Happy new 2023!! :)
I've had a dejavú. It's not the first time that I start the year by posting a small update/reflection on dev.to.
It's been 6 years since I started working on everyday.app as a side-project and it has now been my full time indie business for over 4 years. In this period, more than one million habits 🤯 have been tracked. Besides reaching my original goal of financial independence while working on a product I care about, the journey has brought me many happy experiences and takeaways. If I had to pick, I'd say it has helped me grow a lot as a person and has helped me connect with a bunch of awesome people I admire.
I generally see myself as an imposter (who do I want to lie? I am an imposter!!), but in case this helps anyone starting their indie journey, I'm just an idiot who has worked on it every day, for a very long time.
You can find some of my previous updates here:
2017 IH interview: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/the-productivity-app-that-helped-to-build-and-grow-itself-b4d7afdf11
Year 1: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/everyday-one-year-later-1609ae3575
Year 3: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/everyday-app-year-3-approaching-5k-mrr-cb5916f0fe
Year 4: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/everyday-year-4-approaching-10k-mrr-9e3c4041bd
2022 has been the first year in a while where I took things easy. It's funny how the work and the return don't correlate at all. When you put in the hard early work, hardly anything happens, but as time goes by, your work starts compounding and you become complacent. That's why I love having ended the year with a big push, breaking things again and getting back some of the thrill of the early days!
Oh, Everyday 3.0 got hunted on ProductHunt today! What a coincidence ;D Yes, the beginning of a new year is always a good time to reset and iterate on our habits and goals :)
Some of my 2022 habits:
📕 Read 21 books. Read on 86% of the days!
💪 Did 9440 push-ups. Did push-ups on 100% of days.
👥 Met 476 people. Met new ppl on 37% of the days! (I really need to change this)
🍺 I'm on a 112 no (or very little) alcohol streak!
🚀 Worked on everyday.app every day! and broke my previous plateau. It was becoming a glass ceiling so that's something!
I am on a 1584 day streak of working on everyday :)
The biggest changes this year have been to refactor most of the main UI elements on the iOS, Android, macOS that I had originally developed while learning React-Native. These allowed not only the app to be more performant, but to massively improve the UX and to add some animations :) I also added a controlpanel that makes it much easier to experiment with habits, schedules and triggers. Polished the onboarding, I really want people who check the app out to at least learn something useful for their lives even if they immediately leave the app after wards. It's like a very overengineered tweet haha.
However, one can't stop thinking about all the things that are not getting done. All the original ideas that never saw the light. All the expected iterations that never seem to come. There is a lot of room for improvement, this journey has just begun.
I think we are very lucky that we have the opportunity to create something. It's a beautiful skill. All we need, is to work on it a little bit, every day, for a very long time! ;D
PS: I'm always happy to help fellow indie hackers, so feel free to shoot me an email or get in touch on twitter.
PS2: As someone who enjoys product, code and business in equal proportions I struggled to find my path until I came across the idea of indie hackers. It's been a very enriching adventure so far and it's got me to meet a lot of awesome people. I like to feel I contributed to the movement with my awesome-indie 8k stars github repo (https://github.com/mezod/awesome...). Feel free to contribute to keep it updated! Keep building every day! 🚀🚀🚀
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