Building, Pausing, Living | IndieLog #1

I am a fullstack developer currently working full time in a company in hamburg.
I decided to try out the journey of indie development and create my own apps on the side.
My goal is pretty simple: create some cool apps, have fun, and maybe make a bit of money along the way. But money isn’t the main motivation. I don’t want to feel bad if it doesn’t come, so I’m trying to focus less on external validation and more on intrinsic motivation.
Which is actually hard to focus on, cause it's easy to focus on some metrics on some dashboard and feel good or bad about it depending what you see.
In my case always a little bit bad because the numbers don't go up, which can feel discouraging.
But hey, that’s part of the learning curve.

Build what you use

I’ve been doing this indie hacking thing for almost a year now.
Released one a called Stepmat an Pedometer for Android. I’ve been using it myself daily, fixing bugs, and adding features. Recently, I even hooked it up to Supabase to add some social features 😄
What helped me going, despite the low usage was that i used the app myself and got some feature request from some friends.

The joy of developing a feature and seeing it work helped of course too.

Pauses are productive

Balancing a full-time job, indie hacking, and family life is hard. For a long time, I sacrificed relaxation and was constantly on high alert. That wasn’t sustainable.

What I did was first built tiny breaks during the work. I used breaktimer.app and later i build my own version in flutter with it called Pausitive, (relasing it soon)
And it helped tremendous.

After a certain time my screen just blacks out, so i have to stand up and look outside a little bit or just stretch (I try at least not to skip this break 😂)
And it benefit me, I don't feel so exhausted and I realized for every screen time it helps to have a dedicated task to focus on. Makes me feel more productive and if the work is done i have a list of task i finished, or atleast a progresslist.

Long Weekend

Anyway it's not all about beeing productive. Please also make big breaks in form of a vacation.
Last weekend, my wife suggested a short trip, so we went to the Baltic Sea and just enjoyed some downtime. No coding, no projects, just relaxing.
I made it a point to not work on anything and just think about something else, if even. Just relaxing.
Sometimes doing nothing is the most productive thing you can do.
We shouldn't trade our life time to chase some exintric achievements.

That’s it for my first indielog. It’s a bit all over the place, but I’ll try to be more structured next time 😊 Maybe once a week, maybe every other week... let’s see.

Shoutout to Sebastian Röhl and Takuya Matsuyama — their writing inspired me to finally start this. Been a long-time reader and fan.