Discover One Amazing Creator Everyday #Creator21

Published in

Fueler

4 min readMay 6, 2021

Welcome readers,

Today’s story about a creator who is on the journey of building cool side projects, a morning geek who make bad jokes 😅. An indie hacker who is helping individuals in building and growing.

Tony is currently working on a macOS app Devutils(A tool for developers that helps them in formatting JSON, decoding Base64). Besides, he sometimes also work on other smaller ones, the most recent one is Drivestats(A tool that helps you to organize and manage Google Drive space).

Q. What’s that one thing you want to achieve in 2021?

A. My plan for 2020 has been completely destroyed by COVID-19, so I’m pretty hesitant to have any long term plan right now. I still want to grow my apps to more customers. Hopefully, it’ll help me break through the ramen profit.

Q. What’s the one mistake you have done and will advice others not to repeat that?

A. When I launched DevUtils there was no preparation, I also didn’t know about the “build in public” theme, I underestimated the power of a well-prepared product hunt launch.

In the end, I didn’t get the chance to leverage it. My post got some traction and made it into 3rd product of the day, but I earned 0 followers, 0 subscribers. My landing page was also bad 😂.

So I guess my advice is: learn to launch.

And do that often. Don’t be like me 😐.

Q. What did you like about “build in public”?

A. I learned a lot from folks who build in public. So I’m trying to do the same, hopefully, it will help other folks. And we help each other a lot on our launches, so it’s like a community 😁.

Q. Which book you are reading these days? Which Genre excites you the most?

A. I’m reading “Start small, stay small” by Rob Walling. It’s a 2010 book but a good one. Pretty interesting for me who just get started in indie hacking.

This is the first book I read about startup and business. Previously I only read heavy technical books 😂 (think: Linux programming, database, working with legacy systems, etc.).

Q. What’s something you learnt/realized recently that you wish you learnt/realized much earlier?

A. Build an audience, on Twitter or Facebook or anywhere. It is a good kick- start for your next projects and idea validations. Besides, it’s fun. Sometimes can be addictive too 😂.

Q. Build an audience before you build the product, how much do you believe in this?

A. It’s not necessary, I think you can always do any of those in any order if you have enough time

If you have an audience before you have a product, that’s even better.

Q. What do you love to do when not working? Any hobbies you want to share?

A. I play guitar :D

Q. What problem you are planning to solve next?

A. I have a few ideas, but it went no further than buying a domain for now, haha. I’ll share more on that on my Twitter soon, still study on the problems.

Q. Why do you judge your jokes as bad? 😂

A. ’cause my jokes are 99% bad 😂 but learning to be better 💪.

Q. What would you recommend others who are looking to start their careers in the startup/saas space on how to go about it?

A. I don’t think I’m qualified to give a strong recommendation here, I’m just started my own and still figuring out a lot of stuff.

A general recommendation is to stick with a problem that you are interested in, it’s easier to keep you motivated like solving your own problem, then generalize it for everybody else.

All of my side projects have been born that way.

Q. Suppose there is a big whiteboard in front of you. What’s the first line you would like to write?

A. I would put my favorite line in there “It’s never too late to start something new. If you don’t start, you will never finish.”