TL:DR: From now, I will be sharing personal experiences and thoughts in this newsletter. This might or might not include business related topics. The ‘once per last Friday’ format is changing to ‘as life happens’ instead.

Why pivoting

The newsletter is growing too slowly. I am naturally discarding things from my life that is not fun for me or that do not give me a high enough return to justify the effort. At the same time I want to be focusing on my business instead of writing about it. Each monthly update is a piece of content that needs to match a specific level of quality and because of this it takes time.

Normally I would just stop the newsletter. I believe however that documenting my progress and thoughts for other people out there is a net positive for everyone. Because of this, I am changing the newsletter to a new format and topic.

What to expect from now on

There is going to be more spontaneous content from now on. I will be documenting things that I feel worth sharing as they go. I already have a few topics to share but you can get the idea by visiting alexstyl.com.

What not to expect from now on

There will not be any technical topics discussed here. If you are here because of Android or technical content, I share everything at composables.co.

There won’t be a monthly update any more but instead ‘as life happens’ updates.

Back from Asia from a life changing trip

I just got back from Asia. I feel like this trip was one of the best decisions of my life as it positively changed me and solidify things for me.

I am not going to full detail towards why I moved to Asia as I have already written about this. The main reason was to meet other solo business owners that grow their business online.

Before this trip I was often feeling lonely and depressed. I felt my environment as hostile as my surrounding would dream of a stable 9to5 job and be able to rest on the weekends. Every time I would try to share my thoughts, doubts or wins with people nearby me it would never ‘click’. People could not just relate to what I am going through. For the majority of the people around me what I am doing is pure madness. Who on earth would leave their well paid stable job to build their own business starting off from 0? The worst part is that I knew they were right.

All this got me seeking like minded people online and that’s how I ended up visiting Bali, Indonesia. I knew that other indie hackers were gathering there and I wanted to meet them. After being able to meet them it finally ‘clicked’. Indiehacking stopped becoming a ‘talking to my internet friends about hopefully making a business’ and it turned into a real thing. I met people of different backgrounds and experiences. People that have already ‘made it’, others that are a step ahead of where I am and others that are just starting. We were able to help each other, motivate and understand each other. That alone made the trip worth it.

I am currently back to Europe. I am not sure yet where I will be heading next. What is for sure is that it will be some sunny place, with good food and other indie hackers nearby.

What’s next

Most of my work around Android has been very well received so far. Composables.co has been growing some nice amount of traffic, with more than 7.5k unique visitors this month alone and people seem to enjoy my content around Jetpack Compose.

The original idea of Composables.co was to focus on short video content, teaching people how to use Jetpack Compose and Android. As a professional developer, I do not like long videos on youtube as they require you to ‘dig’ on information in each video to find what you like. Videos on Composables.co are focused on teaching you one thing only with each video, without any advertisements or unnecessary explanations. The problem is that it is way too demanding on my side to do right. As a one person business this is not sustainable in the long run.

Composables.co is not going away, but rather focusing on what works and getting rid of what doesn’t. There are a few ideas in the making. I would love to tell you more about it, but I feel like if I mentioned every single plan that I tried and failed would feel like spam. Stick around and consider subscribing to composables.co to see what’s coming.

Sharing my Indie journey on Effective Android

This month I had the honor of sharing my Indie Hacking story at ‘s Effective Android! Jorge asked me to share my insights about transitioning from a 9to5 job to working for yourself.

Read the full story below:

Effective Android

Quiting Apple to go independent

This is the first guest post for the Effective Android newsletter. Alex Styl shares his perspective on why he left the stability of a full time job to become independent, and gives valuable tips about how to pick the right project, what mindset to have when working on it, how to grow an audience, speeding up delivery, and more…

Read more

3 years ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Alex Styl

December Revenue & stats

How much money I made from my projects on December:

• View to Composable: $ 1,492

• Ubidrop: $ 208.10

Total: $1,700.10

That is all with this update. Until the next one and happy 2023! 🎄

Subscribe now

TL;DR – What happened on October 2022

• #2 Product of the Week in Productivity

• Next steps for Ubidrop & Indiehacking

• Black Friday deals

• New side project launched

🏆 #2 Product of the Week in Productivity

This month I launched Ubidrop on Product Hunt. Ubidrop scored #5 product of the day and eventually was #2 Product of the Week in the Productivity section! Thank you so much for your help and support!

