Intro

Only 2 years remain before a complete life overhaul.

In 2 years, my contract concludes, marking the end of my tranquil corporate life. No longer content working for someone else, I've set a 2-year deadline to forge my new path from scratch.

This new journey? Welcome to the world of Indie Hacking.

I'm just discovering it, barely scratching the surface, but I can feel it—the adrenaline, the promise of changing my life entirely. No more aiming low; it's time to aim high.

My goals?

To finance the dream wedding my wife has cherished since childhood. To maintain a steady income, aiming for €2k/month, with a guaranteed €1k/month for life. To spend quality time with my daughter before she turns 10. And, of course, to afford those last desires—traveling, both in France and beyond—after building a beautiful family, a cozy home, and acquiring all the necessary essentials.

Achieving this will require juggling two jobs, making sacrifices (RIP sleep †), and acquiring a myriad of new skills, not only in my development field but also in areas like marketing, copywriting, design, and more.

Why document this journey? Because I want to share it with the community I already adore: the #indiehackers #buildinpublic community.

So, whether you're here to learn, witness the unfolding of this adventure, or just curious, consider this your home.

My Background

A French soul residing in the southwest, I'm 35 and mid-career, currently in the military. Always yearning to be a developer, I started crafting HTML websites at 13, like many. However, life took me on a different path. Now, two years away from a well-deserved semi-retirement, I find myself back in the tech world.

In 2018, I rekindled my coding journey through online courses (courtesy of OpenClassroom) and seized an opportunity for a web developer role, including access to a full-stack JavaScript bootcamp (Wild Code School) in late 2020. The curriculum covered the holy trinity of HTML/CSS/JavaScript, then delving into React and Node.js, along with a plethora of auxiliary skills and soft skills.

Facing the challenge of revamping a gargantuan PHP/Symfony-coded enterprise application, I decided to reboot it in the stack I knew (Next + Express + Prisma + MUI). Since then, I've been implementing numerous new technologies as I progress.

Throughout 2021 and 2022, I worked on side projects, including solaris-qtt.com. Mid-2023 brought a revelation with the discovery of the #buildinpublic community and the emergence of new dev rockstars like levelsio and Danny Postmaa.

#buildinpublic

In early May, celebrating 10 years in a relationship, I abandon the pursuit of the perfect marriage proposal. Instead, I seize the best moment I could, and it's a resounding yes! But reality hits a few days later: to provide my significant other with the dream wedding, I need to up the income game.

Leveraging my skills, newfound obsession with #buildinpublic, and the AI hype, I decide to dive into the realm of AI tools. Why not something related to e-commerce, given my insights from observing my wife's struggles with clients?

Noticing that many tech-challenged clients neglect their product sheets and suffer in terms of SEO, an idea is born: depikt. It's more than just an AI tool; it's a solution to automatically generate product descriptions and packshot-style photos from smartphone-taken pictures. depiktAI.com is where you can find it, and a dedicated post about it is coming soon!

Lessons from the first app

Embarking on this venture, I've learned invaluable lessons, often at my own expense. I've learned the absolute necessity of validating an idea before diving in, the importance of setting up a solid boilerplate, the challenge of crafting compelling copy, and the art of engaging people in your work on platforms like X.

I've tackled imposter syndrome while elevating my skills by learning from others. I've understood the significance of analytical feedback, why not to start with a too complex idea initially, and the importance of being authentic on social media while following some rules to be effective. And there's much more that I might forget...

What to Expect from This Blog

Here, I'll share not just my ideas and progress but also my successes and failures. I'll provide anything that might be useful to you—tutorials, code snippets, implementations, discoveries, and more.

I'll document some of my projects from A to Z to give you an overview and a roadmap for your own ventures. I'll share my statistics so you can see what works and what doesn't.

I'm not a novelist, and I don't have time to write poems. I'm transparent with you; I take notes, mostly in list form on Notion, and process them through a specific GPT prompt to deliver text that closely resembles my writing style.

I'm considering launching a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly newsletter that summarizes what happened on the blog during that time.

A Bit of Tech Talk

Let's delve into the technical aspects:

Dev Stack

• NextJs (pages & app)
• Tailwind
• DaisyUI & Shadcn\ui
• Prisma
• Tanstack React-Query
• NeonDB / Supabase
• Next-Auth
• Framer Motion & FormKit auto-animate
• Vercel Analytics
• Brevo (mails), contemplating Loops+Resend
• Base boilerplate Shipixen
• OpenAI / Replicate for AI

Social Platforms

• Mainly Twitter/X (aiming for 1k next year!)
• Occasional Reddit when I'm in the mood to spar with the trolls
• Dev.to
• ProductHunt
• HackerNews for launches

Hardware Setup

• Yolo
• Windows + WSL 2
• Gaming PC with a single screen + I use the mouse way too much
• Dell XPS for appearances

Closing Words

This blog is for you. Feel free to comment on Twitter (@MajorBaguette) for now (we'll implement comments if you find it fitting). It's also here to impose discipline on me. We always procrastinate less with some social/result pressure.

I want to experiment, expand my network, showcase my work, and practice writing a bit more.

Thank you for being here; I hope to bring something valuable to you!

Baguette-ly yours, Dany aka MajorBaguette