Indie hacking: 6 years later

It's been a few years since I posted here, and I decided it would be a good time to break the silence by announcing a few things, and write a bit about my journey as an indie hacker.

Did I make it? Am I happy? Was it worth it?

One thing is sure: Indie hacking is the hardest thing I've ever done.

I love my life today, but I don't want to sell false dreams to all the people who are currently at $0 in revenue and think they can get rich in a few months.

I'm going to tell you about my 6 years as an indie hacker: from my student days struggling to buy food, to today making $10,000 per month and being the happiest I've ever been!

The goal of this long post is to transparently share my struggles, failures, fears and successes, to give you an idea of what the journey of an indie hacker who managed to live off their projects might look like.

I want to start way back: I'm 14 years old. I play Minecraft and Dofus (a French online game), a lot. School doesn't really interest me, and I spend most of my free time on the computer.

But I don't just play games, and on both games, I develop gaming communities! These two communities become quite large, to the point that I start making some money from them. When you're 14 and don't grow up in a rich family, earning a few hundred euros is huge.

That's probably what triggered everything.

I decide to study computer science, but I start getting bored very quickly.

Nobody works seriously, I already know how to code so I'm not learning anything, we even play Counter Strike with the teachers during class 😂

After a year, I change schools: it's the same thing. So I quit after 2 weeks.

That's the worst period of my life, I'm depressed like never before. I don't know what to do, I'm completely lost. I think that ultimately computer science isn't for me, I get bored way too quickly.

I start doing tons of research on the internet, and I come across a school's website: Hetic. It looks absolutely perfect: you learn development there, but also design, communication, marketing etc.

I instantly fall in love with this program.

Problem: it lasts 5 years and costs $8,000 per year, and I have no money.

I manage to convince my mother to take me to the other end of France, to Paris, for the open house (thanks mom!)

It only reinforces my choice, and I decide to do everything to get there.

I do quick calculations: how much I can earn between now and next year, how much I can borrow etc.

I start chaining together small jobs, until finally staying for 10 months on a tomato farm: I pick tomatoes, prune them, plant them, clean...

I keep a great memory of this time, for one reason only: I could listen to podcasts while working 😂. I listened to tons of entrepreneurship podcasts during this period (RIP nouvelle école), which taught me an incredible number of things, but especially one thing I'll never forget: everyone can make it.

Quite paradoxically, this moment in my life picking tomatoes for minimum wage gave me all the self-confidence I would need in the coming years.

I had saved up some money, and I managed to convince my banker to let me borrow $25,000, which was well above our borrowing capacity (thanks Hetic!)

A small aside: I just finished paying off this loan, 10 days ago 😂

So I join Hetic in 2nd year, and it doesn't go quite as I had planned 😅

The hardest thing for me: fitting in. Everyone is rich (in my eyes), has great culture, there are lots of people more talented than me, I'm all alone in the capital that I don't know at all, my money is melting like snow in the sun, everyone has a Mac and I don't (I crack quickly and decide to get one after a few months).

But the school is fascinating, because it offers something I value above all else: freedom.

I set aside what doesn't interest me, I focus on what interests me, and I start launching projects. Just for fun, and to learn!

It's this year that I start and put online my first real project: "Uneed Frontend".

It's a catalog of tools for frontend devs... 😅. I add frameworks, libraries, tools etc.

I do it by testing as many new things as possible, including Nuxt, a new framework at the time (spoiler alert: I'll never change frameworks again)

School goes well, I do a few boring internships, I launch quite a few mediocre projects, except that by the end of 3rd year, new problem: I don't have a penny left.

I know I won't be able to pay for school next year, or even my rent soon enough.

So I start freelancing, and I take all the missions that come my way. I end up making WordPress plugins for a guy in Slovenia getting paid peanuts, a website for a photographer who doesn't have a camera yet (true story) and who ends up not paying me, a website for a small zoo in the countryside, in short: everything that comes my way.

The school program was already quite intense, but with freelancing on top, it becomes very complicated: I work until late at night, I completely abandon my video game communities (remember them?), I only eat pasta...

Unfortunately, it's not enough, and I find myself unable to finish paying for my school year. I was about to give up everything and start freelancing by going back to live with my mother.

And then, "miracle": my grandmother receives an inheritance, and offers to pay for my school year as well as my rent for the year.

It came down to a few days, but it's good: the last year of school being work-study, I'll have a salary, and I'll be able to finish my studies.

So I finish my studies, and I'm hired by the company where I did my last year of work-study, Yogosha, a cybersecurity startup.

The team is great, I learn tons of things, but without really being able to figure out why, I don't feel like I belong. I'm not particularly gifted, but I get bored very quickly (again!), and I have trouble focusing on big features from A to Z, which require spending several weeks on them.

In short: I'm not made to be a developer.

COVID arrives, and lockdown with it. And there, I lose it 😂! I quit on a whim, and we leave Paris with my girlfriend to go settle in Nantes, where we don't know anyone!

I take a few freelance missions, which all go very well: changing context regularly and choosing my hours suits me much better.

Except that... I continued working on Uneed in parallel. In recent years, traffic on the site has started to increase.

People suggest so many tools that I'm forced to put a queue in place: I now only add one tool per day.

Some offer to pay to skip the queue.

I now know what I want to do with my life, and nothing will ever make me change trajectory again before succeeding: become an indie hacker.

Little by little, Uneed starts to grow. I continue freelancing. I start making money. Life starts to be "easy". Except I work a lot 😅. I never came as close to burnout as when I was juggling almost full-time freelancing, and Uneed which continued to grow. I end up getting lucky and finding part-time freelance work.

At that point, I go all-in on indie hacking: I tweet a lot and launch tons of projects (which all fail).

None of my projects work, but Uneed has reached a nice milestone: $2,000 per month in revenue. Except it stagnates, I can't make it grow anymore.

I make a pretty radical decision (once again): I completely transform the site. I go from a directory to a launch platform, to attack head-on a behemoth, Product Hunt 😅!

The first months, it's panic: my revenue drops to $500 per month.

Then little by little, it goes back up... Very fast!! It completely explodes in October 2024, I reach $8,000 in revenue.

In December 2024, I decided to quit everything to dedicate myself to it full-time.

Today, I'm at ~$10,000 in monthly revenue.

Uneed continues to grow, and I'm about to make another radical decision, transforming the site from a launch platform to a community of makers.

I'm also the happiest I've ever been, and I love my life today ❤️.

So yes: even though it wasn't always easy, it was definitely worth it.

To be continued 👀.