Reflecting on 4 months of full-time indie hacking

December 23, 2021, was my last day as SEO growth lead at a US-based fintech company. After working for 1.5 years, I took the plunge to become a full-time indie hacker.

Before jumping all in, let me give a brief introduction. My name is Tejas and I’m based out of Mumbai, India. I’ve written 2 books in my lifetime on Quora Marketing & SaaS SEO.

I am also the co-founder & CMO at CampusTrail (Study Abroad Consulting firm) we started 1.5 years back.

I’m currently building Affiliate Corner, a Done-for-you Research product for affiliate marketers (RaaS Model - Research as a Service). Feel free to ask me about RaaS in the comments.

Now coming back to quitting my job. I didn't email my manager but I wanted to share my decision directly and face-to-face. When my manager asked me what was the reason for leaving the job, I said:-

“Growth is uncomfortable and I want to be in an uncomfortable position.”

Being an employee is like playing safe and slow. So, I went back to my core philosophy while I was thinking about quitting my job:

“I don’t want my income to be tied with my hours, Instead I want my income to be tied with what I can do and provide to people at scale”.

I just wanted to eliminate all those factors that limit my growth, both in terms of my abilities, skills, and income. This also coincides with the famous Naval quote: Earn with your mind, not with your time. That hit me hard.

How I quit my high paying SEO job

At the time of quitting my job, my other startup CampusTrail, which we started in Oct 2020, was already making around $13k MRR. We grew from 0 to 30+ employees within a span of 1.5 years. I was drawing a monthly salary equivalent to half of my job’s monthly income.

Also, note that we are 5 co-founders with 30+ employees with a lot of overheads. As a CMO, it was quite difficult for me to work simultaneously on my day job and also at my own startup.

Quitting a job is never easy. Randomly quitting your job in between without any concrete plan is like throwing a dart in the dark. You will certainly miss your target and the vision you want to achieve.

Before I quit my job, I had certain things in place that I wanted to share. So that whenever you think of quitting, you should have these prerequisites in place so that you have ample cushion.

5 things you need before you quit your job:

• Savings (At Least 2 years, it also depends on where you live)
• Skills (If you are not confident about your skills, don’t quit)
• Ideas (If you don’t have any idea what you would be building, don’t quit)
• Patience (If you are an impatient person, then being a solopreneur would be very hard)
• Hunger (You gotta be hungry to build something useful and make money)

From the above 5, Skills, Patience, and Hunger are a must. If you don't tick these 3 boxes, then forget everything.

Savings and Ideas can be taken care of if you act smartly. This varies from person to person.

But Skills, Patience, and Hunger, you need to have those.

A lot of people also say that you need to be making revenue from your side project that is equivalent to your job’s annual income before quitting your job.

Well, I have some contrarian opinions on this.

First of all, this is quite difficult to execute. Personally, I don’t have that creative energy left to work on my project after a full day exhausting at my day job.

And I bet a lot of people do get exhausted and don’t get enough time to work on their side projects. You can easily get burned out.

The worst thing that can happen is you won’t be able to focus properly on your day job and your side project. It will hamper your performance and I have experienced this first hand.

But there are people who have done this successfully. Dan Rowden from Ilo.so has achieved this feat. He quit his job at $5.5K MRR

So obviously this helps in getting that much-needed cushion but this is practically very difficult.

Here’s what I would recommend: If you can get revenue that matches almost 30-40% of your job’s annual income, you can think about quitting.

As I said above, I was making half of my day job’s monthly income when I quit my job. That was a good cushion for me. On top of that, I already had 1.5 years of saving with me. Since I live in India, my expenses are very very low.

Big Risks, Big Rewards?

I am 25. I wanted to take as many risks as I wanted early on. Because without taking risks, you won’t get high rewards and that’s for sure. It’s not worth living a safe and comfortable life like an employee where there is absolutely no thrill.

Going solo is a different story altogether. It’s a roller-coaster journey that is exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. We only have one life, why not make the most out of it.

That’s the mantra I hold when I make big decisions.

What’s next?

When I quit my job, I had an Indiehacker strategy in my mind.

As an Indiehacker, once you quit your job, what’s the most important thing and the best thing you would actually want?

Make money as soon as you can and do it in the shortest time possible to get the cushion you need.

Here’s my blueprint. I call it the Indie Hackers way of real-life MBA:

1. Build 1-2 small projects that take 1-2 months of time. Start monetizing it and get good revenue out of it. (It can be recurring or one-time revenue projects). Scale it up and exit on MicroAcquire.

2. Build a long-term sustainable SaaS product with recurring income. This would be the primary project that is going to be with you for most of the time.

& here’s why this can work:

Upsides of building and selling a small product:-

• Ships faster than a big project
• Saves time & gets a head start
• You get a good cash runway
• You have a shipping blueprint to go with
• Starts building an audience along the way
• You start making more connections

All of the above points will help you tremendously when you start to build your sustainable SaaS product which is your big project.

This is what we are trying to do with Affiliate Corner. Btw, I am partnered with Rishabh Garg who looks after the technical part of our project and I handle the marketing side of it.

It’s good to have a technical or a marketer co-founder, it will help you ease at a lot of things when you start out.

Feel free to ask me any questions you have. I will be glad to answer them. I hope that my journey until now has inspired you in some way or another.

Glad to be a part of this Indie hacking world.

Let me know what you are doing in the comments and any questions you have for me. Feel free to connect with me on Twitter.