🧭 Next steps for Ubidrop and Indiehacking

Ubidrop has a lot of potential. This month alone it made $ 802, which is a first for a single product for me.

I keep seeing the same pattern from all my products and also from other founders: it is extremely hard to take a product to lift off the ground. It requires a lot of effort to make people aware of your product, let alone have people buying your products.

I feel like unless I have a dedicated target to hit, there is not much pushing me to move things forward. That being said, my next goal to hit is to make $2,000 in revenue each month.

I believe this is doable, even though a bit of a stretch. My next goals is to port Ubidrop to Windows. Ubidrop on Mac did well and I think it’s the right time now to increase the audience pool for the app. At the same time I am trying to get more tech app reviewers and tech bloggers to write about Ubidrop. This is all new to me, but it feels like it’s the way to go.

🤑 It’s Black Friday

This was the first time I participated in a Black Friday and I have to say it is a good experimentation for a founder. I tried out having a deal to most of my products to see what would happen.

More specifically, here is what I tried:

• Ubidrop: 50% off from all licenses and license bundles until Friday. The licences will also work on the future Windows version so that people can pre-order their licenses.

• View to Composable: 50% off

• Composables: Free copy of View to Composable with the purchase of an annual subscription.

💳 New side project launched

I have been having this idea for a while now while travelling. I hate carrying cash with me and I wished I knew places that accept credit card payments. Because of this, I made a simple website to keep track of places with contact less payments.

The website is taptopaylist.com and anyone can submit their own places.

💰 Revenue & stats

How much money I made from my projects this month

• Composables.co: $ 149 (or $ 80.71 MRR total)

• View to Composable: $ 100

• Ubidrop: $ 802.50

That is all for this month’s update. Hope you enjoyed this one and thanks for reading.

See you in the next one 👋
- Alex

TL;DR – What happened on October 2022

• Released Ubidrop early beta

• Let customer feedback lead product roadmap

• Technical difficulties building Ubidrop

• Preparing for Product Hunt launch

Here is what happened (in detail)

🛝 Released Ubidrop early beta

About a month ago, I posted a video about a small app I made, to share files from my Android to my Mac seamlessly. People seemed to love the app and wanted to try it out. It seems like a lot of people shared the same problem as I had for years. Android and Macs don’t play nice together. And Ubidrop (my app) makes sharing files super simple.

This month I decided to double down on Ubidrop and let people play with it, so that I can grow it while receiving feedback.

It was great to be working on an app with a lot of interest from people. I was releasing updates and people would immediately respond to them.

Many people reached out to me saying how much they wanted to try out Ubidrop, but it wouldn’t work on their device. This was great as we were able to debug the app on the fly, I could fix the app for them and push an update. I believe that everyone loves having their voices heard and showing through actions that you are listening is powerful.

👥 Let customer feedback lead product roadmap

I focused the roadmap 100% on the feedback I received.

People didn’t like having all their files on the desktop, so I added an option to change it. Others wanted to share bigger files. Also, the app is now available on the Google Play Store as people kept asking for it.

Listening to people’s feedback, questions and comments, led to the creation of the landing page of Ubidrop. I added an FAQ after all the questions I have received while building the app and sharing it on social, such as how the app works or what the difference to other file sharing apps is.

😰 Technical difficulties building Ubidrop

But it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. I have been building Android apps for almost 10 years, but building desktop apps is something new to me. It took a few takes in order to be able to do some basic stuff I would normally do with Android. I am super happy that the app is getting better almost daily.

An other thing that took me more time than I wanted was creating releases. Every time I wanted to publish an update with everyone, I had to wait almost 10 minutes for my computers to create all versions of the app (M1, Intel and Android). I think two weeks after the original release, I ended up automating this process using CI, which took me even more time.

I wish I could be only be spending time on improving the product, but some things are needed in order to keep moving fast.

One awesome moment this week was someone purchasing 10 Ubidrop licences for their business. Ubidrop in a business context is not something that had occurred to me, so it was a pleasant surprise!

Also, today I spotted the first tech blog writing about Ubidrop. Wild!

🚀 Preparing for Product Hunt launch

I would like to invite you all to the official Ubidrop launch on Monday, October 31st!

On Product Hunt, products compete with one another to be #1 for the day (or even #1 of the month). Each product climbs higher with the more number of votes it receives and interest from people.

