Dan Mindru - Indie Interviews

Can you tell us more about yourself and what led you to become an indie maker

I’m a web developer & designer by trade. For 10+ years I’ve been working as a freelance consultant in various industries fintech, telco, architecture, medical, digital signage, real-estate, hydrology (and more) industries to name a few. I still do consulting in fintech but today it’s in a limited capacity, only about 25% of time currently.

Working with so many companies got me thinking. If the work I perform helps them build products that ultimately result in a sustainable business, then why can’t I do the same for myself? And that’s how it started. Roughly at the beginning of this year, I’ve started building a number of products to learn more about this and ultimately become independent.

I’ve built a Mac/Windows app, a couple of web apps, a SaaS + various tools for both developers and marketers. Of course, building is one part of this, equal parts are marketing, sales, support & a ton more we need to do as indie makers to have a sustainable product.

So that’s where I am now. From freelance consulting to building to going to market, this has been a crazy ride.

How did you come up with the idea? How do you generate ideas for your apps or projects, and how do you identify the problems or needs your app can address?

Most of my products stem from an annoyance that either I observed people are having or - in most cases - I was experiencing myself. In the case of my most recent product Shipixen, I was getting frustrated when starting a project. All of my “steam” would go into setup and configuration and not the product itself. And a week later, I’d need to get back to it to add more features.

So I figured, what if I make this as efficient as possible, throw in some themes and content generation & make it into a product? I threw a tweet post out with a LemonSqueezy pre-order & a small demo. Before I knew it, more than 20 people pre-ordered and I was off to building 🚀

Here is how it started

How is your day-to-day app development workflow look like?

I’m not a very organised person. Or not at the moment anyway. I start with a coffee in the morning and I open up my Notes.app (native Mac). I then write what I think I should do that day. Usually 3-5 bullet points.

There is some on-the-spot prioritisation & then I proceed to

• Fire up my text editor (VSCode) & develop. A dev day is usually 5-6h of programming with breaks.
• Fire up Figma if tasks are more design oriented. A design day is typically a long day: 7-8h with breaks. It commonly spills into the next day :D
• And then there’s marketing days where I usually fire up GSC, X/Twitter, Reddit, Indiehackers, the Blog, Email editor, Figma etc. I try to mix marketing days with some of the others so I don’t end up postponing**

I don’t do email marketing too often, but I should. I really should. every day has some marketing, right? I can’t really stay away from twitter and would probably do some SEO tweaks, content work, etc.

Besides that, it’s common to have conversations with customers, do support and gather feedback. That you do every day to some extent. Lately that’s been taking quite a large chunk of my time. I’m the type that jumps on an issue right away if I see it.

As you can see, my days are quite scattered. I try to have an overarching “theme” each day so I can focus for a number of hours on it continuously and get something done. I’m not a big fan of changing contexts, but that is a reality of being a maker. You’ll have to do all sorts of things that you didn’t realise are paramount to your success when you started 😃

How do you launch and market your app?

For Shipixen it all started on X. I announced the initial demo there, and after a good number of pre-orders I started building it in public.

In parallel, I went to IndieHackers and talked about the successful pre-order stage. Then, ProductHunt came, Reddit and DEV (dev.to). Now I’m focusing a bit on SEO, “attacking” the various target groups with individual feature landing pages & a bit of Google ads.

I’m experimenting with a few things at this stage and see what works best. It’s a bit early to focus on a single channel or two, but as I understand more I hope to do so because these are too many tentacles for one person to handle

What are the future plans for your app?

I’m incredibly excited about Shipixen! I’ve managed to capture the imagination of many target groups, from beginner developers to experts, freelancers to schools and of course, makers.

One of the areas I’m already working to improve is blogging. It’s already quite a powerful setup, but I want to add the ability to import blog posts from the (generally expensive) popular blogging platforms. Afterwards, I’d like to explore the possibility of a CMS / UI for authoring posts. Another area I’m really excited about is the landing page builder. I want to expand the AI functionality and allow people to control what sections they generate on the landing page, as well as more fine-grained controls for the UI / look & feel.

