I'm bootstrapping 2 products while consulting as a fractional CTO and traveling the world. AMA!

Thanks Abhi! I'm going to 5k MRR by end of 2022 with GummySearch.

For Hive Index, I'm still experimenting with monetization and haven't quite set revenue goals yet, the primary goal is visitors. Right now I'm 6k/mo and would like to get to 100k/mo.

Oooh awesome, thank you so much for including me in the newsletter!

Regarding my travels, I've always felt inspired by new locations and truly believe that I do my best work when I switch up my location from time to time. I had one amazing month-long solo trip to Singapore & Thailand a couple years ago where I worked on my first side-project for a couple hours a day, and adventured around for the rest. It was incredible, I loved every day of it, and got so much more done than I expected, only working a couple hours a day. I was hooked, and decided that I wanted to try this for a longer period of time and really bring some bigger ideas to life.

Originally, the plan was to travel the world for 9 months with my girlfriend (now wife), and we were saving up for it. We were going to hit every non-freezing continent, and had a fun route planned. Around when we were about to depart, covid hit and put a big pause on the plan. After almost a year of lockdown, we felt safe to travel but were restricted internationally, so we packed our stuff (and our cat), bought a car, moved out of NYC, and spent 9 months driving across the united states. It wasn't the world trip that we originally planned, but it definitely achieved a lot of the goals we had for it. Now that international travel is somewhat available, and because we love escaping the NYC winter, we extended for a couple months to visit some warm climates.

It's been fantastic, fresh, and fun. Best part is that we've met so many cool people on the way, and also got to see a lot of friends that got dispersed over the past couple of years.

What's next? We don't quite know. We have the next 2 months planned out and after that will either settle down somewhere to rebuild in-person community, or maybe bounce around Europe for the summer ;)

Tips for others wanting to do the same:

• It's possible to do this with a 9-5 (my wife does it), but it's definitely easier if you set up a meeting-less schedule for yourself
• Find community online, as it's hard to make an in-person community when you're moving all the time
• I think 2-3 weeks is the perfect amount of time to stay somewhere. We originally did a week in a location and traveled during the weekend, but it was exhausting to never get a break
• Not having a permanent home doesn't mean you're always visiting new exotic places! Take the time to visit family & friends while you have the flexibility to do so

For those looking to embark on a similar journey, best of luck and enjoy! Feel free to reach out to me here or on Twitter if you have any more specific questions!

The time commitment differs quite a lot! For example, for my current clients (both early stage startups):

• One is a 2-year plan where I'm quite involved as an operator and a co-owner
• One is a 4-month active development project, followed by a technical advisor role for 2 years which is more like a couple hours a week of talking to hiring candidates and participating in architecture reviews

Now that I'm done with the active part for the second one, I'm thinking of the kinds of projects I'd take on in the future. I think my ideal scenario would be more 2-3 month active projects, and if we have a great working relationship and I believe in the future of the company, I stay on as an advisor.

I love working on multiple projects. It has some downsides, but I think it's a great way to derisk, as well as not get burnt out. If I'm stuck on something for one of my projects, I can switch to another and get my momentum back while I think of the best solution for the first one. Background processing is quite a powerful concept.

I actually think that my tech stack is what enables me to work like this! Across my projects & consulting work, they are not always identical, but I try to keep them very similar.

I've developed a boilerplate with my preferred tech stack that lets me get up and going in a very short amount of time. Of course, when working with external clients you need to make sure that this tech stack works for their products, and this really only works if you're starting a codebase from scratch for them (which I am for the most part)

The best thing is, because I work across multiple codebases I can re-use certain feature architectures. For example, I implement transactional email, or a subscription billing set of features, if I need to implement that in another projects I have a huge head start because I have already architected it out. The more projects I start, the easier each additional project is.

So far the ones I've done have been via my network. People I've worked with that left to pursue their own startups, or folks I've met through my friends. The more of these jobs that I do, it seems like more people are aware of my service and more opportunities come my way. In fact, I have to turn some down sometimes.

I've noodled on the idea of keeping a list of talented indie hackers that are open to this kind of work part-time, and passing along jobs that I can't take on at that time.

Well I do work on multiple projects at once in the regard that they are both live & doing their thing at the same time. However, because I also have to split my time between my consulting work & travel, I need to be smart about time allocation.

I don't like switching focus too frequently, so what I like to do is:

1. Build my projects such that they can maintain (or even grow) on autopilot. This means automating user onboarding, good docs & emails for support, SEO for growth, social listening for marketing opportunities, etc
2. I plan out meaningful chunks of product & marketing work for each project. I then execute on that work for one project while the other maintains/grows, and then I switch to a meaningful chunk of work for the other. These meaningful chunks can be a week, they can be 2 months. The goal is to know what my primary objective is for a project during that time period, and know that when I'm working I'm working towards that.

Cash & equity are a sliding scale, and where you would land on that will depend on what you're looking for, and the relationship the startup desires. Same goes for time.

What I do for active projects is between 10-25 hours a week, charging $100 - $150 /hr depending on the length of project (more time is discounted). I've heard of some folks charging much more, in my case I'm working with people I know and take equity so I'm happy with my rate.

To determine equity, I'd recommend deciding on your hourly rate, and estimating what the project will cost overall. If that doesn't fit in the budget of whoever you're working with, take part of your payment in equity. Personally I'd never go full-equity, but that's just me. For advisor relationships, research the "FAST contract" for some good industry baselines of what time/stage/equity ratios are.

Thanks Atul! I totally intend to.