Time To Build

Published: 2023-02-25

Intro

About a year ago I came across this youtube video which popped up in the recommended section on my Youtube home page. I found the recommendation odd yet also intriguing. Typically Youtube recommends videos in the five to twenty-minute range as that seems to be the sweet spot the algorithm found for keeping users engaged on the platform. So much so that Youtubers frequently talk about “gaming the algorithm” to make videos around that length.

This video, on the other hand, is a pretty long one, clocking in at an hour. Second, it caught my eye because of the catchy title, “How to Build a Startup Without Funding” by some guy I had never heard of. Around that time I had recently joined a startup and had been following the All-In pod for some time, which is a podcast by a few friends who are also Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Perhaps the algorithm saw knew I was getting more into startups and decided to recommend this video. But this video didn’t describe a typical VC-backed startup, which raises significant amounts of money. So how was this random guy starting a startup with no money or investors? And that thought sent me down the rabbit hole of people who refer to themselves as indiepreneurs or indiehackers.

An indiepreneur, as the word implies, is an individual entrepreneur. These individuals create businesses they start, build, and run generally by themselves. You may be asking yourself, isn’t that the same as self-employed people? Well yes, but actually no. Not all are fully self-employed. Some do it as a side hustle, while others do it full-time. People typically relate self-employed to contractors or gig workers, but indiepreneurs are their own niche. They opt to build businesses, often multiple, and accomplish this by mainly focusing on building using software but any low-cost startup works. The low cost here is key. To own and run a business independently, for the average person, you need a low barrier of entry which is why many opt to build software products.

With that definition out of the way let’s go back to the Youtube video. This video was a talk given by Pieter Levels about creating these indie startups. Pieter is a well-known indiepreneur as he has been at it for some time and has built some successful apps. The talk consists of what he considers to be the core parts of starting and scaling these indie businesses. I watched the video, followed him on Twitter, and left it at that.

Time to Build

But over the following months, I kept thinking about that idea. It stuck in the back of my head. Something about building indie businesses became more and more appealing. The simplicity, the skin in the game, the adventure. And eventually, I decided I would try to build, to be an indiepreneur. While I still am working full-time for a startup, I’ll be learning and trying to ship side projects in my spare time.

I come from more of a data science background and don’t know much about full-stack web development, but I find the idea of combining the two exciting. I have a bunch of ideas on some interesting apps which incorporate both so hopefully one or two stick with some people. It is also good timing as a new platform shift is happening with the advent of accessible foundational machine-learning models from companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, etc. So I plan on building web apps that solve problems and incorporate data science.

For the past couple of months, in my spare time, I have been tinkering around with different frameworks, learning the basics of web dev, and building this site. It will act as my home base, a place to link everything I create, and any writing I do along the way. My goal is to build something which provides utility for others.

aedificare abundantiam

I'm on Twitter if you want to follow for more updates. Cheers!