Everyone is welcome, and you support is highly appreciated 🙏

💰 Revenue & stats

How much money I made from my projects this month

• Composables.co: $ 25 (or $ 93.29 MRR total)

• View to Composable: $ 50

• Ubidrop: $ 388

That’s all for this month. Thanks for reading this update.

Until next time,
– Alex

TL;DR – What happened on September 2022

• Went viral on Twitter with my new Android to Mac sharing app

• Talked about my Indie Journey on the Coffee And Coding podcast

• Teaching developers how to build Android apps

• Flew to Asia to surround myself with other makers

Here is what happened (in detail)

🔥 Went viral on Twitter with my Android to Mac sharing app

Being a long time Android user, sharing files to/from my laptop has always been a pain. Because of that, I decided to make a little app to make sharing across Android and Mac as simple as possible.

So, I built the MVP of the app and shared it around. Seems like others liked the idea too:

The app is currently free while it is in development. Join 229 others and share from your Android phone to your Mac seamlessly:

Share from Android to Mac

🎤 Talked about my Indie Journey on the Coffee And Coding podcast

I have been receiving many questions about how and why I decided to switch from working as an engineer to building my own products.

The tl;dr is I am not happy when I am only doing engineering work. I love talking to people and figuring out solutions to their problems. Doing engineering for the majority of my days just didn’t seem enough for me.

You can listen to the full episode over at coffeeandcodingpod.com

🎓 Teaching developers how to build Android apps using Jetpack Compose

This month I introduced paid memberships on composables.co. Composables.co is a place where people can learn Android development using Jetpack Compose.

Other that various paid and free courses introduced this month, there is now a private Discord server, where people can learn Android development together or ask me any Android specific question they might have.

🛩 Flew to Asia to surround myself with other makers

Last but not least, I wanted to surround myself with other people building their online businesses so I flew to Bali, Asia 🌴 for a few months.

I have been interacting with other makers online for the past year, but technology have yet to come close to face-to-face.

This is also one of the reasons why I wanted to work for myself building an Internet business, as I would be able to work from any place at any point.

Revenue & stats

How much money I made from my projects this month

• Composables.co: $ 819.5 from annual sales (or $ 68.29 MRR)

• View to Composable: $ 100

• Ubidrop: $ 53

That’s all for this month. This was the first issue of my newsletter. How was it? What would you like to see more next time? Let me know!

Until next time,
– Alex

I am on the plane heading to Asia to meet other makers building online businesses. Working solo growing your online businesses leaves you spending many hours on your own, trying to solve problems that no one else has. That can feel quite lonely and often demotivating.

You can of course talk to people for topics unrelated to work, but it is not the same. There is something in talking about the things you are passionate about, the problems you are going through with others that can relate and understand them.

Working a 9to5 job, you get to spend a good time with others doing the same job as you, or work on the same project as you. You get to go through the same problems with others, you talk about it with them, it feels better. By default, you share a good chunk of your time together, and share a lot of your lives in common because of this. People get to cheer each other up and motivate them through tough times. Working for yourself though is not like that. You end up spending a lot of hours on your own, working on problems that might be unique to your business at a given time.

On the bright side, it is now easier than ever to connect with other like-minded people, through social media or online communities. Despite that, technology does come close to face to face communication. I have been having video calls and chats with other makers online and it is great but often times those few moments of chat or hours of calls is not enough.

It is hard to talk about a topic that most people are not familiar with. This seems to be a common pattern among makers online. Those people are passionate about what they do, they do want to hangout with other people that are building their own things, but other like-minded people are not nearby.

Because of this, I am heading to Bali, Indonesia for a few months. I have seen quite a few people gathering there from the online communities I am part of and I would love to meet. No expectations.

About a year ago I left my high-paying software engineer job without having a set plan in mind or a profitable side project. I am documenting this journey, hoping this will be helpful for others that are after the same.

Some context

The goal was to figure out how to making a living outside of a 9-to-5 job. I enjoy the full process of building products (such as researching, designing, building, promoting).

Unfortunately, 9-to-5 jobs require you to specialize in something (say engineering) and focus mostly on that. There is also a big chunk of time spent on meetings, office chit-chat and unrelated activities, I am not excited about. Most of the times I would end work feeling drained, not feeling like doing anything afterwards. I wanted to change that.

