Lessons from a merger of indie projects

A few weeks ago, Taylor Palmer, who runs the well-known annual Design Tools Survey, messaged me. He said he thought our two sites (uxtools.co and learnuxd.io) fit really well together and maybe there was an opportunity to work together.

As we talked further, we realized our two projects had a lot of complementary strengths and assets, and filled in gaps for each other. He had built up a big (10k+) mailing list of designers and had great traffic and SEO juice, but the only thing he was doing was the survey once a year. I was putting out consistent content that was getting good reactions and steadily building up a following on social media around that. Put those two things together and we could both significantly advance our projects in one go and provide value for our audiences.

We decide to completely merge. We'll now be doing everything at https://uxtools.co.

I've taken away a few lessons for indie hacking from this...

First, don't be afraid to work with other people on your project. When I initially read Taylor's message, I was a little hesitant. Learn UXD felt like my baby and I didn't know if I wanted to share it with someone else or give up part of my control. But I realized that combining could multiply all my efforts and open up new avenues to reach our goals in ways that weren't possible if I were on my own.

Second, opportunities bubble up when you put out high-quality work OVER A LONG PERIOD OF TIME.

Ali Abdaal (who has 1.5 million YouTube subcribers) explains this type of thing in this video:

https://youtu.be/VTTp5A-rSdc

It took him years of constantly putting up videos that almost no one saw before he saw exponential growth and got to where he is today.

Taylor and I are nowhere near as successful as Ali, but I couldn't help thinking about this the last couple of weeks. We have both been working hard to put out great value for our audiences for a long time (and have tried other side projects in the past). And we ended up working together because of all the work we had put in beforehand.

Consistency is the key to the game. It's about the long game (probably longer than you think). You don't know what will happen in the future, but you can be sure that if you're persistent, patient, and pay attention to details, "lucky" moments happen.