Beginner's Guide: Indiehacking Your First Week

Links

• MudQuest - https://mud-quest.framer.website

• X

• Facebook

• Waitlist

Intro

It has been one week since I started my first project, MudQuest, and it's already been quite a ride. Moonlighting every day takes its toll on me, however, after talking to my community and multiple places like Facebook, Reddit, and some offroad-related forums, I keep gaining motivation.I have prepared some tips to help you get through your first week of solo product development.

In the first week, my main focus was technical onboarding and some light exposure in niche-related forums, Reddit subgroups, and Facebook groups.I recommend taking it easy. I have been pushing too hard, and now I cannot sleep at night because my brain won't slow down. So, relax and enjoy some lessons I have learned.

Reddit insights

The actual post is here;

• ~9000 views;

• Up to 83% upvoting;

• 26 comments(some are very useful);

• 14 shares;

Reddit Lessons Learned

• Do not repost with a link to another group! People didn't like that I reposted my main topic to another group. In the mobile app, it only shows a link and not the actual original post, so I was getting a lot of confused downvotes because of that;

• Make sure your post has a good hero picture. Mine had mostly text and it was skipped by many;

• Include your user action in the main post! I was not getting sign-ups as my link to the waitlist was in the comments not in the main post;

• Include your main idea explanation with use cases. I think this was the most successful part of the post—use cases! Explain more scenarios with personas and how they interact with each other. This will help lay out your app idea very well;

• The Reddit community will share with you some information about possible competitors;

• Be interactive with any replies. This gives more credibility and won't look like you are advertising your app.

Waitlist Insides

In one week, I got 8 subscribers. This doesn't sound like a lot, but for me, it is a great achievement. My current marketing goal is to reach 10 subscribers without paying for any ads. I have noticed that people are more willing to sign up through web widgets rather than going to my website and clicking on it. This is mostly because I am focusing on online groups and forums where people don't like commercial links and websites. I will keep focusing on the widgets for now. Later, close to the release date, I will make sure to switch to the project website (I will also add a domain name when it's time) - https://mud-quest.framer.website/.

Waitlist Lessons Learned

• Use a self-hosted widget at the beginning of your project as people will trust it more than a domainless website :);

• Do not be discouraged by a small number of subscribers. It might just be your marketing skills and not the actual market research. Be mindful, though, if this stays very low, it may be a good idea to move on to another project;

Flutter Mobile Development Insides

This is the big one. To me, developing something new is not a very new thing to do. However, developing a mobile application is definitely a first. Most of my expertise is around Ruby on Rails (RoR) and the React Stack, where I know pretty much all I need to know, from business logic approaches to the tanstack, suspense, and state management. It's like when you start speaking a different language you know you can speak, but what comes out is 'write code here.' Or, in my case, 'write code, you must,' and suddenly I sound like Yoda trying to debug my own brain. However, I can say that Flutter is something that resonates with me and my setup. I have tried different frameworks like React Native, but setting it up was very hard even though the syntax looked way more familiar to me. So here are some lessons I learned when just starting to develop a mobile application with Flutter:

Flutter Lessons Learned

• Complete their onboarding collabs! Very useful videos: https://docs.flutter.dev/get-started/fwe

• Do not overengineer simple things, in my case I was trying to apply some good practices that I thought I knew :D how wrong I was lol, had to overwrite it all already. So keep it simple!;

• Pick the most common state management and improve later if needed if ever! - https://docs.flutter.dev/data-and-backend/state-mgmt/simple;

• Use only one Scaffold per screen render :D;

• Search GitHub for examples. I cannot emphasize this enough! This is, so far, the best search tool I've ever used for software development learning. Not ChatGPT, but real applications publicly available are the place to properly learn a framework! For example, this app gave me a lot of understanding of the layout structure, and this one is a game example. Sometimes, you can find very sophisticated GitHub repositories that follow best practices, which you can use in your own apps;

• You cannot write the whole app in 1 week :) just enjoy the process and treat it as a nice hobby, do not stress about it!;

• Do not code 14h a day like I did :D. This is all exciting for us but you gotta have a life balance without it there is a high chance to burnout!

MudQuest

Offroad real-time event finder!

MudQuest is a mobile app that helps offroad enthusiasts find and join offroad parties in real-time or plan them for later. Users can create or search for offroad parties, customize their preferences like trail difficulty, meetup location, and vehicle type, and receive notifications when nearby parties are available.

The app displays active party requests on both a map view and a list view. Users can join open parties or host their own, while others in the area are alerted to new opportunities. After the trip, the app tracks the participants' experiences and allows them to connect for future adventures.

MudQuest - https://mud-quest.framer.website/