The Latest Indie Maker
Hello world! My name is Ed and I have jumped on the latest bandwagon of crazy internet based professions: the Independent Maker. For those not familiar, you do exactly as the name implies. You make things. Anything. The world is your oyster. The second I saw the term I knew I was going to like it. I am the type of person who loves change and I easily get bored with monotony. I am also constantly analyzing everything in this world to see how it works and if it can be made better. So the idea that I can have a job where I can literally make anything I want is pretty damn appealing.
A bit about me: I used to work a 9–5 steady desk job in Kansas, USA. I had become unsatisfied with my work and overall situation and decided I desperately needed a change. So, I went big: I quit my job, sold 99% of my belongings and packed the rest into a backpack and began to travel the world on my savings. I had no plan and no goal at the time, I simply wanted — no, needed to get away! It turned out to be the best decision of my life! The adventure so far has taken me from Iceland to Australia and many places in between. I’ve met so many wonderful new friends from all over the world and have grown much as a person.
Being the nerdy person that I am, for fun during my previous life I had taught myself to program iOS apps using the Swift language. I tinkered around with very small projects and enjoyed the creative process that went into each. I continued tinkering with small projects during the start of my travels. One day I met a fellow iOS developer at a hostel in Seville who gave me lots of useful advice on launching iOS apps. This convinced me that it was possible to turn this little hobby of mine into something that could support a nomadic travel lifestyle, which I have grown to love. So I began blazing this new trail, and I have been enjoying the adventure of both my travels and my exciting new career as an indie maker ever since!
My focus for now is on iOS. I’m happy to say that I just released my first money making endeavour: Moments, a dark theme special event countdown app available on the App Store. I would like to make one or two more iOS apps (or maybe macOS) before I graduate to bigger things. I have lofty goals of designing games and even getting into product design. It is amazing that we live in a day and age where you can even build prototypes of physical products as a nomad (thanks 3D printing). We’ll see how this goes.
If you’ve read this far there’s one thing that’s important to me that I think others are beginning to appreciate. I am not in the business of data selling. Data selling, while making things free to users (monetarily at least), has had some nasty downsides, including creating the internet bubbles we now live in and a general reduction of quality of products. I think we need to get back to a time where people paid for services and products. As such I will never sell user data or use 3rd party marketing of any kind in my apps. Even if you don’t agree that there are downsides to data selling, you probably agree that ads really just ruin the software experience anyway.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to reach out on social I am open to conversation.