Update: I Became A Full-Time Indie Maker And Doubled Revenue This Year

Anthony Castrio

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Published: November 27th, 2022

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Anthony Castrio

Founder, Indie Worldwide

$2K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Indie Worldwide

indieworldwide.com

from Remote

started January 2019

$2,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Anthony recommends to grow your business!

The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less Richard Koch

How to Win Friends & Influence People Dale Carnegie

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join ... Timothy Ferriss

Want more updates on Indie Worldwide? Check out these stories:

1. We Built A Virtual Community To 2K Members [#1 On Product Hunt] (2021) ➜

Note: This business is no longer running. It was started in 2019 and ended in 2024. Reason for closure: Acquired.

This is a follow up story for Indie Worldwide. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 3 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

Hey, I’m Anthony. A nomadic solo-indie hacker, community builder, and newsletter writer. 4 years ago, I started freelancing, and 3 years ago I started Indie Worldwide, 2 years ago I started to make money, and this year I quit my job as a freelancer to work on it full-time.

Indie Worldwide is a private community for bootstrapped startup founders where you can get smart introductions to other founders based on what you’re working on and how much money you’re making. We have about 100 active members at any given time and should make around $24,000 this year in revenue.

Indie Worldwide meetup in Lisbon, Portugal

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

In 2021 Indie Worldwide made $11,209 in total revenue. So far this year Indie Worldwide has made $18,079 and we’re on track to at least double.

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In 2021, 100% of revenue was one-time, not recurring. This year over half of the revenue is recurring, which sets us up for more stable growth in the future.

In the last few months of this year, I decided to start working on this community full time, quit freelancing, and realized I’d built a rats nest of an operation. A lot of work has gone into making the operation simpler to run, recruiting help from the community itself, and improving the business model.

This year I…

Overestimated:

Personal commitment to outbound sales
Ability to improve landing-page conversion rates

Underestimated:

Value of recurring-revenue
How much I should charge for membership
How much I should charge for sponsorship

I also spent about 6 months longer than I originally planned freelancing.

When I wrote the linked thread I thought I'd go full-time in January, but ended up continuing to consult for another 6-months.

To be fair, that was one of my favorite consulting gigs ever.

Biggest business improvements this year:

Uncoded everything (code replaced w/no code)
Switched to recurring pricing, first with Stripe checkout and now with Outseta
Made newsletter weekly
Raised prices

When Indie Worldwide first started it was free. I started charging an annual membership only after more than one member asked me to! After a while, I realized that one-time or annual only options made it difficult to invest back into the group.

If I couldn’t predict how much money we’d make month to month, it was hard to justify investing any money.

As of earlier this year, we now have a monthly option at $29/month which has let us grow to almost $2,000MRR so far. That MRR is now a dependable base that lets me spend money on the group with much more confidence.

Our second revenue stream is via Sponsorships, which can range from around $300 for a single newsletter placement up to $5,000 or more for engagements that last multiple months and reach multiple channels (podcast, newsletter, slack, website, co-branded events etc).

Our biggest marketing wins this year have been on Twitter. I started aggressively growing my account, from around 1,000 followers at the beginning of the year to now over 9,000 in November. Hoping to cross 10,000 by the end of the month.

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This has mostly been driven by building in public, especially sharing updates on my travels and my revenue growth.

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For the last few months, I’ve been traveling around the world hosting meetups, and meeting up with local members of Indie Worldwide.

I also recently started writing a not-quite-daily newsletter about artificial intelligence and machine learning called Bot Eat Brain.

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

For a long while, I tried to avoid making Indie Worldwide fully into a business. It was nice that it was making some money, but it still felt like a launchpad for my "real business" whenever I figured out what that was supposed to be.

Because I didn't set out to make it a business, a lot of the operational side got messy. Accounts under multiple email addresses, dozens of services. It was my playground and not running in a lean or easy-to-maintain way.

And of course, I was still consulting almost full-time helping startups as a hacker in residence, freelance software engineer, or fractional CTO. My title changed a bit over time, but the focus stayed the same: helping startups go from an idea to MVP and setting up their initial remote project management flow.

That meant I'd sometimes struggle to keep up with Indie Worldwide tasks, or even put the community aside for months at a time while I focused on the business that made significant revenue.

A good portion of this year was spent un-coding: replacing things I'd coded with no-code solutions.

I traded in a custom-built static website for Carrd and Feather and Notion.

I brought Outseta to be my billing and authentication layer.

I replaced the custom script I used for match-making with Intros.ai.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

Don't over-engineer: Spent a lot of time this year getting rid of code where I could and replacing it with no-code.
Raise your prices: Even a couple of years into being a founder I'm still shy about raising prices and asking for a sale.
It can take longer than you think: I was sure I'd 10x my revenue this year, but only managed to 2x. Which still sounds great! But my expectations were so high that doubling is still kind of a let-down (which is why I wrote some of my thoughts out in the above thread.

Don’t be afraid to use your unfair advantages to their fullest.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

Upcoming Year

Grow Indie Worldwide to $5,000+ MRR and $100,000+ annual revenue.
Grow Bot Eat Brain to 10,000+ subscribers and establish a crack team of writers.

Next Five Years

Find a place to establish a home base. Hopefully, find a life partner and maybe start a family. Achieve $1M networth.

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

Podcasts
ADHD Nerds
My First Million

Books

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Minimalist Entrepreneur

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

Your priority is not to run out of money. As long as you aren’t out of money, you haven’t lost yet. Even if you do run out of money, you can go get a more typical job, make more, and then try again later.

Focus on building things that people want to pay you money for. Indie Hackers tend to spend way too long building things for free that people only kind of want vs building things for money that people want. Myself included!

Once you start making enough money online to cover your expenses, everything changes. It’s the difference between a side project and a business.

Don’t be afraid to use your unfair advantages to their fullest. Almost everyone has some advantage in life whether it be their education, where they live, previous career experience, or something else entirely. Figure out what your unfair advantage in life is and leverage the heck out of it.