Prior to February 2019, I published all my retrospectives on Indie Hackers:

• Is It Keto Month 4: My First Dollar of Revenue

For years, I’ve hired freelancers through a site called Upwork. The site attracts many different professionals, so I’ve used it to find everything from cartoonists to software developers to copy editors. Some were great, some were disastrous, but none of them had ever tried to scam me outright.

That is, until I met Lizzie.

I recently installed a media sharing app to one of my servers. It was simple to install, but it hid a dastardly trap for long-term maintenance.

Every time a user uploaded a file, the web app saved it to the local filesystem. If I ever blew away the server and rebuilt it, I’d have to backup and restore every file manually. The better architecture would be for the app to write its files to a separate storage server, but I didn’t want to spend months rewriting the app to make that possible.

Prior to February 2019, I published all my retrospectives on Indie Hackers:

• Is It Keto Month 3: Returning to a Site that Grew without Me

I wish that I had found this book nine years ago. It taught me a great deal about choosing the right product to build and the advantages of targeting small niches. The author makes compelling points about the importance of marketing and small founders’ common pitfall of treating it as an afterthought.

Unfortunately, much of the content aged poorly. Published in 2010, Walling intentionally kept the book pragmatic, recommending specific tools and strategies that were popular at the time. Reading it in 2019, many of the services he recommends are either irrelevant or dead. It would be nice to see an updated edition, which Walling has suggested is a possibility.