From Zero to $83K/month in 3 Years

I was just a normal software engineer making $105,600/year at a regular corporation, living in a $700/month rental room in Singapore.

In September 2021, I quit my job to start working on my own "startup." It was a special type of startup: there was no funding, no investors, and no team. It was just me working on my product ideas. I became a full-time indie hacker.

I didn't come from a rich family, had no experience in startups, no connections in the business world, no social media presence, no followers, no community.

In next 3 years:

• I made the first $9 internet money from my software product and built an audience of 10,000 followers on Twitter.
• Then, I built a new SaaS business and grow it to profitable at $14K/month revenue, but then lost it all to a surprised incident.
• Then, I built a new AI product, expanded to B2B, and bounced back to $45K/month revenue in 6 months.
• I continued to grow my audience to more than 100K followers, build more products, growing total revenue to $83K/month with 85% profit from my products by the end of 2024.
• And I was able to do all this while living my life in freedom, traveling, doing what I love, not having to report to a boss or manage a big team.

How I was able to achieve this is not a secret, it's quite the opposite. I share my stories, ideas, updates, and even revenue numbers publicly all the time — people call this "build in public."

Since I started this journey, I have posted more than 25,000 tweets, 45 long-form articles on my newsletter, websites, forums, and appeared on several podcasts and YouTube videos.

In the past 2 years, I've been gathering them all, rewriting, updating, and structuring it into one central place: My Indie Book. This is the book where I share about:

• My stories, who I am, why, how, and what I did to achieve this result.
• How I find and validate ideas, how to build, find customers, launch, market, sell… all without having to spend big money or having a big team.
• What are the steps that I took along the way, the tools I use, how I made my decisions, the preparation, the mindset, the advantages… and many other related topics.

I want to make indie hacking become more popular so more people know about this alternative way to make a living without having to work for a company or start a new VC-funded unicorn startup.

What is this book about?

I divide this book into two main parts.

Part 1: My stories

In this part, I will share with you my entire story from the very beginning, and all the stories for each successful product that I have created, including the failed ones.

• How I get started and how I built an audience
• Building my products: DevUtils, Black Magic, Xnapper, TypingMind
• Reflections after 3 years of indie hacking

In each story, I will share relevant takeaways and the lessons I have learned for each time period.

Part 2: Coffee chats

In the second part, I want to share my opinions about different topics related to indie hacking. I organize this part into small individual topics and group them into chapters:

• The Indie Mindset
• Finding and Validating Ideas
• Building Your Product
• Ways to Reach Customers
• Growing Your Business

It's like having a morning coffee chat with me, talking about indie hacking.

Table of Contents

My Indie Book

• Contents
• Foreword
  • From Zero to $83K/month in 3 Years
  • Who Is This Book For?
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Part 1: My Stories

• From 0 to $83K/month in 3 years: TLDR version
• About indie hacking and me
  • What is “indie hacking”?
  • A new way for individuals to make a living
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• First attempt at indie hacking: the log viewer app
  • How I came up with the idea
  • I learned Swift to build a native app
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• What I learned: The first mindset change
  • Code is a tool
  • How to stop over-engineering
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• DevUtils: My first internet revenue
  • Came up with the idea
  • Building the first version
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• What I learned about product and distribution
  • A good product is not enough
  • Organic growth doesn't always work
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• Building an audience on Twitter
  • How I Got Started
  • Choosing the Audience I Want to Build
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• Tips on building an audience on Twitter
  • Start by being an interesting person
  • Engaging with people using reply/comment
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• My Twitter timeline from 0 to 10,000 followers
  • My Twitter timeline
  • Conclusion
• Black Magic: From zero to $5K MRR
  • Came up with the idea
  • Doubling down on the momentum
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• What I learned from build in public
  • Get product ideas by doing hard things
  • Build in public
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• Growing Black Magic to $14K MRR, then back to zero
  • Living the indie lifestyle
  • Growing to $14K MRR
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• A few thoughts on Black Magic
  • Product Market Fit and Product-Led Growth
  • How I work with a small team (as an indie)
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• TypingMind: Catching the AI wave
  • My first contact with LLM
  • How I came up with the idea
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• Some thoughts on TypingMind
  • Going B2B as an indie hacker
  • Listen to customers, but don't do everything they say
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• Reflection after 3 years of indie hacking
  • The strategy that worked
  • Things get easier but not guaranteed to work
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• The other products that didn’t make it
  • My other products

Part 2: Coffee chats

Chapter 1: The Indie Mindset

• Should I read indie success stories?
• Build your unfair advantages
• Indie hacking with a full-time job
  • Find time
  • Fight procrastination
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• Do you need a group, friends, or community?

Chapter 2: Finding and Validating Ideas

• The maker mindset
• Scratch your own itch and product-founder fit
• Research and solve other people’s problems
• Make a simpler but better version of an existing big product
• Validate your ideas
  • Why you need to validate your ideas
  • Self-validation for product-founder fit
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Chapter 3: Building Your Product

• Be a generalist
• Build MVP the indie way
  • MVP is a finished product of a simpler version
  • Be aggressive about cutting down all unnecessary things
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• How to do UX/UI design?
  • User Interface (UI) vs. User Experience (UX)
  • How to do UI design
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• About the tech stack
  • Mindset
  • My tech stack
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• Build many products
  • Why I build many products
  • When to call it quit and move on to the next product?
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Chapter 4: Marketing and Distribution

• Build first or find distribution channel first?
  • Building the product is just step 1 of N steps
  • If you have never built a complete product before, just build first
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• Personal branding as the initial distribution channel
• Launch your product
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  • Way before you launch: find early users
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• 14 ways to find customers without using money
  • Why not use money?
  • Talk about your product offline
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Chapter 5: Growing Your Business

• Incorporating a company
  • You may not need a company
  • Benefits of registering a company
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• Getting SOC2 certified
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  • Why I want SOC 2
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Appedix: .

• Acknowledgements
• References