From 0 to $1M in 3 years

In September 2021, I quit my job to start working on my own "startup."

It was a special kind of startup: there was no funding, no investors, and no team. It was just me working on my product ideas. I became a full-time "indie hacker" - people who build businesses and products while working alone.

Within the next 2 years, by September 2023:

• I reached $45,000/month revenue combined from 3 of my products.
• I built 4 successful products, sold a few of them, and had many failed attempts.
• I built an audience of 100,000+ followers on Twitter and 12,000+ subscribers.
• One year later, in November 2024, I reached revenue of $1 million (~$85,000/month).

How I was able to achieve this is not a secret, it's quite the opposite. I share my story, progress, ideas, updates, and revenue numbers publicly all the time — people call this "build in public."

Since I started this journey, I have posted more than 25,000 tweets, 45 long-form articles on my newsletter, websites, forums, and appeared on several podcasts and YouTube videos.

In the past 2 years, I've been gathering them all, rewriting, updating, and structuring it into one central place: My Indie Book. This is the book where I share about:

• My story, who I am, why, how, and what I did to achieve this result.
• How I find and validate ideas, how to build, find customers, launch, market, sell… all without having to spend big money or having a big team.
• What are the steps that I took along the way, the tools I use, how I made my decisions, the preparation, the mindset, the advantages… and many other related topics.

I want to document everything I know about indie hacking in this book. It will be the living resource where I can brain dump my learnings, lessons, and experience to share with the world.

What is this book about?

I divide this book into two main parts.

Part 1: My stories (10+ stories)

Over the past 3 years, I have written and shared a lot about my learnings, updates, and progress with a high level of detail. I have collected some of the best posts from that time and gathered them all in one place, reviewing and updating them.

In this part, you will get a glimpse into what I was thinking and doing during different phases of my journey, from when I made my first dollar up until I sold my first product and reached $1M.

It is like looking at a snapshot of my journey in time.

I believe the most interesting and relevant part of every success story is the beginning. That's why I think this part will give you a lot of insights.

Part 2: Coffee chats (70+ topics)

In the second part, I want to share my opinions about different topics related to indie hacking.

I organize this part into small individual topics and group relevant topics into chapters:

• Prepare
• Find ideas
• Validate ideas
• Build
• Transition
• Reach customers
• Build
• Get paid
• Launch
• Grow
• Sell
• …and other topics.

It's like having a morning coffee chat with me, talking about random topics.

The best way to use this part is to pick a topic you like from the outline and just jump straight into it - that's how I write it too. From time to time, when I find a topic related to indie hacking, I come back to this book and add a new topic or update the existing ones.

Table of contents

Part 1: My Stories

• My indie story: zero to $1M in 3 years
• Black Magic: $322 → $2K MRR in 60 days by building in public
• Black Magic: $500K acquisition offer
• Black Magic: I sold my business for only $128K
• Xnapper: how it started
• Xnapper: Product Hunt launch - results and learnings
• Xnapper: sold for $150,000 - the acquisition process
• TypingMind: how it started - $22K revenue in 7 days
• TypingMind: 20 months to reach $1M
• How I build an audience from 0 to 10,000 followers on Twitter

Part 2: Coffee chats

Prepare

• Why become an indie hacker
• It’s never been a better time to become indie
• Build your unfair advantages
• Should I read indie success stories
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Find ideas

• Scratch your own itch
• Train your maker mindset
• Generate ideas by doing ”something”
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Validate ideas

• Why validate your ideas
• Product-Founder Fit
• Validate with your audience and community
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Transition

• Handle “conflicts of interest” with your full-time job
• Fight procrastination
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Build

• Do you need a deadline?
• How to do UX/UI design?
• How to build fast
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Get paid

• How to charge your customers
• Invoice, sales tax
• What is a merchant of records

Find customers

• Should I build first or find distribution channel first?
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14 ways to reach customers (without using money)

• Why not using money?
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• List your product online
• Build an audience or a community
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Launch

• Find early users
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Grow

• How to decide what to work on next?
• When to call it quit and kill the project?
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Incorporation

• Do you need to register a company?
• When and where to register?
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Exit

• Stay indie
• Sell your product / acquisition
• Should I hire a team?

Others

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• Tools and services I use