Shut up and Build!

Hey!

A few people reached out and asked if I’m still alive and what happened to this newsletter.

The short answer is yes, I’m still alive and the reason why I went silent for is that I decided to “shut up and build” for a while. 

My number one priority was and still is to increase my monthly income and I wasn’t making as much progress as I should be. So I stopped doing everything that didn’t directly serve that purpose for a while.

Did it work? Yes, absolutely. 

Ryan and I in our Airbnb in Barcelona

The agency I started with Ryan has taken off since we started taking it seriously. 

And most importantly, I no longer feel stuck. This was definitely the case in the “indie hacker game” I was previously playing. 

I’m definitely not alone in this. I rarely see anyone win the indie hacker game anymore. Instead, my Twitter feed is full of people working incredibly hard only to max out at unsustainable MRR levels. 

Another symptom is that fewer and fewer people are sharing their journey publicly. The golden age of building in public seems over.

Even Pieter Levels removed the “/open” pages on his projects where he used to share his businesses metrics publicly.

One reason is that sharing your journey is simply not fun when you’re struggling. Another is that with less people finding success, people are cloning other people’s projects more shamelessly and desparately.

The Indie Hackers “community” barely deserves the name anymore. 

The new playbook I’m following is one that has been used by tons of people before me. You start by offering a service. You build tools for internal use to deliver the service. Then you try turning them into standalone products.

This is, for example, how Basecamp and Tiny got started.

This approach has a few advantages over the standard “build random projects, test if they take off by tweeting about them and posting them on Product Hunt” indie hacker approach. Most importantly, you know that what you’re building provides value since you’re using it yourself to deliver a service people are willing to pay for.

Another benefit is cash flow. The money earned by providing the service can be reinvested freely into product experiments.

So far, the agency game is a ton of fun. It’s all a bit messy at the moment but that’s of course where all the fun is. I’m finally facing exciting new challenges and get pushed out of my comfort zone more regularly. 

We already built several tools and APIs that we use internally. However, we want to focus on using and testing them to get our clients results for a bit longer before turning them into products. 

Right now I’m in Barcelona. I flew here yesterday to meet with Ryan in person for the first time. We rented a nice Airbnb and will spend the week brainstorming, strategizing, working, and of course, exploring the city together.

Cheers,

Jakob