Working, I Guess

Three words, one Sunday

My bio says "Developer, indie hacker, student." It reads like a list. In practice it is three people asking for the same hours, and the weekend is when all three show up at once.

The student gets the weekdays by default. The developer gets whatever is left. The indie hacker gets Sunday night, which is how I ended up, a little after midnight, committing a change to Kuiz Space with the message "early access mail working i guess".

That "i guess" is the most honest line I wrote all weekend.

The building is the easy part

It is tempting to think the hard part of a side project is the code. It is not. The code is the part with feedback. You write something, and it compiles or it does not. The test passes or it does not. There is always a next step, and the next step is usually obvious.

Everything that turns a project into a product has none of that. A landing page. An early-access form. An email that is supposed to land in someone's inbox and, as far as you can tell from your side, maybe did. None of it compiles. None of it tells you whether it worked. You ship it, and then you wait to find out if anyone cares.

That was my Sunday. Not a feature. An email.

Time is the only budget

Most indie hacking advice is about money: pricing, revenue, runway. As a student, the budget that runs out first is time.

Every hour has three owners. An hour on Kuiz is an hour not spent on coursework, and not spent getting better at the craft itself. There is no version of this where all three get what they want. There is only choosing, every weekend, which one loses a little.

The trap is treating late nights as free time. They are not free. They are borrowed from the next morning, and the next morning always collects.

Earning is further away than it looks

The SaaS I want to earn from is still a waitlist. That is not a complaint, it is just where it is. But it changes what motivation has to run on.

There is no revenue yet to tell you that you are on the right track. There is only the work, and small signs that it is moving: a form that submits, an email that sends, a page that finally says what the product is for.

So the question worth asking on a Sunday night is not "is this making money". It is "is this closer to something a person could pay for than it was on Friday". This weekend, the answer was yes. Barely. One email closer.

Working, I guess

I like that commit message more the longer I look at it. It is not confident, but it is not a failure either. It is the exact state of most indie projects on a Sunday night: probably working, not proven, shipped anyway.

Monday brings the other two jobs back. The waitlist will still be there next weekend, and so will the "i guess". For now, that is enough.