up their minds.

As for me, over the past few years I went from not caring much about blockchains and crypto, to being 100% behind it, to now being afraid of it. Here's why.

First of all, the tech is great

Those who deep dive into the problems and possibilities of cryptocurrencies, blockchains, Bitcoin, and smart contracts will find very interesting implications about the future of governance and finance.

I love following Vitalik Buterin’s blog to see what kinds of problems need to be tackled to make future infrastructure more secure, fair, and inclusive for everyone, not just crypto-bigots (pun intended) and oligarchs. It’s a joy to think about possible solutions, and try out prototypes using Web3 tools.

That we can weaponize cryptography to enable trustless services seems like both a natural progression, from the militaristic origins of modern cryptography, and a huge innovation, kind of like the internet itself. It gives me hope that we can find a way to organize society to tackle our most pressing issues.

The crypto community though...

What I’m currently seeing in the real world manifestations of this innovation fills me with dread. It’s feeling more like the jerks who ruined our current system are being replaced with their ideological offspring to create an even worse one.

Influencers are trading absolutely useless NFTs for hundreds of thousands of dollars, proclaiming the joys of their hedonistic excesses as if it’s a good argument for others to join in. NFTs are intrinsically useful for a variety of things in a blockchain-ified world, like tickets, identifiers, certifications, and deeds. But pictures of bored apes aren’t tickets, and they don’t integrate with any kind of system to be of utility.

Then, we have the Bitcoin priests who are all making sure we know that anyone who doesn’t get on board is going to die, and anything other than Bitcoin is blasphemy. They're so insecure about it!

Besides them, we have "sh*tcoin hustlers" making useless services that either enable the excesses of the influencers, or are straight up scams to steal as much money from people as they can. I guess they’re savvy and unethical creeps.

Enter the old guard

Finally, as if all these creeps weren’t enough, the elite hegemony have noticed crypto, and have seemingly decided to try to co-opt it. The mainstream media and its sympathizers constantly pump out smear campaigns about how crypto is useless and evil. They tell sob stories about how some poor grandma bought a sh*tcoin that crashed, causing her to lose her home and her dog. Bitcoin is killing the planet, man! And hackers buy drugs with it! Often, they mock blockchain technology itself, acting as if it’s so ridiculous that anyone would find it useful for anything. After all, it’s just a glorified database, right?

Meanwhile, every central bank in the world is furiously trying to develop its own blockchain-based coin. You can keep up with their progress on this CBDC tracking map. They simultaneously believe that cryptocurrencies are useless and evil, and that they are also the future of money. To them, it's a great way to maximize control over all finance, and in turn...all of us.

These particular creeps aren’t trying to help anyone, either. They’re just trying to destroy any possibility of an open source, decentralized, for-the-people solution.

They have taken all of the focus away from the real threats, and made us argue about whether or not Bitcoin uses as much energy as the cruise ship industry.

The eye of a storm

There's no doubt that this situation has been influenced by our recent past, with the seemingly endless stream of calamity and political strife. It's also influenced by how we see the future. I guess most people are just trying to maximize their bottom line, or take refuge in ideologies that they hope will win out as more problems come onto the horizon.

But I think this behavior from the crypto enthusiasts is self-destructive. Do we want decentralized systems, or do we want more dollars and clout? All this posturing and money chasing is delegitimizing and distracting.

Something needs to change to realign the vision for the technology before the inevitable clamp-down by states and existing institutions, and before it gets taken over by psychopaths. Otherwise, this is in danger of devolving into a huge dumpster fire for everyone.

Do you agree with this assessment of the current crypto landscape? Let's chat!

Discuss this story.

👥 10M Users, Zero Funding

by Aytekin Tank

Growing and scaling:

Pamper your first 1K users!

Treat these people like family. After all, they’ve taken a chance on you. Learn as much about them as you can: What do they want? What do they want to avoid? What features do they need? What’s confusing? Enterprise products may have smaller numbers, but the same logic applies. Provide exceptional support and earn their loyalty.

Discuss this story.

🦩 Daniela's Indie Hacking Juggling Tips

from the Indie Hackers Stories newsletter by Teela Fleischmann

Founder: Daniela.

Founded: Odsgns and CtrlAlt.CC.

MRR: $4.2K.

Zone of genius: UX design.

Below, Daniela talks cold emailing and getting paid to learn to code. Let's dive in!

The background

I worked in sales and recruitment for a while, and hated it. So, I quit and taught myself how to code in order to build a recruitment platform. I became a freelance designer and developer in the meantime. I went down the investment route for my recruitment platform, but decided that it wasn't for me, so I am now bootstrapping my own products. Here's my story in more detail!

I believe that, in general, the chances of making something successful are pretty slim. Theoretically, the more things you get out in front of people, the more likely you are to find what actually works. Because of that, I have a couple of things going. Some are making money, some aren't yet, and some may never.

I've got products (CtrlAlt.CC, Bubble Burst, and Bump Into), productized services (Pre MVP, UXfix, and QuickNewSite), and design consultancy work that I do with my brother (Ddsgns.com).

I am currently getting my revenue from the consultancy business and productized services by making websites and landing pages, and consulting startups on UX design. The products are my ways of addressing some problems that I come across while working with these startups. The main ones that I am currently trying to address are getting validation, and making your brand visible online. I am working on getting these to produce revenue soon, too.

On growing the business

I got my initial clients through Upwork as a freelancer, and now, I get a lot of new clients as referrals from my older clients. So, I haven’t actively done anything on this side for a while.

This allows me to focus on getting users for my products. My main product, CtrlAlt.CC, is a marketplace. It's a bit more complex than some products, since I have B2B on one side (the people who use the platform to list their product and have paid options for making their product attract more potential users), and B2C on the other (people who are looking to find tools for specific tasks), and there’s also some overlap. I find it pretty easy to get B2B users for this platform, mostly because was I doing B2B since before I started coding.

For this particular platform, I usually use a cold outreach approach via emails, social media, and sometimes chat bots, asking the people in charge of a specific product if they would be interested in being listed on my platform. Pretty straightforward. But to make it as valuable as possible for these businesses, I need B2C users on the platform too, which has been a bit more difficult.

Across all the channels, I have a 31% conversion rate from cold outreach, which I think is decent. Here's an example email:

I haven’t really done B2C until now, and I am still trying to properly crack it. I have recently started trying to build in public on Twitter. The more I’ve been experimenting on the B2C side, the more things I've decided to build potential solutions (and MVPs) for.

On getting paid to learn how to code

I went from a beginner learning to code, to actually doing it for other people and getting paid for it, by applying to freelance gigs that I barely had any idea how to do. I'd then just figure it out by doing a lot of Googling to see how other people would solve the problems that I was coming across. I would definitely not be where I am today without Stack Overflow.

I didn’t really have the option to fail at the freelance gigs that I was taking on if I wanted to ever be able to get any other freelance gigs. Using Upwork, I needed to do my best to keep an almost five star rating at all times. I would end up spending way longer doing those tasks than the clients knew.

On unpopular opinions

I think that the building in public movement is starting to transform into an MRR show-off. It’s starting to become a bit of a toxic stat between people, similar to “likes” or social media followers. I think it can be very unhealthy and not relatable, because it doesn’t focus on the process that people took to get these numbers.

The second unpopular opinion is about marketing. I think the whole “build an audience before you build a product” ideology is running a bit wild now. It’s transforming good community platforms into hidden marketing platforms, and I'm looking for a solution to this!

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Indie Hackers Stories for more.

🐦 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 Justin Jackson, Priyanka Vazirani, Prohob, Aytekin Tank, and Teela Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing