Sep 2024: Interview on Indie Hackers

Happy Sunday everyone 👋

I recently got COVID for the 4th time. My recently-hired freelancer quit too. This make me realize that the biggest risk for an indie business is the founder’s heath.

Before sharing more about my progress, this is my first meme that went viral. I think many indie hackers are still struggling with this.

Indie Hackers marketing struggle

My interview on Indie Hackers

A few weeks ago, I did an email interview with Katherine from Indie Hackers. We talked about my indie hacking journey, how I almost got into full depression and my plan for the future.

Here is the full unedited version of the interview.

1) Please could you give me some basic information about yourself and your background – your age, where you’re from, where you live now, your core expertise (technical or otherwise!), and how you learned your technical skills in the first place.

I’m Daniel Nguyen, a solopreneur based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I’m 35 years old.

I love building things on the Internet. The first dollar I earned from the Internet was roughly 15 years ago when I was selling a plugin for an open-source forum software called Invision Power Board.

I dropped out of college to start an internet business, where I provided WordPress consulting services and reached $100K in revenue. I later shut it down and then joined multiple startups as a founding product engineer.

My core expertise lies in product engineering, which I define as 50% product-focused and 50% engineering-driven. I am mostly self-taught. When I was starting, I primarily learned from blog posts, forums, and official documentation (lol yes, some developers do read documentation). It's amazing how much faster you can learn with the help of AI these days.

Side note: I strongly believe that being a product engineer would increase the chances of success for an indie hacker.

2) How did you get into indie hacking in the first place and what motivated you to start? E.g. was there a particular moment or was it something you always wanted to do?

I joined startups pretty early in my career so I always wanted to start a business on my own. It wasn’t called indie hacking back then, I think. Most people refer to it as solopreneurship or ISV (independent software vendor).

My first attempt was to sell WordPress themes and plugins. It failed miserably. Turned out consulting and selling products require completely different sets of skills.

Then I built an uptime monitoring SaaS called StatusBoard. I got a few customers from my network but I was never actually spending time promoting it. I shut it down after 6 months or so.

In 2022, I joined Twitter and found the indie hacking community there. I got huge inspiration from @levelsio, @tdinh_me, and @damengchen. I launched my first product, KTool, a productivity tool for Kindle users. I spent quite a lot of time sharing its progress on IndieHacker.

One year later, I launched BoltAI, PDF Pals, and ShotSolve.

3) What gave you the idea to make BoltAI (and its sister products, PDFpal and ShotSolve) and how did you make it happen?

After one year of building KTool, I couldn’t find a way to reach ramen profitability. I had only one year of savings left and was quite depressed about KTool’s growth. I knew I needed to freelance, both to extend the runway and to keep me from falling into full depression.

So I decided to learn about generative AI and the OpenAI API, hoping to find a good freelance gig. I did land a couple of interesting gigs, but what's more interesting is that I found a new product idea: BoltAI, a better way to use AI on macOS.

I started it primarily to learn SwiftUI development & OpenAI app development (the so-called "AI wrapper”). It's now my top revenue-generating product.

While building BoltAI, one customer asked about the ability to chat with PDF natively on Mac, I fouind it interesting and so I decided to build it.

PDF Pals recently reached 700 paid customers (~$25k in revenue)

And finally, I built ShotSolve as a lead magnet for BoltAI (engineering as marketing, or side project marketing)

It was welcomed by many Mac users and so far, has brought 1,700 visitors to BoltAI.

4) Please could you give me some basic information about BoltAI: what does it do, how old is it, what's its MRR, what's the basic business model and what's the tech stack?

BoltAI is a native, high-performance all-in-one AI client designed for power users, allowing interaction with multiple AI models via a chat interface or inline within any app. Instead of paying for multiple subscriptions, users can use BoltAI with their API keys and only pay for the services they utilize. Unlike other clients, BoltAI integrates deeply with the operating system, enabling users to perform tasks significantly faster.

I launched BoltAI in May 2023, and it now serves more than 7,000 customers, having received over 100 updates that constantly improve the platform based on customer feedback.

BoltAI has two sources of revenues: license sales via the website and subscription revenue via Setapp.

Overall, it’s generating about $15K/mo on average.

Technical stack:

• Native app: Swift, SwiftUI, AppKit, SQLite, Sparkle

• Web: TailwindCSS, NextJS, Cloudflare Pages, Cloudflare Workers

• Payment: Lemon Squeezy, Stripe

• Binary hosting & distribution: Cloudflare R2

• Documentation site: Gitbook

• Web Analytics: Simple Analytics

• Email: Bento

5) How have you adapted the technology over time and why?

The tech stack largely remains the same. I don’t find a reason to change it. “Don't fix what’s not broken” ;)

6) How has the business model changed over time and why?

In the beginning, the only revenue source was via license sales: one-time payment with free 1 year of updates. Later BoltAI joined the Setapp platform and it unlocked the second source of revenue: subscription revenue from Setapp customers.

I’ve been building features for teams and will start charging a subscription for business customers.

7) How have you grown the business? What’s worked and what hasn’t? Did you grow slowly over time or was there a moment when things picked up?

Initially, I primarily promoted BoltAI on my Twitter account. I built it in public and shared new features every week. It works well enough since many users on Twitter are AI enthusiasts.

However, I quickly explored other channels: AI directories, paid PPC, and free tools. I recently saw some success from SEO (mostly from help articles).

Growth was slow in the beginning, but then BoltAI went viral (thanks to Pieter Levels RT). But targeting AI enthusiasts alone will not work in the long run. I started talking to the most active customers and built more features specifically for them. I then shared my progress with their community, and growth picked up again.

Another milestone was when BoltAI joined Setapp, unlocking a new source of revenue. Additionally, the Setapp team invested a significant amount of time in promoting BoltAI on their platform. A side effect of this was that many customers purchased software licenses outside of Setapp. So, it was a huge win for me.

8) Can you think of anything about your business in particular that might be interesting for other indie hackers to hear?

Pricing. I gradually increased the BoltAI price from $19 to $79. At $79, my monthly revenue is slightly lower than at $39, but I’m a lot happier: fewerless refunds, fewerless support queries, fewerless “bad fit” customers…

At half the number of customers, I can provide better and faster support.

I think as a solo founder, it’s not always about maximizing revenue. We need to optimize for founder happiness too.

Happy founder →  happy customers → better business.

9) What's been the hardest thing about the business? Did you ever consider giving up?

Giving up? Not with BoltAI because I was lucky and it generated revenue pretty quickly. But it was different with KTool (my first product). I wanted to quit many many times but I was also kinda of stubborn and thought: what if the SaaS needs at least one year to see any meaningful result?. I worked on it for a year before starting BoltAI.

Well, the hardest thing about building a business is to manage my psychology I think.

Every day is a battle with self-doubt, angry customers, critical bugs, keeping up with the competition… And as a parent, I also need to put all of that away and try to be present with my family.

While it’s hard, I know it’s not unique to me. And so, as cliche as it sounds, we just need to keep going.

10) What are you most proud of? Do any moments in particular stand out?

I’m not entirely sure TBH. I know building an indie business while being a parent is hard. I was lucky that it works so I guess it’s not a small feat.

I think I’m feeling grateful more than feeling “proud”. My wife has been incredibly supportive throughout the whole journey. Thanks to the indie hacking community, I learned a lot and got huge support from other founders. A lot of my customers also send support messages personally. I’m grateful for all of that 🙏

There are 2 significant milestones in my journey:

• When I got my first sales for KTool. I said to myself: OK, this is possible.

• When we’re ramen profitable: I can go full-time with indie hacking now.

11) What are your main goals for your indie hacking career moving forward? How will you grow what you've already built and do you have plans to start anything new?

Tough question. I’ve been struggling with this for a long time. Beyond profitability, I think indie hackers generally go in one of these two directions:

1. Continue to grow the business solo, and enjoy the freedom lifestyle.

2. Build a team and scale the business further.

I plan to build a small team later this year. I’m good at hiring and leading a small team so this would play well to my strengths.

12) More generally, do you have any business advice for other indie hackers? And is there any common business advice you'd ignore?

I suck at advising so I don’t have any. Here is what I would do if I was to start again:

• I would not start with a SaaS. Instead, I would follow The Stair Step Method of Bootstrapping and start with simpler products with one predictable organic marketing channel: https://robwalling.com/2015/03/26/the-stair-step-method-of-bootstrapping/

• Charge from day 1. I don’t know about others but to me, paying customers is the only validation I can trust.

• Start finding my ICP as soon as possible. This was my biggest mistake: I thought I could do this once I got enough customers. But it’s not easier with more customers. TBH: I’m still working on this.

• Always “think in funnels”: would this task improve acquisition, activation, or retention?. And is it my top priority right now?.

• 20% learning, 80% doing. I think most indie hackers are smart enough to understand the fundamentals of sales and marketing. However, putting them into practice is a completely different story. The only way to get better at it, I believe, is to put in more practice: send more product update emails, write more blog posts, post more educational tweets…

• Getting started is always the hardest. The fear of failure is strong. Rejections hurt. I would try to get past that “first scary moment” as fast as I could. And then I realize it’s not as scary as it seems.

13) Is there anything you know now that you wish you'd known when you were starting as an indie hacker?

Sometimes all you have to do is ask.

• Want a discount for your SaaS? Send an email asking for it.

• Need advice from a seasoned founder? Send a personal message asking them.

• Want to work 4 days/week instead of 5? Ask your employer for it.

I’m surprised that it works most of the time.

14) Has your indie hacking success helped you achieve anything else in life (e.g. self-employment, ability to travel, etc). And do you have any personal goals you hope it will enable in the future?

Oh, absolutely. Indie hacking offers many perks that I don't have while being employed: the freedom to travel anytime I want, no mandatory meetings, no alarm clock, living on my terms...

But the biggest impact on me is that it broadens my perspective and makes me a better person.

My personal goal is to build a small and nimble team. Hopefully, I could buy back my time this way and spend more time with my family & my hobbies.

That’s all for now

Thanks for being part of my journey. Writing is never my strong suit but I will try my best to share everything I’ve learned.

See you next time.

Have a wonderful weekend

— Daniel