#4 How Jason is building his way to freedom by creating a portfolio of small bets 🎰
The story of Jason's indie hacker journey
Hello and welcome to issue #4 of Indie Insiders ⚡️
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Today’s interview is with Jason, an indie hacker from Singapore building his way to freedom by creating a portfolio of small bets.
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👋🏽 Hello, Jason! Nice to meet you 😁
How did you get into indie hacking?
I started when I saw Pieter Levels go viral with his 12 startups in 12 months challenge and it was something I’ve always wanted to do— create digital products bootstrapped.
In 2018, I dived into the indie hacker scene to learn.
What were you doing prior to being an indie hacker?
I was running my own design consulting business, where I consult for governments and non-profits.
You can learn more about it here.
I liked my consulting work, as it's very meaningful, but as a maker at heart, I craved to develop my own products and bring it from idea to market, but I wasn't sure how.
Do I have to learn to code? Hire a developer?
Seeing solo makers like Pieter do it with low cost and low upfront capital was inspiring.
It was at that time that no-code tools were starting to pick up too, so the barrier that coding presented was lowered.
I started with nocode, but since then I've learned to code.
Lifelog is my very first SaaS I coded from ground up, but I remain very much in love with no-code, and it's still the first tools I reach for when starting anything new.
I often use a hybrid of code and nocode for my products now.
What's your process to find new ideas to work on?
I don't focus on one thing to build, as I use a portfolio of small bets approach and have always done that, but Daniel Vassallo was the one who coined "portfolio of small bets" and really described it way better than what I only intuited.
I try ideas that I feel excited about, am competent enough to do, and might have some market potential. I scope it small, use no-code to launch quickly within few days to weeks, and see how it goes.
If it doesn't show promise, I leave it running, and build another. The point is to treat my products like a VC. More quantity, more luck 📈
What kind of life/lifestyle are you trying to achieve?
More freedom. Blank calendar. Creative autonomy. No one to answer to except my family and customers.
Location independence, can digital nomad everywhere. Eventually, financial freedom too.
What piece of advice do you have for those starting out?
My advice is to not take advice wholesale.
Listen but discern and filter what's relevant and applicable in your context because following the wrong advice might bring you down paths that end up wasting precious time and money.
Even if the advice is from your heroes.
What small bet are you working on right now?
I'm working on many small bets within one small bet, which is my Plugins For Carrd project— been building more plugins for it.
How can we keep up with your journey?
There are many ways to follow my journey:
Weekly newsletter about indie solopreneur journey
See my present projects: https://sheet2bio.com/jason/
See all my past and present projects and daily task logs: https://getmakerlog.com/users/jasonleow
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Thanks for the feature! 😍