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The Indie Worldwide Newsletter
Welcome to the third edition of the Indie Worldwide Newsletter!
Every month we’ll be shining the spotlight on founders in the Indie Worldwide community who’ve been working hard and accomplishing great things.
This edition of the newsletter is sponsored by True Source:
Zoltan and Edward have built a no-code product to turn your data-sets into data-products. Upload data from any source, configure your product, and start earning in minutes. What’s more, they just launched on Product Hunt today 🚀🚀
We are also happily sponsored by Alternative Assets:
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In this newsletter:
- January Meetup Recap
- Upcoming Events – yes, plural!
- Founder Spotlight – Vance Lucas
- Top launches of the month
- Community updates
January Meetup 🥰
Our first meetup of the year was a big success with even more founders than our last event of 2021. It was great meeting so many of you for the first time!
Here’s what people other than me had to say about it:
“It was wonderful and full of amazing people who are brave enough to pursue risky ventures to build a lot of value!” @goforbg
“Joined an @indie_worldwide event for the first time and it was awesome to meet so many amazing people who are building!” @zawwadx
“The @indie_worldwide meetup today was a blast 🤩It was so intense I have problem remembering everything 😅. But one thing for sure, I'm looking forward to talking to you more, you guys. Remind me if I promised to get back to you 😁.” @KamilaHerkova
Upcoming Events 🌐
We’ve got a full calendar of events in the coming months.
Open to all:
- NYC in-person meetup TBA
Open to Slack members:
- What investors are looking for w/ the founder of Peach Score TBA
- Getting the most out of email w/ Michael Greenberg TBA
- Virtual co-working hours TBA
Get access to the Slack and all upcoming events plus a whole lot more when you sign up to Founders’ Club aka Indie Worldwide pro.
Founder Spotlight 🔦
@vlucas, $1k MRR, budgetsheet.net
BudgetSheet is an add-on for Google Sheets that lets you import your bank transactions directly into a spreadsheet. Vance built his micro-startup on the side while also holding down a full time job, in large part just by choosing the right market to play in. He’s a solo-founder.
Why’d you decide to build on top of Google Sheets?
“I'm a developer, a long time developer. I'm not that great at marketing. I was looking for a marketplace that had some existing leverage that I could use.”
Vance, you joined Indie Worldwide as part of the 100 in 100 challenge last year. Why?
“That leaderboard gaming kind of mentality, it made me want to focus more on new sign-ups“
You already have a highly paid full-time job. What inspired you to start this in the first place?
“It's just something I wanted to exist. I tried three or four budgeting apps before I built this, but I got to a point where it was like five clicks to edit a transaction category. And I was just like, oh my gosh, if this was in a spreadsheet, I could just do this in seconds.”
Have you made any friends at Indie Worldwide?
“There’s a couple people who reached out with other Google Sheets add-ons. One in particular helped me with an issue and gave me their sample code. I did not expect that! I’ve had some offers to buy BudgetSheet too, but I’m not interested in selling.”
Everybody has a number. What would you sell for today?
“If someone offered me an insane number that wouldn't even be worth paying for what it is right now, then maybe, but the market is big enough. I think there's an opportunity for this to be a multimillion dollar business. I have the money that I need right now from my full-time job. So for now I'm growing it on the side until I can kind of step over. And that's my plan. I want to work for myself.”
Thanks Vance for the interview 🙏🏻
If you’d like to be our next Founder Spotlight, reply to this email and let me know what you’re working on. Looking forward to hearing your stories 😌
Launches 🚀
Each month we pick a few launches from Indie Worldwide founders to give an extra shout out to. Here are our top picks for the last month:
Zoltan and Edward launched True Source today! A no-code platform to turn any data-set from any data-source into a monetized data-product.
Hannah O’Connor launched TagTeam AI, a natural language processing api built for developers first.David Miranda hit the front page of Hacker News with Animatize, a quick and intuitive way to create simple animations just by dragging objects around with your mouse.
Mehdi Djabri launched Iteration X, a Chrome extension to annotate and edit any website live in your browser. They hit top five for the entire week on Product Hunt!
Domenico launched Pitch 2.0, a fully automated pitch deck creation and monitoring system.
Don’t forget to post your launches in #launch-alert in the slack for a chance to be featured next month 😉
Community Updates 🛣️
- The biggest change of course is that our Slack group is now private. All new founders will be invited to join on a case by case basis or automatically when they sign up for Founders’ Club. So far this change seems to have had a positive impact with more founders starting better conversations and less low-quality link bombs (which are removed anyway).
- Members-only events. This is new! We’re adding a lot of events to our calendar, most of which will be restricted to existing members of the Slack community. Our once a month general meetups will still be open to any and all indie founders and I’ll continue to proactively invite founders to these events that I think you’ll all want to meet.