Before quitting my job, I had 5 years of savings if I were to continue my life in London, UK. The truth is, I did not actively saved money specifically for quitting my job. I was considering to eventually buy a house, so I had some money saved. I am not not a big spender (roughly £2k pm), spending mostly on housing, food, gym and experiences.

During the first COVID lockdown, I was start thinking a lot of how I wanted my life to look like in the next few years.

Even though I love London, I sometimes felt tied to the location due to work. I wanted to be able to visit my family in Greece, and my friends around the world, whenever I wanted instead of risking not to be able to leave due to work reasons (as it has happened in the past).

So, I did the math, checked out how much money I had saved at that point and what would happen if for a whole year I had 0 income. Suddenly, it didn't seem that scary to 'pull the trigger'. For the record, I am now 31 years old, single, debt-free, healthy and I love creating (I find it therapeutic in a way). If this didn't work out, I thought that I would have grown so much as a person, learnt so much about how the world works, and meet some incredible people along the way. Seemed like a good deal, so I went with it.

On June 2021 I quit my job. I took a month off and August was the start of my indie hacking journey.

From blindly building to finding focus

The first six months worked as an exploratory period and were full of self-doubt and imposter syndrome. I was building products left and right hoping something would stick. My marketing "strategy" included shipping to Product Hunt without telling anyone about it before hand. During the first month I built and launched my first SaaS product which made a wooping $7 a month or so after from a customer that churned a month after.

It was due to pure luck that I found out a market I was part of for many years and also happy to build for. I have been building Android apps for the past 10 years and I already knew problems developers are facing. It seemed like a great fit.

I started focusing on social media and becoming more active on Twitter. I started creating short valuable tips for Android developers. People seemed to appreciate the tips which gave me a level of credibility in the community. The more tips I would give, the more interest I would see on specific parts of the ecosystem.

The first paid product I made for that market was an app template that was using the latest technologies in the community. People were interested about it and ended up selling 41 copies and making my first $680.32 online. No life changing amount by any means but it felt like a great start.

The second product with some significant revenue was a book on a new UI Android framework. Even though devs are excited for this new UI framework, they do not want to spend hours in putting the effort learning it, while they can build apps with the old framework. The book is saving people tons of time by including tons of code snippets and examples on how to do things they already know from the old framework. It works like a reference/cook book. The book has generated over 100 sales and $3,342.74 in revenue in three months and still going.

Lessons learnt

First of all, a great product is not enough. People need to be aware of how much value they can get out of your product and how it can help them. Your product might be best thing ever, but unless anyone knows how great it is, it doesn't matter.

Second of all, you don't need a SaaS to make profit. There are so many other ways you can be profitable, such as info-products, software with 1 time payment, paying newsletters, etc. It is probably obvious to most people here, but I had this belief that I had to build a SaaS when I started.

Also, there is no such thing as a step-by-step process that will work for you. You can read as many books as you want, blog posts or stories from the founders you look up to, but it won't work for you. There are a lot variables that come into play that can make or kill a product, such as the trust people have that you can deliver, how much they need a product that they are willing to pay for it or how compelling your offer is. Your network and people you can reach also plays a big part in this.

In the end of the day, you have to put in the work and see what works best for you and the people you want to help.

Last but not least, it is not up to you whether people will buy a product or not. Build something, put a price and see how the market reacts seems like the way to go. There can't be any expectations in this. People have the final saying, but you can keep changing your offer to see what works best.

The best part is that even if you launch something and fails, nothing will happen.

Next Steps

This past year was focused on figuring things out and making the jump to working for myself. The focus for this year is becoming ramen profitable, so that I keep doing this for a long time. Since quitting my job I was able to visit friends in multiple countries and move countries which also worked for reducing my monthly expenses.

I also want to meet some of the awesome makers I am chatting with online all this time. It would be great to finally hangout with people that are building their own businesses.

Conclusion

This year marked my first year of working for myself. I am not yet ramen profitable but I am confident in myself and excited to continue pushing forward.

I hope this post was useful for anyone that is after the same path. If you would like to support me you can follow me on Twitter.

There are a lot of things I have skipped in the post, as I was thinking it might have been too much. I am happy to answer any questions you might have if you want to hear more.

A sensory deprivation tank or floatation tank is a big futuristic looking device. It is filled with highly concentrated Epsom salt water that will make it impossible to sink. The water is body temperature. This makes the sensation of the water fade away after a short while.

Essentially this gives you the feeling that you float in nothingness.

