From Zero to $83K/month in 3 Years

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.

When I started all this, I was just a normal software engineer making $105,600/year at a regular corporation, living in a $700/month rental room in Singapore. 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 — nothing.

Within the next 3 years:

• I built an audience of 100,000+ followers on Twitter and 12,000+ newsletter subscribers.
• I built 4 successful products, sold a few of them, and had many failed attempts.
• I reached $83K/month of revenue from all products combined at 85% profit.
• And most importantly, I was able to do all this while living my life in freedom doing what I love, not having to report to a boss or investor 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

Part 1: My Stories

• TLDR: zero to $83K/month in 3 years
• About indie hacking and me
• First attempt at indie hacking: the log viewer app
• The first mindset change
• DevUtils: My first internet revenue
• About distribution channel
• Building an audience on Twitter
• Tips on building an audience on Twitter
• My Twitter timeline from 0 to 10,000 followers
• Black Magic: From zero to $5K/month
• Xnapper: Idea to selling for $150K
• TypingMind: Joining the AI wave
• My failed product attempts
• Reflection: my thoughts after 3 years of indie hacking

Part 2: Coffee chats

The Indie Mindset

• Who are indie hackers?
• Is indie hacking a good fit for you?
• The good and the bad of going indie
• Should I read indie success stories
• Build your unfair advantages
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Finding and Validating Ideas

• Where to find idea inspirations
• Should I go after “the next Uber/Facebook” type of ideas?
• Scratch your own itch
• Train your maker mindset
• Generate ideas by doing ”something”
• Research and solve other people’s problems
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Building Your Product

• Be a generalist
• Why build fast?
• How to do UX/UI design?
• The tech stack
• Build MVP the indie way
• Do you need a deadline?
• Focus on core value of the product
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Marketing and Distribution

• Should I build first or find distribution channel first?
• Why build first
• Why find distribution channels first
• Build a product and a distribution channel at the same time
• Find early users
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14 Ways to Reach Customers (without using money)

• Why not using money?
• Talk about it
• List your product online
• Build an audience or a community
• Cold outreach
• Life-time Deals (LTD)
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
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Growing Your Business

• How to decide what to work on next?
• When to call it quit and kill the project?
• Sell to enterprises as an indie hacker
• Do you need to register a company?
• When and where to register?
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Other Topics

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