Bye bye 2024
My first full year as an indie hacker in review
Hey, listen!
This year comes to an end.
This was my first whole year as indie hacker.
In this post I summarize how it was.
This year 2024 has been awesome for me.
This is the one year I spent completely as a full-time solopreneur.
It’s probably also the year when I worked the most days in my life.
But, when I started this journey, I had engraved in my brain, like a mantra, that success wouldn’t come out of nowhere.
This was going to be a long term hard grind, specially in the early stages.
And it was.
And it is.
And it still will be.
I am still pretty far from working relaxed 2h/day while my products bring money to the table in autopilot.
Probably that may be the final goal, even though I think the part that I enjoy the most is the early phase of building new things.
However, I don’t feel it like work.
When you work for yourself, and you know all the effort and hours that you put on it will pay off in your benefit, you can’t stop grinding.
For better or worse.
For me the most difficult part was the “disconnection”.
Disconnect for prioritize your health and do exercise.
Disconnect for spending quality time with your family and friends.
Disconnect to avoid burnout.
However, even though you know the disconnection is good for you in the long run, it is damn difficult to achieve.
Mostly, because you don’t want to.
Because you are so addicted to this.
To build things, improve your sales, grow audience, achieve the financial freedom.
You think about it while cooking, while having a shower, while going for a run, while watching a movie with your girlfriend…
It may be stressful, specially in the early stages, when you are not even ramen profitable.
So you have to take in mind, that this isn’t a bed of roses.
Be sure to have a strong mindset and learn to deal with the failure.
But it in the end, damn, it paid off.
I’m starting to see the light.
Things are starting to work.
I enjoyed this 2024 so much and I can summarize it around three pillars:
🛠️ Building things
I built 12 projects this year:
I’m an iOS developer, but this year I tried doing web things stepping out of my comfort zone, like WrapFast landing page, Marvin Chrome Extension and Boilermates.
My big win was WrapFast.
I rode well the boilerplates wave and created the best seller iOS boilerplate.
My plan for 2025 is growing my App Store portfolio, making it my main income.
I also won two products of the day in Product Hunt with Marvin and Widgets for Stripe 🏆
🤑 Making money
I made this year somewhere around $40.5k
WrapFast: $25k
App Store: $2137
Building AI identifiers as a service: $6k
Selling two AI Identifier apps: $4.5
Marvin: $1750
Boilermates $1035
I could had made way more freelancing or in a 9-5 job.
However, achieving ramen profitability as a solopreneur is a huge milestone for me.
My best months were November with $4k+ and this month, December, where my revenue skyrocketed to $15k+ thanks to the 7 days, 7 apps challenge.
👥 Growing audience
My favorite platform for content creation, and the one I enjoy the most, is Twitter/𝕏.
I started the year with 680 followers.
I ended up the year with 8667 followers.
I posted EVERY SINGLE DAY, never missed a day.
Along the way, I started using Typefully to start cross-posting to other platforms like LinkedIn, Threads or recently Bluesky.
In Threads I grew from zero to 602 followers.
In LinkedIn I grew from I don’t know to 1484 followers.
I also spent some time creating video content mainly for Twitter, and eventually posting it also to YouTube.
I also live streamed for the very first time and made two series:
Building Widgets for Stripe from scratch to launching on Product Hunt — and winning the Product of the Day
Building 7 apps in 7 days publishing it to the App Store
My Youtube channel grew from zero to 556 subs.
My Twitch channel grew from zero to 114 followers.
And last but not least, this newsletter.
I started in June 9th delivering an issue every single Sunday, and never missed one.
The newsletter has grown to 527 subscribers!
That’s insane — thank you all for reading my messy thoughts! 🫶🏼
(And apologies to my native-English speakers out there 😬)
Let’s crush the 2025 🔥
My plans for the next year are:
Build more apps and make the App Store my main income.
Keep creating content, stream more and keep growing my personal brand.
Stay more Disconnected and prioritize health
Meet in person some indie friends 🫶🏼
I wish all of you guys a HAPPY NEW YEAR and great success in all your resolutions!
See you next week.
See you next year.
Juanjo