It is called sensory deprivation as while in the tank, none of your senses are used. There is nothing to see, as everything is pitch black. There is nothing to touch or feel, as your body touches nothing but body temperature water. There is nothing to hear, as there is no sound. There is just you.

Before you enter the tank, they ask you to take a shower. They told me that this is to get your body to the temperature of the water quicker. The tank is kept in a private room. You get fully undressed, put the special earplugs on and have the shower. All the preparation before entering the tank made me feel unease. I had never experienced not being able to see or hear or touch before, but this was something that got me interested in the experience in the first place.

Once in the tank, you are greeted with relaxing ambient music and soft blue light. You start making yourself familiar with the insides of the tank, trying to find a way to relax your body while floating. Five minutes in, the music stops, the lights turn off and you experience the true sensory deprivation.

It took me a good while to get comfortable in the tank. It was awkward at first to relax your body on the water, without floating to the sides and getting your hands or head touching the sides. Not sure if this was my case being quite tall or this is a common issue. One trick I found is to hold the inside walls and wait for the water to calm down, so that it doesn't move your body while you float. Once you are all comfortable and can finally "relax" there is this weird "now what" moment.

I remembered seeing a sign at the lobby, mentioning why people like to float in a tank like this. It is meant to help you relax, reduce stress, come to terms with yourself and think about the future. I laid down (floated rather) reflecting on my life for the past year. In retrospect, life has been good, despite all the craziness of the pandemic and the unstable nature of bootstrapping your own business. I thought about my close family and people in my life and how it gets harder and harder to relate to their way of living. In the end of the day though, everyone is working towards their life and goals. The best thing to do is accept that everyone's life and circumstances are different, truly listen to them and support them as much as possible when needed.

For the rest of the float, I let my mind run on its own and see where it would take me. Time flew by at that point and it felt like dreaming. They say that we see dreams through the whole duration that we sleep, but when you wake up it feels like the dream lasted a few seconds. This is the closest thing to describe how it felt.

After an hour of floating, the calm ambient sound comes on, notifying you about the end of the session. It feels nice listening to sound after an hour of nothingness. After a while, the blue lights turn back on and suddenly your sight turns full red. I guess that is a reflex of the eyes adjusting to light after such a long time in the darkness. When the time is up, you open the lid of the tank and experience the room you entered the tank from.

After having an other warm shower to remove all the salts, you are welcomed to the post floating area. It is a place where you can relax with some tea while you get used to your senses once again. I had the chance to have a chat with an other man relaxing in the area. It was this sea food business owner, father of two. This was his fourth (or fifth) time floating after a friend's recommendation for a way to relieve stress. He told me how it takes a few floats until you can get the full relaxation of floating.

Overall floating was a pleasant experience. Who knows? Maybe one day I will feel the need to float again to see where my mind can get me.

About two weeks ago I donated, sold and threw away most of my stuff to live off Airbnbs. This is not the first time I am doing this. Right before COVID-19 happened (December 2019) my house contract in London was coming to an end. I really did not want to go through the pain of finding a place to rent.

The effort required in finding a place in London is not worth it. There is a huge drain of resources and energy in finding a single apartment. You first need to scan various flat sharing and renting websites in order to find the ones matching your criteria and budget. You quickly realize that the majority are either overpriced or in poor condition. For the remaining ones that look decent enough, you need to decrypt how edited the photo might be or whether they used a fish-eyed lense to make the place look bigger than it really is. Finally, you need to arrange a flat viewing and if ultimately you like the place, need to be fast and lucky enough to book it.

Contracts are usually at least one year long. This is too short if you really like the place and have to go through the process again the year after. Then again this is too long if there is some unexpected issue with the place that you couldn't see during the viewing (such as neighbour issues or noise polution).

I decided to give longer stay Airbnbs a shot to see if that would be a viable way of living instead of renting. It just made sense to me.

Finding a place to stay on Airbnb vs any rental websites is way more streamlined. I know that when I go to the Airbnb website, the quality of the places seem higher, they will have the amentities and furniture I need. I don't need to worry about setting up and paying bills as they are all included in the price. If I am not sure the place has everything I need, I can message the friendly host and they reply almost immediately. Good luck talking to an agent or landlord in London and receiving an answer in that manner. Best part is I do not need to be worried about the length of stay as I can adjust it according to my needs.

