From freelancing to failed startup and building indie products

I've recently interviewed Adriaan Bouman the creator of IndieLeaders and StartupCrowns two side projects that track the growth of indie makers and startups on Twitter. He's also working on a SaaS product named Mailto.id, an alternative to mailto links for websites.

You can watch the full interview here.

Find below some take-aways 👇

🧰 About freelancing

"I always wanted to have a dev shop. Freelancing is nice but it's very very hard. When you have multiple projects and multiple customers... they call you for everything and your work gets very fragmented."

🚀 Startup failure

"DutchPlaces was really popular in Holland, had a lot of city marketing and I was collaborating with travel bloggers but the business model was really bad and I was pretty bad at marketing so it only made $10. I ended up losing interest and motivation and that made it lose momentum."

💡 Finding ideas

"IndieLeaders and StartupCrowns don't solve any problem. I was in bed and asked myself: what kind of problem did I had when building my previous projects? That's how I came up with the idea for Mailto.id "

👂 Learning from others

"Talk with other people. Talking with a friend really opened my eyes... In just two or three calls I learned som many things that I didn't even know existed. Get a different point of view, learn from others and be open to listening to their feedback"

👨🏻‍💻 Build small

"Don't build too big things. I had three projects that I built and that I believe in them but didn't do any research just because I enjoyed the building process. Just build small things and set small goals to keep it interesting for yourself and have small victories along the way"

You can watch the full interview with Adriaan here or you can watch some clips of it on QuickTalks Youtube channel:

Hope you enjoy it ✌️