My Journey as an Indie Hacker is beginning

I've been inspired by the IndieHacker community to take my entrepreneurship goals more seriously. I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur, build stuff I'm proud of and that people love.

I have been sidetracked for a long time, but maybe I can take something away from those detours. I went to college like my parents wanted me to. I studied Mechatronics Engineering(also called Control and Automation Engineering) and built robots at the robotics competition team DROID for 5 years while in college.

Never really won any competition, sadly, and I always tried to come up with side hustles ideas during my classes. I failed tons of ideas and classes because of it lol.

Tried selling smartwatches, and did work for 2/3 of the ones I sold (I had low money to keep doing it and my profit margins were consumed by big burgers late at night at some dude's joint called Salada).

Bought stocks, saw it increase 20% in one year, sold off, and bought a bunch of stuff to celebrate, and with a little bit that was left, bought bitcoin (that was back in 2017 I believe). After Bitcoin grew my margins by about 50% I sold it off and got myself a Rock Lee(from Naruto) tattoo (yeah I haven't been the most disciplined with my side hustles as you can tell by now).

Then after my money went down the drain, I actually got a job from Craigslist to work for a branch of Disney Research Labs, was a very easy-to-do job, mostly design, and the pay wasn't all that good, to be honest.

I was also accepted into an "Entrepreneurship Simulator" called TrepCamp, you can read all about it here. And it was something that helped me to get my first internship.

Internship and First Job

After a couple of years on one and off jobs, I started interning in a company that worked with health care data for all the regions of Brazil(That's where I'm from).

I then stopped competing in robotics and started my real career in software development. I started in my last year in college and oh boy if it wasn't something!

I had at that point always seen my life as "I need to learn to build apps, so then I will just keep trying to code a bunch of them until I get a big hit". So I started by coding in javascript (React and React Native) at my new job (back when React was object-oriented, feel old yet?).

So I started learning how websites worked, what was more efficient, and what wasn't to be done on the front end. By the way, I learned about front and backend. Something that didn't make much sense at first to my academic/robot builder head.

But then I learned about all these fancy words, and how to communicate with people from a different area in the tech stack. I learned also about specific health tech stuff, like FHIR as a way to normalize healthcare data, and worked with it on all the projects there.

I worked mostly as a front-end developer there, but I also had to configure some backend stuff such as identity providers using WSO2 and helping with the migration from on-premises to the AWS cloud for some of the company's products.

Funny thing, my last project there was a covid vaccine scheduler for a bunch of states in Brazil. Pretty damn cool.

It was a ride, I started as an intern and after 3 months I was already hired as a full-time member there. The boss saw my efforts in learning stuff and gave me a shot, I thank him to this day. It was a huge leap for me, I finally got enough money to move out of the university's dorms. Finally, I would live in a place I wanted to live in, and not with some crazy dudes ( I mean it was fun, but there's a time when you just want to shit in peace without someone knocking on the door).

Do you know what's crazy? Whenever I wasn't working on this main job, I was coding at a startup that wanted to create a game-playing social network. We coded the app on React Native and I was nearly averaging 18-hour work days. I still talk to the folks I met there, even traveled to hang out in pubs and stuff. Really love them. I did this because I loved the company's idea, the folks there and I would get equity if things scaled. Unfortunately, it didn't.

Do you know what is even crazier²? I was also building my own startup called AllFarmz, I had won 10k USD in TrepCamp as seed money and was with a group of founders from all over Latin America to bring better resources for poorer farmers. That didn't pan out either.

Big Company Boy

After losing my nerves a couple of times working way too much and not making college a priority, I wanted a different type of job, one that wasn't as "startupy" so I would have time to finish my degree. That's when I moved over to my second company. This time I would abandon all things startup-like and focus on my job and school.

I moved to a big tech company. I worked with Kotlin (and Kotlin Multiplatform which led to one of my biggest posts) to build a stock trading app in a company that dominates over 60% of the market in Brazil.

It was pretty damn cool, but also not as demanding as a startup so I could finish my graduation.

Remote Offshore

I finally got to graduate and felt sane for the first time in 8 years. And then I got a job opportunity to work at the company I'm currently at. Working with fintech clients, coding in anything from React, NestJS, Flutter, and dotNet.

It took well over a year working here before I started thinking I was ready to side hustle once more, I really needed a break after college, graduating really was one of the hardest things I ever did.

Now

So that brings us to now. I started reading books and the IndieHacker blog and started getting some ideas.

The first Idea came from the Content Inc book. Which basically argues that first, you should build an audience before you even think of building a product.

And so I started this blog (been running it regularly for about 7 months or so, posting weekly).

But somewhere along the way, I came across several posts on IndieHackers about doing 6 Startups in 6 months. So I decided on doing something like that, one app a month, till next year or I find an app that people really want.

Therefore I created a Youtube channel where I go into more depth on the projects I'm building.

So I'm excited to be back at entrepreneurship and side hustling, but I'm also doing it more responsibly, where I rock at my daily job and do these side hustles in my free time and on weekends. No more 2 startups and a job and college for me LMAO.

One app a month helps me stay more focused and allows me to say NO to a bunch of other opportunities without feeling FOMO. After all, if this doesn't work, there's always next month.

I'm glad you reached the end and if you want to keep posted, do subscribe to my channel and to this newsletter. I will share anything I learn along the way, be it marketing, sales, lead gen, software development, etc.

Thanks and I will see you! Happy hacking!

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