The first time time I attempted this was for a period of 2 months. I booked a first month longth stay, then had a short trip to Denmark and Switzerland. On my way back to London, I headed off to the next one month stay. Right after that COVID happened which made me consider renting for a year long contract as it did not look like the best time to be moving around often.

Two years later I decided to give this an other shot. At the current stage of my life I have been working towards making a living off my own digital products and what is important to me is increasing my runaway money as much as possible by reducing the cost of living. At the same time I am not willing to sacrifise the quality of living to achieve this. I have considered various countries for the next months both in Europe and Asia. As always this will probably make more sense the more I do and explore this.

I have only kept the things that are the most important to achieve my goals. This is my laptop and phone, some basic clothes and underwear. I really do not want to have to move unnecessary baggage while moving, let alone across countries.

This is a recap of what happened in the first six months working as an indie dev. I built a lot, failed a lot, learnt a lot. There is a huge mentality swift for coding as 9to5 to building as an indie dev, which I was not expecting.

The first couple of months were painfully slow and full of self doubt. Looking back I did everything wrong. Being a mobile developer, I started building for the Web. Even though I am glad I did that as I now have a better understanding of what is doable with the technologies, it was a really bad place mentally wise. I put a ton of burden on myself, truly believing that for me to have any chance in this I had to learn web development. Nonetheless I am glad I experimented with web technologies.

After the release of Audio Bites, I decided to let the project live on its own and see what happens, while working on a new project. People were providing me with feedback and feature requests and instead of me working on those, I kept them hidden on a trello board and wait for multiple requests to come in. Looking back this was a very bad idea. I think that this logic makes more sense if you are some big corp that has tons of users providing feedback. For an indie dev trying to grow their business, not so much. Implementing customer feedback shows people you are listening, which is a huge advantage compared to big corporations.

The second project I worked on was called Social Viewer. Social Viewer's idea came from my curiosity of wanting to understand my Twitter followers better. I was trying to make sense of Twitter and online presense, so I figured that building a tool on that domain would help me make sense of it. At the same time, instead of working with unfamiliar technologies, I tried to stick with tools and languages I already knew.

In theory it was a great project to be working on. After spending a couple of weeks trying to figure out how to setup a server using the languages I knew well, I realised that I was just trying to build a tool for myself. Right after I was done with the basic functionality, I immediately lost interest in the project. That made finishing the project incredibly draining. Not believing in a product you are building is not fun and feels like working for someone else. It just doesn't make sense to do it. From this I understood that unless I am invested/truly interested in an idea, this won't work. Plus, I knew I had to figure out a way to validate my ideas before getting heavy on development (if I had to), but I didn't know how.

After the first two months of failing and feeling stuck, I felt like I needed a "small win" to boost me mentally. I started realizing the importance of side projects and how working on multiple thing at once could be beneficial. Working on a project for profit does not prevent me from exploring and building other side projects that purely for the joy of working on something I liked.

Before leaving my 9to5, I started working on a Contacts app for Android. The default app and the ones I could find on the Play Store felt outdated. At the same time, I wanted a project to experiment with a new technologies and other ideas I had outside of work. While working on contacts, I quickly remembered how much of a pain it is to work with the existing Contacts API. I continued working on the project most mornings before work, and the idea of building a better version of this 10 year old API came to life.

Fast forward to October, this was the perfect thing to build for that "small win". I enjoy designing APIs as much as products and I enjoy working with Android. It was something I genuienly wanted to work on, and the solution could be used in so many future projects of mine. Plus, having a 7 year old laptop to work with Android is not ideal and this was light enough to help with fast iterations. As a result ContactStore was born:

The project seemed to be well received by the Android community, which was the cherry on top of the small win idea. In the following few weeks after the release, people created issues, requested features and shared the library around. I kept working on ContactStore, including more features and making the API more fitting to people's needs.

After releasing Social Viewer, I decided to go back to Audio Bites and turn it into a SaaS using everything I had learnt. Even though I was more confident with web technologies and server side at that point, I realized that I had no clue about server databases, authentication, managing customer records and a bunch of other things server people do.

My first approach to these was using 3rd party frameworks. One thing I had not predicted was that each one of those frameworks is yet an other tool you need to learn from scratch. It took me a week trying to figure out which frameworks to use only to conclude I was just wasting my time. I ended up using mobile solutions on the server-side (SQLite3 as that's what Android uses and I know well), and hacked a quick solution for anything I was missing so that I can get a product to the market and validate whether people will pay for it.

