Indie Interviews
Can you tell us more about yourself and what led you to become an indie maker
Hi, I’m Jim, a developer/designer who builds small indie SaaS products like BrandBird & MagicPattern. These days, I’m building indie products full-time while freelancing on the side from time to time.
I was the co-founder of a VC-backed startup when I first heard about indie hacking in Pieter Levels' book. At that time, we were struggling with our startup finances. Although we had a great product & pretty decent MRR, our VC forced us to burn our funds fast, and then we ended up with a ton of expenses and only a few months of rundown.
Pieter Levels’s book made me reconsider everything I knew till then, and I slowly started building small tools on the side. After a few months, our startup couldn’t raise a new round, and then I had to decide between finding a traditional 9-5 job or taking indie hacking more seriously.
Hopefully, I took the bet on indie apps and don’t regret it.
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?
Nearly all of my products aim to solve a problem or frustration in my daily workflow.
For example, I used to post daily design tips on Twitter. I had a Figma template to keep all my posts consistent in branding & updated it accordingly to feature new tips. However, it used to take 30 minutes or more to update it correctly.
It was an annoying & boring process, and Figma was the only alternative. That’s how BrandBird was born.
I built BrandBird over the weekend to force myself to develop an MVP quickly. While building, I shared all my progress live on Twitter & people loved it. That’s why I decided to offer an LTD to check demand.
Sales emails flooded my inbox, so I knew something valuable was there.
Another way to come up with ideas is freelancing. It’s a great way to talk with people with skin in the game & face the creative flow firsthand. When I work on a new freelance project, I always come up with multiple product ideas.
How is your day-to-day app development workflow look like?
I keep a huge backlog of fixes, feature ideas, and simple UX enhancements for all my apps.
I prioritize them based on urgency & time needed. I complete 4-5 of these tasks per week, along with everything else that comes into my inbox.
At the beginning of my day, I follow up on email & Twitter and then jump into coding sessions of 1-2 hours. Time blocking is my best friend since, most days, I have to context switch between 2 or more different projects.
In general, I try to embrace my mood and not be too strict with tasks unless it’s something too urgent. Inspiration can’t be forced, so it’s good practice to take it advantage when you’re inspired to code/design/write and just do it.
Do you have any interesting lessons learned or tips for other indie makers?
I always share these tips with fellow indie makers who are just starting out or struggling to find their first steps:
- • Launch as early as possible to gather real user feedback instead of trying to create a pixel-perfect product
- • Actively listen to your customers and iterate based on their feedback. Do not blindly add features, but try to understand the underlying need of their request.
- • Focus on your powers & stick with a tech stack you’re comfortable with.
- • Always be kind & quick with customer requests because you need happy customers. Our competitive advantage as indie founders is the personal touch & speed of delivery.
What are the future plans for your app?
Right now, I’m investing time in setting up proper product analytics to start making more product decisions (features, marketing, etc) based on real data instead of my “gut feeling.”
It’s gonna help me evaluate new features and ideas more easily & more confidently.
Another thing I’m exploring is AI integrations for my products. Already BrandBird includes some handy tools with generative AI, and soon, I’m gonna announce more things. 👀
It looks like AI is here to stay, and I want to invest time in that direction.
In the future, I want to explore B2B sales to accelerate growth even more & eventually sell some of my products.
How do you launch and market your app?
I chose mostly Twitter to build in public and share updates, milestones, etc. It’s my main marketing channel, especially in the early days of a product. Having an existing audience is a plus, but not everything. When I launched MagicPattern, I had 300-500 followers on Twitter. Nowadays, I have 20k followers, and although my posts go viral easily, the actual product feedback is not the same quality since most people are just “reply guys.”
Launching on Product Hunt is a great tactic as well, for rich feedback & exposure in little time. It’s also a great backlink for your SEO game.
Once my products grow more mature, I invest in more marketing channels to diversify my reach. SEO & email marketing are my favorite marketing channels for long-term growth. Especially with SEO, it’s within my expertise to build small free useful tools that people love & search on Google searches.
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?
My biggest regret is not being 100% open about revenue, goals, and everything in general. Openness attracts competition & copycats. Seeing my work being copied 1v1 was both frustrating & heartbreaking, then at some point, I decided to share less to avoid this.
In retrospect, copycats are bad players who rarely survive, so it’s not worth the effort to engage with them or even think about them.
Apart from revenue posts, I think that posting more about anything would have helped me reach a larger audience as well. As an introvert, it’s hard to keep up with posting daily, but it’s something that I’m working on.
Are there any other products that you are particularly proud of? Could you share some details about them
SuperMotion.co is the most recent project of mine. I wanted to experiment with video for many years.
It’s a simple video editing tool for social media videos, something like BrandBird but for video. I haven’t spent as much time as I wanted on this product yet, but I have big plans.
For 2024, I want to introduce a few new features to make it more powerful for SaaS founders. I want founders to see it as a way to create engaging videos for their SaaS with minimal effort.
Are there any indie makers or creators whose work you admire and follow closely?
Of course, the GOATs. Danny Postma & Peter Levels.
Also, I really enjoy the content and the journey of these amazing makers:
Tim Bennetto, Damon Chen, Erwin, James & Danielle.
Could you recommend any specific tools or resources that you believe are helpful for other indie makers, especially those just starting out?
I use multiple tools in my daily workflow to speed up my flow. Some of them:
- Mixpanel: analytics
- Customer.io: email marketing
- Stripe, Lemon Squeezy: payments
- Setapp: for useful Mac apps
- Tweek.so: the only todo apps that stuck with my flow
- Twitter: for daily design inspiration, business & marketing tips
- Gmail: for emails with the “Inbox Zero” methodology
- React.js, Express.js, MongoDB, Heroku, Next.js, Vercel: it’s my tech
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