One day I was talking with a friend of mine who is an indie hacker and has two successful web apps, he told me that he rejected a part time job offer because he didn't want to give to the company three days of his week. This struck me and I couldn't stop thinking of it for days, my friend has the freedom to choose where and how he is spending his time.

The more I was thinking this the more appealing was becoming the idea of sustaining my lifestyle by working on my own projects. It is not that I don't like my job, on the contrary I enjoy it a lot and I am very grateful for it. But the idea of not selling my time to someone else and having complete control over it couldn't escape my mind.

I know that this is not an easy task, and that it comes with a lot of challenges and pressure that you don't have when you are working at a 9-5 job. When you are a solopreneur, you have to wear multiple hats at the same time and this might mean doing things that you don't enjoy that much, compared for example with just doing engineering. Also, you have to build a product that people want to use and are willing to pay for, which definitely is not an easy task. But if you manage to do it, it must be a very rewarding feeling (at least this is what my friend told me). I get it, every success is 100% on you, and at the same time every failure is 100% on you. To be completely honest, I don't know if indie hacking is something that fits me, as generally I am a risk averse person and the safety of a 9-5 job is something that gives me peace of mind.

Nevertheless, I decided that this is something that I am willing to try since the benefits outweigh the risks. But, as an embedded software engineer, I lack a lot of the skills necessary to build a web app from scratch, I am missing skills like marketing, sales, web design, web development, etc. So, last September I decided to start building a web app in my free time in order to acquire these skills, and to learn by doing. Other than learning this process will help me to understand whether I like indie hacking or not.

This app is called FlightsMeet and is a web app that helps you find outbound and return flights to common destinations starting from two different airports. Imagine that you and your best friend are living in different countries and you want to go on a trip together on specific dates. In order to find a common destination, you have to check the flights from both of your cities and find a destination suitable for both of you. At the same time you want to find something that is not too expensive for both of you. This is a very time consuming task and FlightsMeet aims to solve this problem. I will share the details and screenshots from the current state of the app in next week's post.

The reason I decided to solve this problem is that I have been in this situation many times as my partner and I are living in different countries for the past two and a half years. So this is a win win situation for me, I get to solve a problem that I have and I get to experiment with indie hacking.

I have been building FlightsMeet for the past 6 months and now I have a working prototype which I am planning to launch in the next few weeks. I will be writing a blog post every week about what I did the previous and what I am planning to do the next. I am hoping this will add a sense of accountability and will help to keep me motivated.

That's all for now. In next week's post I will talk about the technical details of the app, like which languages and frameworks I am using, which APIs I am using, etc. Also, I will post screenshots of the current state of the app and explain which features I am planning to add in the next few weeks before launching it.

I hope you enjoyed reading this, feel free to connect with me on Twitter (I know that I am not very active on Twitter, but I am planning to change that in the next few weeks).

See you next week,
Cheers!