Second year as an indie founder & creator: complete ✅

It was not easy. And I don't have everything figured out. But after a disastrous first year, my self-funded business earned more in 2021 than my former tech salary.

Here's a look at what made a difference this year: I started 2021 with a single goal:

One month of $10,000 *in profit* from my businesses.

I wanted to prove to myself I could earn more on my own than working for another company.

After a painfully slow start, I reached this goal in November:

Lots of developers I've talked to think SEO is nothing more than a "marketing scam".

But done right, SEO isn't just a systematic way to grow traffic your blog or side project — it can improve UX & accessibility at the same time.

Here's 5 ways to improve SEO, UX, a11y, at once: 1/ Write articles on topics people are searching for with keyword research

One example: Developers tend to include the name of the tech stack in search queries.

So don't forget to include the tech stack in your blog post title & h1, some of most important spots for keywords ☝️

In my first year as a full-time indie hacker:

🦠 Lost my main income source
🚀 Launched 4 times
💰 Managed $30K in revenue
❌ Still lost money

Here's a look at my story, struggles, and financial outcomes building a self-funded business in 2020: 2020 started with two revenue-generating projects:

1. Not a Nomad Blog: My travel blog
2. Affilimate: An affiliate analytics SaaS tool (+ first cohort of travel bloggers as customers)

You can probably guess where this is going...

By March, me AND my customers were all broke.

I'm going to try to be better at "building in public", so here it goes:

I'm *preparing* to launch something on @ProductHunt for the first time 🙀

First up, I'm adapting the homepage based on what I learned from launching on Twitter.

Here are the changes before / after & why ⬇ The product I'm launching is my newsletter. As such, the goal of the page is to get an email address!

Before: Bold headline leading directly into long form text.

People told me they subscribed because they liked the personal and direct message.

A lot of devs have asked me why their posts didn't get any attention after sharing on Hacker News or Twitter.

So this week's Blogging for Devs newsletter contains tips based on my experience and observations about writing content for developers with "viral potential".

3 tips 👇 Tip 1. Your content has been to be *interesting*. Genuinely interesting.

Unless you teach someone step-by-step how to hack a Russian satellite with a Raspberry Pi, your technical tutorial probably isn't going viral.

But how can you tell what's really *interesting* to people?

Checking out my analytics, I recently hit a pretty big milestone on one of my sites:

*My blog posts have been read by over 1 MILLION people*

It took four years to reach that point, and finally reach 100k+ views per month 📈

Here are the most useful things I learned:

1/ SEO is superpower few devs have ⚡️

What many developers might dismiss as "marketing" or even "dark magic", SEO has given me a way to strategize about what people need information on.

And while social media delivers spikes for days, search can deliver for years.

2/

After having my job opening for a junior developer go semi-viral, I wanted to share some tips for ✨aspiring junior devs ✨ who are look into breaking into their first role.

Both what you can do to improve your chances, and also what not to do.

7 tips below 👇 1. Realize that good junior jobs are s c a r c e, but there are many, many juniors looking for their first gig. Supply outweighs demand massively. This means you have potentially *hundreds* of people who want the same spot 😞

Yesterday I had a situation that just totally epitomizes the futility of software development.

1. My website was not updating after I pushed to master.
2. Hm, I wonder why. Check Travis CI - build is green.
3. Must be the CDN. Check the CDN, purge cache.
4. Still no update.
⬇️ 5. Rebuild Travis a few times, no dice.
6. Finally read the log carefully. "Update failed, out of disk space".
7. Hunt for my YubiKey. SSH into my server. 28GB of 30GB used. 😱
8. No worries, I will just size up the instance until I figure it out.
9. Log in to DigitalOcean admin.