$1M as an indie dev

You know, that's a hard question to answer. I'm sure there's been tons of things but since I've quit doing them, I have mostly forgotten what they were. Haha! Heck, sometimes that's just a product in general. It's a lot more work than it's worth and you have to decide whether you sell it, shut it down, or pivot it.

I know I spent a lot of time writing little blog posts that never really mattered so I've stopped doing that. Instead I try to write more things that are evergreen and for my email list.

I wish I had spent more time on my email list honestly. Those are people who specifically want to see more content from you and you just have a more personal connection with them over email than you do on twitter, etc. I'd have invested more time into that consistently throughout the years.

It's true, the brand is very valuable. There's no way to put a concrete number on it, so it's hard to say what it's worth exactly.

The subscription is really useful because it's stable. I know what I'll make next month. If you sell courses, you've got to build up hype for a launch and try to maximize sales during that time. It can make a lot more money because people are willing to spend $150 on a course, but only $19 a month for a subscription. That $150 might very well be a higher LTV than the monthly subscription.

Of course, this depends on your product and what you're trying to accomplish a bit. GoRails is a subscription cuz I want the incentive to continually produce new content otherwise I'd probably take a break and might never come back. 😅

That makes my day @1979 🙏

Just the first 15 videos originally, but I still give away free content about every other week. It goes a long way to building trust and I end up charging for the more advanced stuff that takes me more time to make which people are happy to pay for.

I split my time on the products. GoRails probably gets 1/4rd of my time, Hatchbox gets 1/2, and Jumpstart gets 1/4th.

Jumpstart turned out to be really interesting. I definitely intended for it to be a template to save you time, but so many people have told me that it's the perfect app to learn what real production code looks like and how it's tested, etc. I never really planned for that, but it does make total sense to me that it's a great template to learn from. I'd have absolutely bought Jumpstart when I was learning Rails because I know I would have learned a lot from it (like how to model complex things like teams/accounts, invites, etc).

Thanks Manuel 🙏

No retiring yet! Gotta keep growing and making things better!

1. Learn Ruby well. Rails takes advantage of so much of the unique features of Ruby that it can be confusing. I'm actually creating a course on all the things I wish I knew about Ruby to help save time. The metaprogramming aspects of Ruby are really powerful and make Rails possible.

2. Get good at debugging. So many people struggle with this. When you get an error with a long backtrace, learn how to read it. It's telling you exactly what happened, but most people see it and get scared.

3. Build an app or two you'll use every day. Could be a todo list or calendar. Deploy it to production, add features to it, fix bugs, get friends to use it. Doing this got me my first couple of jobs and taught me a ton in a short period of time. Far more than just following tutorials and building brand new apps would.

It's a mixture. People are tweeting about learning, asking questions on Reddit, and looking for tutorials on YouTube but SEO is also a great driver. All good places to find people who are trying to get better.

Thanks @julianu! 🙏

GoRails makes about half the revenue and was my original product. Over the years I've added on Hatchbox and Jumpstart and they're starting to make money now.

I'm not sure what I would do differently. When I started, I had no audience and no idea what I was doing. I'd probably have shared more of what I was doing early on instead of waiting till I polished it up. People like ongoing updates and keeping things secret until they're "finished" only hinders you when you have a small audience. That hopefully would have sped up my first year or two.

I reinvested as little as possible actually. I was trying to live on the income, so it needed to be as profitable as I could make it so I could eat and pay rent. Originally my expenses were about $99/mo (Wistia I believe) and that the rest was profit I could use to pay bills.

I'm not sure exactly. I have between $1-2k/mo in expenses, so that'd come out to like $156k in expenses if it was $2k/mo on average for 6.5 years. That's probably in the ballpark.

Love hearing that. Thanks for all your support George!

1. I taught what I knew. Since I had a few years experience, I could teach the stuff I learned over that time. Then I'd push myself, learn new things and try and teach those. Trying to teach stuff forces you into learning it really deeply, so that has really accelerated my pace of learning I feel like.

Most of the time, I need to learn stuff on real projects and then I can teach it. It's helped to do a little consulting or build other products so I can extract learnings from those and teach them. Makes creating content a thousand times easier.

I always try to almost over-explain things. I don't want to gloss over anything because those are the crucial things to fill in the gaps sometimes. I've seen plenty of tutorials that skim over things and you end up just as confused as you were when you started.

2. It's a lot of gut feeling. Stuff I wish I learned earlier is always great content and something a customer couldn't tell me they wanted. Sometimes people need help on a specific topic, so that's another good source of tutorial ideas. And new libraries and tools coming out are always good too.

3. Number of comments I got was the main metric. If it got people talking, then I knew it was something we should dive in more on. Simple metric and easy to keep an eye on.

4. I actually don't plan too much. I have a general idea in my head and I try to create the content as I would in real life if I wasn't recording. I want to try to record my regular workflow as opposed to following a script. That said, I'll usually practice building the feature 2 or 3 times while explaining it out loud so when I sit down to actually record I don't run into as many issues. It gets distracting if you're debugging in the middle of a video and takes away from the main thing. Debugging is important to teach too, but it is so distracting that I prefer if things are more streamlined and we talk about that separately.

I'll be sure to share the story when I get there. Seems like it'll be a lot easier for the second million.

I'm mostly looking at the type of product. Education subscriptions typically have very high churn, so I've expanded my offerings to sell other things with higher LTVs. Other education SaaS owners I've talked to have all had the same struggles with churn. Once you teach people what they need, they don't have a reason to stick around.

Brand makes it about a million times easier now. In the early days, I'd spend my time creating content (videos, blog posts, tutorials, etc) that I couldn't find online. Those are things that are easily shared on Reddit, Twitter, etc and tend to rank for SEO easier because they're not oversaturated topics. Finding inspiration for those topics can be hard, but if you pay attention, things like google searches you do but can't find the answer quickly are prime candidates for a topic you could write about.

I personally only like learning by doing. I just start creating something, and if I don't know how to do something, I Google it. I hate the idea of spending tens of hours reading/learning something just to forget it and to have to search for it again when I start building stuff.

I understand that many others prefer written courses or watching videos, but I also think many of those just do it because watching a video is easier than creating something, so they feel like they are progressing or doing something for thei future, when actually they just learn information that, unless used to create something, is useless.

Video fits visual learners well. I know I learn a lot watching someone else work, so video is great for that and not something you could ever do in books or documentation.