Quit Google. Failed 3 apps in 18 months. The 4th one pays my rent.

💻 Tech & Softwareby ex_faang_solo · 7w ago

▸ What I did

Left a senior SWE role at Google in mid-2024. Had savings for 2 years. Grand plan: become an indie developer. App #1: social app for book lovers (3 months, 40 users, dead). App #2: habit tracker with "accountability partners" (4 months, 200 signups, 5 DAU, dead). App #3: recipe manager with AI meal planning (5 months, actually decent but already 50 competitors, dead).

▸ What I expected

Honestly? I thought my Google pedigree meant I'd build better products. Better code = better products, right? I expected at least ONE of these to get traction.

▸ What actually happened

18 months. 3 dead apps. Savings getting thinner. Started questioning everything. My ex-coworkers were getting promoted while I was arguing with CloudFlare DNS settings at 2 AM. Then out of desperation I asked myself: "what's the most boring unsexy problem I've personally had this year?" Answer: invoicing for my freelance consulting gigs on the side. Every invoicing tool was either too complex (FreshBooks) or too simple (PayPal invoices). Built NicheInvoice in 6 weeks — dead simple invoicing for solo consultants.

▸ What I've tried so far

For the first 3 apps, I tried everything "right": Product Hunt launches, Reddit posts, Twitter threads, beta testing programs. All the indie hacker playbook stuff. For app #4, I did almost nothing — posted once in r/freelance and set up a basic landing page. Turns out when people actually need your thing, you don't have to beg.

🔗 NicheInvoice

Progress Updates (3)

4 months in. 187 paying users at $15/mo. $2,800 MRR. Still can't believe this is the one that worked. The ugliest, simplest, most boring thing I've ever built. I had a call last week with a user who said "I tried 6 invoicing tools before yours and they all made me feel stupid." That's the whole product thesis. Don't make people feel stupid. Don't add features. Just solve the problem and get out of the way. Currently working on Stripe integration for direct payments. That's the most requested feature and honestly the only new feature I want to add. Keeping it simple is the entire strategy.

✓ How I Fixed It

NicheInvoice hit $2,800 MRR after 4 months. Not Google salary, but real money from real users solving a real problem. The difference was stupid simple: I stopped building "wouldn't it be cool if" apps and built "I literally need this right now" apps. Every feature in NicheInvoice exists because I needed it for my own invoicing. I'm my own power user. The 3 failures taught me that technical skill doesn't create demand. Demand creates demand. Find an annoying problem, build the simplest thing that fixes it, charge money from day one.

0 / 3000

3 Replies

pivot_master · 2w ago✓ the fix

The "I tried 6 invoicing tools and they all made me feel stupid" quote is marketing gold. Put that on your landing page immediately. Real user language beats any copywriting.

indie_hacker_vet · 2w ago

"Technical skill doesn't create demand. Demand creates demand." This should be in the welcome packet when you quit FAANG to go indie. I mentor a lot of ex-big-tech founders and the #1 mistake is treating indie development like a hackathon — build the coolest thing, demo day, hope for adoption. The boring thing is always the better bet.

ux_first_kai · 2w ago

What I love about this story is that the product didn't succeed because of your Google engineering skills. It succeeded because you stopped thinking like a Google engineer and started thinking like a frustrated freelancer. The empathy switch is the whole game.

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✓ fixed

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