How I Saved $5000 By Drinking Coffee
If you lift weights at the gym and ask a guy out for coffee he’ll think you’re gay. But if you are building a business and ask a guy out for coffee… Well, here’s what happened.
Indie Hackers are a friendly bunch
I have an account on indiehackers.com. And while I’ve learned a lot from the discussions there, the most valuable thing I did was to share my contact details and city in my profile. In the past year I’ve been contacted by a few users who also live in Krakow and contacted a couple others myself. I met with four of them.
Coffee #1
The first indie hacker noticed my product release and became my first user. We met over coffee and discussed our businesses. I provided him with a free account and over the months he gave me extremely valuable, detailed, and frank feedback.
Coffee #2
My second friend was an expat living temporarily in Krakow. He had a lot of technical skills that I lacked. I was wowed when he showed me his way of building websites and the tools he used. Together we set up some of those technologies for my products.
Coffee #3
One other entrepreneur I met turned my product roadmap upside down. He’s running a business that’s already successful and he even has a few employees. He told me all about how he managed to achieve this growth and invited me to his private Slack channel.
A few days later he sent me a tip that there was an AppSumo sale for Startups.com membership for $49. One perk of it was $5000 of Amazon AWS credits. I’m spending around $150/month on my servers, so that was a valuable tip indeed.
Now I can run my servers for free.
Coffee #4
The last guy I met told me about how he enjoyed Startup School. He said that at the end of the 8 week course he received credits for GCP. I’ll update this post once I finish it and see if it applies to me as well. What I did get from Startup School so far though was really great feedback from a fellow maker during the weekly Group Session.
Don’t be shy
Thank you to every Indie Hacker that I’ve talked to. I can only hope that I provided as much value as I received.
Still, there are some Indie Hackers who live in Krakow or Warsaw that I could meet, but won’t - because they either didn’t share their city or make it difficult to contact them.
Don’t be shy or great opportunities will miss you. Set up an account, tell people where you live and let them contact you.
Business requires luck, but luck won’t find you if you’re hiding.