Plus, spending a week working on something that has no real impact on the goal felt like wasted time (and a huge hit in my mood). To this day of writing, Audio Bites generated £7 of revenue from a single pay customer, which churned after a month of usage.

Towards the end of the year, I started questioning whether I need to do any coding at all to validate whether a product will sell or not. At the same time, interacting with the Android community and building using tools I am really familiar with, made me realise how much I missed building and sharing for the Android community.

And then it hit me... I enjoy working on Android and I already knew the problems the Android community is facing. Being an Android developer myself for the past 10+ years and being involved in communities in multiple countries helped.

This gave me an idea on the next area I wanted to move next. Given that I knew how much of a pain it is to work with Contacts on Android, I thought that companies and businesses might already be struggling with that. At the same time I keep seeing how much of an issue design and UI work seems to be. Most developers I talk to are not fans of UI work. At the same time, most of the work for using contacts had been made easy using ContactStore, so it was a good opportunity to try out the library on a real project.

Instead of building the whole thing before selling I decided to try out a pre-sale first to check if the work is worth doing. The Kit got a few pre-sales and some friction on Twitter (for my little following) which pushed me to build the Kit for real. I already had some good knowledge of Jetpack Compose so building a new app from scratch wasn't much of a deal. This helped me share my progress as I went through, building in public. This made the whole development of the Kit way more enjoyable than developing any of my previous projects.

On February 1st, the Jetpack Compose Starter Kit became available to everyone. To this day of writing, the Kit had 40 sales (including pre-sales).

Even though the amount of money is not enough to cover a month's of expenses, this experiment helped me understand a few things. I do not need to learn new technologies or become a SaaS master to make a profit online. As I try to try to make sense of the Saas world by growing Audio Bites, I can be working on domains I already know very well. I know for a fact now that I want to be doing more Android related work and contribute more into the Android community.

If you are wondering what I am planning on doing next, so am I. I am somehow switching off from a have to be producting 24/7 and start leaning towards things that feel right to work on. Plus, working with tools I already know very well allow me to move fast and keeps my energy high. Seems like a keeper tactic for now.

Next review in 6 months, which is going to be on August 2022. Follow @alexstyl to be notified when that happens.

This was the first month working as full time maker. It has been about two months since I left my six figure job and after a month spending time with my family and friends back in Greece, I came back to London to start working on my own products.

Having to start from somewhere, I set the goal of shipping a product within a month's time. That way I could get a lot of unknowns and fears out of my system. Otherwise I would self-sabotage myself and risk never ship anything.

The first problem I faced was to come up with an idea of a product to build. Having worked on the ideation and research of new features for existing products, you learn a thing or two about approaching this. There are various user research methods to help you understand the users' needs and pains using your product. What do you do when you don't have a product though? Also how do you validate that a solution is truly needed when you have no or very limited resources?

Every time I would find a 'problem that needs solving' online, I would also find multiple products that would cover that need. Whenever I found something that had no existing solutions, I felt like the idea was dumb and not worth it. I ended up coming up with the idea to create a tool for new content creators to generate content out of their existing one. The users would be able to select some audio recording and the tool would generate a short visual clip made from that audio. Despite the fact that there are some other solutions out there that do this, I decided to focus on the video generation aspect with as less hassle from the user side as possible.

In order to validate the idea, I created a landing page using Carrd. I then created a sample video that the app would generate using iMovie. I was planning on emailing multiple content creators with examples of their branding on generated videos. I ended up emailing one. I never heard back from them. It seemed like a great idea before sending the email, which quickly seemed silly after I sent the first email. Why would anyone want to use a product they never heard of by someone they don't know? Because of that I ended up building the original idea anyway so that I could share it around and get more feedback.

I made some mocks on Figma in order to get a sense of how the website would look like and have an idea of what I wanted to keep or remove. Web development seemed way more straightforward than I was expecting it to be. I ended up building the layout of the site and some basic functionality in a couple of days. I think that it took me more time to figure out how to configure the server (php + apache) and then finally upload the website to Heroku than the main building itself. In order to manage the amount of work, I created simple user stories on Trello so that I could keep track of the work that was left to complete.

The way the app works is super simple. The users can choose some of their existing audio and video files and choose some of the preselected colors. The server then extracts the audio using AWS Transcribe and then ffmpeg is used to create the final video. There are so many things I could build upon this idea, but given the time I had, this is all I could build for the time being. You can try out the app yourself at audiobites.io. In the following days, I am planning to distribute the app via various websites and take care of any bugs that might arise.