It’s going to be a really fun product to work on!

Do you have any interesting lessons learned or tips for other indie makers?

There are a few big lessons I’ve learned over the past few months:

• Be yourself, don’t write content that you think others want to see, write your own thought, your own idea. That’s how you attract people that will ultimately admire you and not some regurgitated content from the internet.
• Be part of the community. Help people without asking for anything back or having expectations. Be a decent person online and you’ll slowly build something called “eventual reciprocity” (Arvid Kahl has coined this term, and I think is great example of this approach)
• Enjoy the journey and not only the destination. I know it’s a platitude, but I already miss the times 6 months ago. The friends you make & bring on your journey are the best part & I’m so grateful to have made so many.

Looking back, are there any decisions or actions you regret not taking before or during the development and launch of your apps? Is there anything you would have done differently?

Of course. I’m getting better at this, but my first apps were built over a long period with the wrong mentality. I made too big bets and released apps that were free to use with a plan to monetise once they reach x metric.

However, I’m getting a lot better at that. I am validating before I jump into building and even then - I don’t try to create huge products. Shipixen took a few weeks and my record so far was building MRRArt, which was about 10 days of development. I find that the more I build, the better I get at this. And without plugging this too hard — I think Shipixen cut off many days if not weeks of development. Of course, Shipixen itself was built with… Shipixen.

I’d recommend this to all builders. Make a “boilerplate” for yourself when you complete an app so the next one is going to be faster and so on (you can start from someone else’s and make it your own with time). Gather UI components so you can copy/paste them between apps and stick with one tech after you have found your groove to not have to start over and over with each product you build. That way I think you can ship an MVP for pretty much any product within 2-4 weeks.

What I’d do differently: I think I didn’t spend enough time on pricing & gathering feedback on that. Even on launch day, I was getting different opinions on it. I think I should put more effort into it for future products, but I am not sure what’s a good approach to arrive at a good pricing strategy.

Are there any other products that you are particularly proud of? Could you share some details about them

Without listing them all, I am proud of all the products I’ve built. I’m probably up to 7 now and each of them has a special place in my heart. I learned a lot with every product I’ve built.

If I had to pick one, it’ll probably be Clobbr since it’s my only product that has an open source core & cli. It’s special that way. And it’s the only product that is available on 3 stores: Mac App Store, Setapp & Microsoft Store. I’m proud to have gotten it in the hands of so many people.

Clobbr got #1 on Product Hunt and has > 500 downloads across platforms. It also has an open source CLI and almost 100 stars on Github.
CronTool blew up on Reddit and had more than 20k unique visitors in 48h (without adblockers etc. so number much higher in reality)
Crontap has > 100 users now and it’s starting to attract paying customers; generally it’s getting a lot of praise
Hunted Space got #2 on Product Hunt, 900+ upvotes, 500+ comments and is been universally praised by the community
ContentPal, one of my apps that’s been in beta for a little bit (I’m pivoting it, soon 👀) has > 170 people on the waitlist

Are there any indie makers or creators whose work you admire and follow closely?

Of course. I really hope I don’t miss anyone. If I do, I am sorry. With Alex and Sandra I talk pretty much a daily basis. I admire how clever, hard-working and brilliant they are.

There are many other members of the build in public community that I frequently talk to and admire. Some of them (and not limited to) are:

They are each special in their own way and I have learned so much from then.

Zooming out, I have some northern stars that guide my path. I think the two that have inspired me the most have to be Arvid and Alyssa.

Could you recommend any specific tools or resources that you believe are helpful for other indie makers, especially those just starting out?

Yeah. I’m going to recommend the stack that I currently arrived at.

It allows me to ship fast and reuse large parts of applications in new products:

Next.js
Supabase
Cloudflare (can’t believe what you get for free!)

On the UI side:

React
Material UI
Tailwind

Design:

Figma

Thanks for reading til the end. Hope you enjoy the interview as much as we did.

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