Solopreneurship and indie-hacking journey

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Remote or Not is a website designed to list all companies based on their remote and work-from-home policy.

The idea behind LibrePress, is to create a platform for newsletter distributions while focusing on two aspects:

1. You remain in control of the data.
2. LibrePress is just a platform to distribute your newsletter, rather than yet another social network.

Currently, I work on polishing it, and bringing it a workable MVP.

While not a coding side project, I still consider it as one.

This is the first book I ever wrote, and it helps software engineers with technical writing.

So far, it’s the only side-project that made me some money.

As a coffee lover, I wanted to create a community for like-minded people. A place where we could share our unique brewing methods.

I failed to drive any traffic to it, and came to a conclusion that building communities—is extremely hard. The success of a community based product, relies on critical mass of users, or an appearance that the product is used by many.

PetAway is the second attempt to escape the rat-race.

An idea that was born out of necessity, together with my wife, and our dog. We were able to drive some traffic to it, but attempts to reach out to potential customers—yielded no results.

Right now this project is dormant.

SilentFlip is my first attempt to escape the rat-race after burning out.

Instead of trying to come up with a million-dollar idea, I decided to just offer existing tools at a cheaper price. I had some traffic to it, however any attempt to contact potential customers—yielded not results.

I later learned that there are existing tools, some of them are even open-source, that offer the same. Right now, the project is dormant, and I don’t work on it.

AnySwitch is my first attempt at a semi open-source project.

As a fan of mechanical keyboards, I wanted to create a tool that will allow users to compare key switches based on raw specifications. The database for the switches is open-source at switchdb, while the website is not.

I don’t work much on it, and mainly try to monitor the PRs made to the database.

MoneyPin was the biggest, and most ambitious project I’ve ever attempted. It took around 8 years, but never seen light.

The idea was very simple: create the most comfortable personal finance tracker. It had many faces.

• A web-app, but I didn’t want people to store their finances in the cloud.
• A local application, built in Java/Kotlin. But it turned out to be complicated to create UI elements with JavaFX.
• A desktop application built with electron. But I never appreciated electron apps, and building complex UI elements, with awareness to accessibility (and I wanted a big focus on keyboard driven approach)—turned out to be extremely hard with JavaScript.
• A CLI app. I had an attempt to build it as a TUI, but again, it was complex to build a data-heavy app in the terminal. In addition to that, It really narrowed down the potential audience.

It was very hard for me to let it go. It was my main side-project which I worked on when I had a free evening, or weekend. But eventually, in 2022, I decided to let it go, and started to focus more on my blog.

Looking back, it was a great boost for my career. I had the chance to work with RabbitMQ and asynchronous task processing, a fact that later helped me get my first job at Autodesk.

Not only that, but it also kick-started my interest in Rust. And the combination of Rust and JavaScript helped me to create an amazing blog post: Supercharge your NodeJS with Rust. I, later, created a presentation based on that blog post, which I present at a local NodeJS meetup, as well as two international conferences: JSNation 2022, and Conf42 Rustlang.

FavoriteWeb was my first ever project. I get inspiration from the WordPress codebase, and digg.com. The idea was simple: people can submit links to websites, and those links can’t be upvoted and downvoted.

I coded it during the summer break between college semesters. Took me about 1.5-2 months, with 3 rewrites (I’m an engineer and a perfectionist).

I used my dad’s credit card to buy the domain name faweb.com, because my credit card was blocked for internet transactions. And it ended here. Like a good newbie solopreneur, and indie-hacker, I believed in the “build it, and they will come” mantra. But nobody came.

Then college started, and I found a job as software engineer, so I abandoned the project. Looking back, if I would invest more time into marketing it, it had chances to become popular, based on the existence of lobste.rs and HackerNews.