Hello friends 🙋‍♂️,

I warmly welcome new subscribers to Ivan's Indie Journey.

It is my weekly newsletter, where I share reflections and updates on my journey as an indie maker.

Due to work-related issues, I went nearly two weeks without publishing. There was turmoil on the past project and a similar issue in the company where I am working, so I had to sort out those issues to be sure that I have projects to do for money and that my family is safe.

Fortunately, I have customers with long-term projects, so I can return to my indie-making journey (commitments will go first, of course).

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👨‍💻 Projects I am working on

Well, let’s return to the topic. I wrote one small tweet some time ago. It was pretty short, but here I would like to explain more about the projects that I am working on right now.

Ivan Klimchuk 🧱 @ivnklm

Earlier, I'd been asked, "What am I building?" To have an answer, I decided to collect all my active projects and ideas ‼️ In tomorrow's newsletter, I will share: → Notion Template + Idea → 2x Micro SaaS → Kind of community → Free course Subscribe if you are interested 👇

I have more than ten ideas to implement, but they wait a proper time and my time to work on them as well. I prefer to work on one piece at a time to achieve any results and then move on to the next.

To achieve that, I decided to select the top 5 projects, which have the highest potential and focus on them. Projects are different, but according to my time, they are doable.

Growth Review

growthreview.guru – work in progress

Tool for assessing engineers in teams, based on Engineering Growth Framework invented by the Medium engineering team and implemented by me via Notion.

In short, it has a set of prepared data and templates and allows easy to fill the teammate data using only checkboxes. All calculations are done automatically via formulas. In the end, it may be a useful tool that allows team growth and allows team leads better to care about their colleagues.

Micro SaaS – x2

I have working names for both, but I am still not sure about them.

The first idea is pretty simple. It is about linking Notion and static blogs made by Hugo. There exist plenty of CMSs on the market, but Notion still looks like a better choice to be a content management platform. At the same time, Hugo is an excellent tool as well, because it is pretty fast (written on GO) and can be run on many platforms. Only monetization raises doubts.

The next one is about the reverse process – importing data to Notion. The Notion has a nice automatic import which excellent detects types of fields but sometimes needs more detailed import data into existing databases, to not create a lot of copies of documents. So, a tool about it is to provide the right and configurable way to import data into Notion, with field mapping, validation, preventing overriding, and many other features.

Maker Shots Party

makershots.party — not ready yet

I am going to massively tease here, but I don’t have another way. I decided to create a project to link people with each other and show how people walk on their indie-maker journey. With which difficulties they are facing every day and how they fight with them. Another goal is just to help them to train the ability to present themselves.

The main idea of the project is a list of short interviews with a limited amount of questions, the same for everyone. I want to make focus on the people, instead of projects. Would be nice to build a community around it as well.

Buy Me a Coffee for Makers & Indie Hackers

Course pre-ordering is available

I was going to make it free, but I did not decide yet exactly. It is a course about possibilities that BMC provides for creators and makers. I know that there are a lot of popular tools with rich functions, but they don’t work well for all. The main limitation is payout options, which require having PayPal or Stripe. But these payment providers work only in a limited amount of countries, and a big amount of indie makers are out of the boat.

BMC provides an ability to make payouts via Payoneer, which has better coverage over the world and allows people to receive money via that platform legally and without workarounds. So, my course will help people discover the abilities of the platform and how it can be implemented for selling products and services.

🧐 Summing up

Last week I saw a trend of publishing lists of products people made. I don’t have such one, except a list on my website, which I try to keep updated. I did a lot of small projects, but they were not business projects. In other words, I have never thought about making money from them.

I guess after some activity this year, I will be able to share the same list next time. And this list of projects I described above is some kind of public contract, which means if I published it, I have to finish at least one of them to be able to say “I tried!”.

That’s it for today! See you next week. Check out some constant rubrics listed below if you are interested in my growth numbers.

Follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, DEV, Indie Hackers, and Product Hunt.

#️⃣ Build in Public in Numbers

I decided to keep the rubric, but limit it to numbers only. A full wrap-up will be published monthly. Here is the growth during the past several weeks. Deltas based on the latest published newsletter issue.

Social Media:
— Twitter: +59, in total 446 followers
— LinkedIn: +58, in total 1999 followers

Writing:
— Medium: +3, in total 135 followers

Newsletters:
— Substack: +3, in total 38 subscribers
— LinkedIn: +9, in total 326 subscribers

Building:
— Product Hunt: +2, in total 18 followers
— Indie Hackers: +1, in total 6 followers
— See Naked Report: Week 08 — 2023 for detailed MRR numbers.

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Ivan's Indie Journey

What I am building these days