Indie Hacker Diaries: July 29th-August 2nd, 2024

“It’s pretty easy to criticize everything. And so the world is full of a lot of people criticizing everything and showing how smart they are by decomposing ‘I’m gonna tell you how bad the world is in 99 chapters’ or ‘I’m gonna tell you how bad your idea is in 37 different points.’ But no one’s offering a solution. So, in the absence of a solution, you’re just generating noise.”

— Michael Saylor

Interesting Links

One Man SaaS, 9 Years In - A solid, realistic look at running a solo-founder SaaS with details on income, costs, and infrastructure.

How to Save $13.27 On Your SaaS Bill - A fun, semi-technical deep-dive on replacing a hosted service with your own DIY solution as a way to save money.

AWS Breaking Changes - A helpful “heads up” list of AWS services that are being sunset or receiving breaking changes. Hint: also a great list of potential ideas for businesses you could start to replace what’s going away.

Cloudflare NO-IP Alternative - Pure serendipity, but I came across this right after I mentioned NO-IP in my last IHD. Not sure I’d trust it for anything serious, but if you just need it to run some toy stuff at home, it’s a solid way to save some money.

Pro Tips

Make sure you're investing time in the right things

I got engaged last Saturday and to make things more memorable, my fiancée and I decided to take a few days off to hang out, goof off, and take a break from our usual grind. I’ve got a ton of stuff to get off of my plate, but taking the time to celebrate our engagement will easily go down as one of the smartest things I ever did (and one of my favorite memories). You can always work more, but you can’t get back moments like that. A question I routinely ask myself when deciding how to spend time: “what will 80 year old me think about this?”

Expose yourself to things outside your routine

As part of our adventure, we made a point to do some stuff we rarely do like going out to nice restaurants/fancy bars, etc. We also took a detour (?) to go do an AirBnB experience to do some splatter painting (a dude puts you in a Tyvek suit, hands you some bottles of paint, and says “go nuts” for an hour and change). Definitely not something I’d normally do, but it was a blast doing something creative outside of the usual key clacking.

The coolest part was having a chance to let my brain flip off, which ironically, led to a lot of ideas bubbling up as I was throwing globs of paint at a canvas. If you’re feeling stuck on a problem, go do something 180º from your norm and see if it helps to get you back on track.

What I Worked On

• Made a ton of progress on the SaaS idea I teased in the last IHD. Should have v1 ready to go by end of next week.
• Fixed a bug with the testing framework in Joystick (I had left a test dependency in the code).
• Started designing some more branding stuff and posting it on Dribbble. Not something I normally do, but I got switched on by seeing a lot of good branding in the wild while I was taking a break.

Final Thought

My favorite song by The Beatles is Tomorrow Never Knows and ever since I first heard the song, the title has stuck with me. No matter where you’re at in life, business, etc., make a point to be mindful about the passage of time. Not for the sake of rushing or stressing out over not being “there,” but how your use of time beyond just getting things done has an impact on your life. Don't throw away a good thing just to stay in your routine (or avoid a power struggle with your inner child—j/k).

Being disciplined is good, but developing a discernment for spotting the right time to break discipline with purpose is even better.