Indie Interviews
Can you tell us more about yourself and what led you to become an indie maker
Hey, I’m Jason. Service designer, self-taught coder, indie hacker. I’ve been running a design consulting agency for the past 10 years, and recently decided to try transiting to indie hacker. I remember 2 individuals being the early inspiration for going indie hacker - Pieter Levels and Jon Yongfook, this was around 2014. Seeing Jon’s slideshow of digital nomading and building his SaaS, and witnessing Pieter’s bootstrapped, ship fast approach of 12 startups in 12 months challenge. Those ideas planted seeds in my head, and slowly I got the courage to learning coding, build products and start trying.
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?
There’s many ways to generate ideas, but personally what I found most useful was scratching my own itch. When I’m the user for my own product, I got more insight to what the functionality is and what painpoints I’m trying to address with the product. On top of feedback from users of course. Being my own user also means more skin in the game to ensure the product’s survival and growth. This might limit the range of ideas that I can build, but it’s fine because I feel ideas are the easy part. It’s the tough balance of finding a great idea, while also having enough experience in the niche, and interest and motivation to solve it, that makes or breaks a product’s success. A sort of indie hacker ikigai.
Another approach I use often for Jason’s Plugins For Carrd is to listen to the questions that other users are asking, and if asked enough times and I sense a pattern, I build a plugin for that. For my plugins business, most ideas come from other Carrd folks, not me.
How is your day-to-day app development workflow look like?
I run a few products, so it really depends on product type and market/customers. For Jason’s Plugins For Carrd—a one-time payment, digital download type of business—I build a MVP quickly in a day or two, then show it to the community and get feedback.
For bigger ideas like a SaaS, I use Vue.js/Nuxt.js, so it’s VS Code for coding, ChatGPT for debugging, then deploy to Heroku.
How do you launch and market your app?
Depends on product type and customers again. I build all my products in public on Twitter, but my Twitter audience are other indie hackers, so they might not always be the target audience for a new product. So I often use other distribution channels too.
For my Carrd plugins, the main marketing methods are sponsorship ads on newsletters/sites, free tools, and commnity engagement. I also launch them in those communities. Not to my Twitter audience.
What are the future plans for your app?
I run a portfolio of products, so the aim is to keep shipping until I find one that can get me to ramen profitability! So far, my combined revenue per month for all my products are around $1k. Still some ways to go to get to ramen profitability of $10k/month! (because of family responsibilities).
Do you have any interesting lessons learned or tips for other indie makers?
I’ve followed and tried many tips and lessons I picked up from other indie makers. The meta lesson I learned is - Don’t listen to 99% of advice. Because entrepreneurship is a very pretty chaotic and contextual process. What worked for someone might not work for you. Oftentimes a lot of details and background context are lost in the narration of someone’s success story, so you might not have the full picture when using said advice. Worse, you might be able to replicate the methods but you can’t replicate the market and external conditions that led the person to success.
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?
I wished I started earlier, because it’s such a long journey of learning and growth. Most of the overnight success stories we see have a long grind backstory behind them, very often for many years (5-10 years seems common). So we’ve got to really put in the work and the time.
Are there any other products that you are particularly proud of? Could you share some details about them
Pretty proud of Lists Kit, my latest product that I’m building right now. It’s simple kit for building info directories and listings. The main product is a HTML, CSS and JS boilerplate, in a single index.html file that makes it easy to drop into a web host and deploy. Again it’s something I’m building because I need it for myself (I run several info directories), so I’m personally invested in the functionality and UX.
Are there any indie makers or creators whose work you admire and follow closely?
Yes so many! A few I follow closely:
Could you recommend any specific tools or resources that you believe are helpful for other indie makers, especially those just starting out?
I started out as a nocode maker, so definitely recommend nocode tools to those who are just starting out and don’t know how to code. Sheet2Site, Spreadsimple, Softr, Airtable are great tools to start building info directories. Even Wordpress is a great start, if you don’t know any other tool.
The other tool that’s a must-have - Twitter/X. being part of the indie hacker community on Twitter opened up my eyes to what’s possible, to dream bigger, and to dare to try. Even just lurking, is educational and inspiraing enough.
Thanks for reading til the end. Hope you enjoy the interview as much as we did.
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