What My First Year As Indie Hacker Taught Me About Entrepreneurship And Life

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

I have always had a passion for building things. That’s probably why I studied engineering. I am fascinated by the process of designing a solution and then bringing it into material existence. As a child, I recall reading about Thomas Edison, who was a serial inventor, and feeling like I could identify with him. I wanted to invent and build new things.

But somewhere along the way, I lost that goal. The reason was a combination of a poor education system that rewarded abstract superficial knowledge of subjects over the capacity to deeply master them and create concrete solutions to problems. I recall doing some hands-on tasks in my electrokinetics and electromagnetism classes. We had to go to the school’s physics laboratory, but nothing we did there was designed to help us have a concrete understanding of how to build circuits, test Norton and Thevenin laws, build systems. Most experiments failed, the teacher was more focused on courting female students (a very problematic man), and we had the pressure to write a report of our experiments under the 4 hours of our bi-weekly session.

In the physics laboratory, the teacher was not helpful at all. The lab materials were substandard. I learned almost nothing of value from these sessions. So I came to the conclusion that with the state of my…