Building a product from start to end without having all the answers helped a lot. It made me understand a bit better what the missing bits were in order to go from ideation to delivery. Plus, it gave me the confidence to build for the web which was a mystery to me a month ago. An other great thing about this approach is that now I have a whole list of potential ideas for products to build. It is the moment right after you start building something that all the new ideas flow in. What is next is to find out how to validate as many of them as I can, ideally to a much shorter period than a month, so that I can spend the time required to build again.

Ever since I can remember myself I have been attracted to activities that let me create new things. I grew up sketching, designing 2D video game stages and then started building and coding custom maps and levels for games with level design builders. Creating always felt like a game. As a matter of fact, creating felt (and most of the times still does) more fun than playing some game. It came naturally to me to pursue a career in Computer Science and start fidgeting with gadgets and get into coding and later on building apps. Creating though somehow felt like an afterthought of how the world around me worked. Given that I was truly free to create anything I liked in my personal time, it felt like a hobby and something that was too good to be true to do as a living. At the same time, people didn't want anything to do with their profession outside of working hours. People find it crazy that I code and design outside of work instead of watching TV or "relaxing" and that I enjoy it.

In todays society we rarely ever talk about personal happiness and how important it is in both for the individual and society as a whole. It somehow feels like a taboo topic. Yet again work takes a big chunk of everyone's day and dramatically affects our lives. Unless you are excited to go to work in the morning, the bed might feel like a struggle to get out of. Your time at work, unless fulfilling, will seem eternal and it will feel like there is no energy left in the end of the day. And the whole process repeats itself.

Each person's happiness is an aspect of their life that is far too important to be left to its own luck. Happiness is unique to each one of us and it takes time to understand one's self in order to understand what makes them truly happy. This is something that has been stuck in my mind for the past few months. By this point you might have already guessed that what makes me happy is creating. I am the kind of person that loves spending the time to understand a real world problem and come up with a solution that fits the problem like a jigsaw piece. That might be because it feels important and the effort you put into the understanding and the solution feels worth the time.

An other thing I have been thinking a lot lately is the state of technology in the Western world. High speed connections are fairly common nowadays and you can find almost anything you want nowadays on the Internet if you know where to look for. Those curious enough about a specific topic or skill should have anything they need to their disposal to get things going. The more I look at this the more I keep getting into the conclusion that the resources to design the way that fits the lifestyle you want are currently out there. All it takes is to figure out how you want your life to look like and get into work. At the time of writing this post, it has been about one month after quiting my Software Engineer job in order to spend enough time to truly understand how something like this can be achieved.

Thankfully being cautious of my spending habbits allow actions like this. I stick with buying the essentials I need and unless I truly believe that something is really going to improve my life directly, I think twice before buying it. Favoring home cooking meals instead of takeaways not only saves you a ton of money but also can help with mood and overall health given that you know what goes in your food and you can cut down a lot of excess calories.

I have set a few goals for this coming year which I will be working towards:

• Launch and maintain at least one profitable product - Needless to say this is a stretch goal. Figuring something out for the first time is always the hardest and there are countless stories of people taking them years to see any profit. There is no expectation to see any profit straight from the start but it sets a clear target which I can work backwards to figure out how to get there.

• Improve my full stack skills - Coming from a mobile first backgroung my full stack skills are somewhat rusty. Native development is fantastic when it comes to user experience but realistically if the solution is simple enough, a native approach might be a waste of resources.

• Improve prototyping skills - Prototyping an app or feature in order for the team or customers to play with and explore potential product concepts has deemed increadibly useful in the past. I am confident with my Android app prototyping skills and I would like to be able to do the same no matter the platform. So far faking an app via a website and running it on a device seem the way to go but I am sure there are better solutions out there that I am not aware of.

Building anything that is only profitable doesn't seem like the way to go though. Even though profit is important if I want to continue doing this for a long time, products created need to be within a field or topic that I have an interest or passion about. It wouldn't make sense not to do this. Otherwise I will be going full circle with what I described in the start of this post.

Next steps are to continue working towards the first public launch and get more ideas for future products along the way.

Thank you for reading. You can follow me on Twitter to follow along this journey, where I share everything I learn as I grow my business.