There's something weirdly exciting about building things that might completely fail.
Right after college ends, I'm starting something I've wanted to do for a long time. Publishing my own apps on the Play Store as an indie hacker.
Not as a startup founder with funding. Not as a team. Not with a perfect plan.
Just me. A laptop. A bunch of ideas. And $25.
That $25 (roughly ₹2408) goes into a Google developer account so I can actually put apps on the Play Store. That's the first real commitment. Skin in the game.
The First Benchmark
The first mission is almost embarrassingly small compared to what people usually post online. Earn back the $25.
That's it.
If one of my apps makes enough through in-app purchases or a handful of pro users to cover that cost, I'll consider it a huge win. Because then it stops being "just a project" and becomes proof that something I built has value to someone out there.
And honestly? I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to marketing.
I can code. I can build things. But distribution? Positioning? Retention? Getting strangers to care about an app I made? Totally different game. Never played it before.
So I'll figure it out while building. That's kind of the whole point.
Where This Thinking Came From
A few books and creators genuinely changed how I think about work and building on the internet.
The Minimalist Entrepreneur, The 4-Hour Workweek, and Million Dollar Weekend made small internet businesses feel like something a regular person could pull off. Not some Silicon Valley fantasy for people with connections and capital.
Sahil Lavingia and Marc Lou pushed me to stop overthinking and just ship. Build something, put it out there, learn from what happens, repeat.
One thing I keep coming back to: a single person today can sit in a room, write some code, and ship products globally through Google and Apple. One person. That still blows my mind.
A lot of that is because of Steve Jobs. Before the App Store, shipping software meant retail deals and shelf space. Jobs made it so a college kid in a hostel room could put an app on someone's phone in Tokyo. He built a trillion-dollar company, sure. But he also built the rails for every solo developer on the planet. People don't think about how crazy that actually was.
The Stack and the Plan
Stack is simple. Expo and React Native with TypeScript, Zustand for state management, Cloudflare for backend/cloud, PostHog for analytics, and SQL. Ship fast instead of polishing features nobody asked for.
I'm not trying to build a billion-dollar company.
I just want to build useful things and see what happens.
If the apps cross $100 MRR consistently, I know what's next. Get an iPhone for testing and grab the Apple Developer membership so I can ship on the App Store too. Apple charges $99/year (~₹9,500) just for the privilege, which is way steeper than Google's one-time $25.
I carry an S24 and genuinely prefer Android over iOS. Buying an iPhone just to have one feels pointless. Hitting $100 MRR gives me an actual reason to own one. That's the benchmark.
Things I'm Bad At
Design.
I can build systems. I can engineer products. Making things look good? Completely different muscle. Mine's barely developed.
If any of these apps start earning something decent, I'd love to work with designers. Maybe hire freelancers from college clubs or people around me who are way better at visual thinking than I'll ever be.
That sounds more fun than pretending I can become a designer overnight.
That said, I am learning design on the side. Because why not. If I'm going to ship my own apps, I might as well get less terrible at making them look decent.
This Could Totally Fail
Most apps fail. Most projects get abandoned. Most people quit before iteration five.
There's a real chance nobody downloads anything I build.
But there's value in trying anyway. Even if everything flops, I'll walk away understanding product development, user psychology, app distribution, monetization, retention, and marketing better than I do today.
And if things work out? Hell of a story.
Asymmetric Bets
I've been thinking about this a lot lately.
Most careers are symmetric bets. Fixed time in, predictable return out. Salary bumps, internships, placements, promotions. Nothing wrong with that. Stability ofc matters, it gives you the runway for assymmetric bets. My day job is my symmetric bet.
But the asymmetric ones fascinate me way more. Small downside, huge potential upside.
Building apps at night. Shipping on weekends. Writing online. Publishing things that keep existing long after I hit "upload."
Worst case? Lost sleep, a few wasted weekends, $25 gone, and a ton of learning.
Best case? One app takes off. One piece of content reaches thousands. One product starts generating recurring income. One journey connects me with people I'd never meet otherwise.
That asymmetry is beautiful.
A single person can code an app, throw up a landing page, distribute globally, and build a real business from a bedroom. Laptop and Wi-Fi. That's it.
Documenting the Process
I don't just want to build apps. I want to document the whole thing. Blog posts, reels, videos, tweets, whatever feels right in the moment.
The wins. The bugs. The failed launches. The small milestones. The cringy first marketing attempts.
Even if a project dies, the knowledge stacks up publicly. Someone might find an old post. Someone might stumble on a reel. Someone might avoid a mistake I already made. And maybe years from now I'll look back at all of it and cringe at how little I knew.
Skills Compound in Weird Ways
Here's another asymmetric bet people sleep on. Learning new skills.
Going deep on something feels terrible at first. Hours of confusion. Slow progress. Bad output. Nobody cares. No immediate payoff.
But skills compound non-linearly.
One skill is useful. Two stacked together start feeling unfair. Programming plus communication. Engineering plus design taste. Writing plus software development. Each combo unlocks something neither skill could alone.
Learning to code pays dividends for decades. Learning marketing changes how every future product performs. Learning to write amplifies every idea you ever have.
Downside of picking up a new skill? Capped. Some time and mental energy. Upside? Uncapped. Skills are tools you carry forever.
Every app I build forces me to learn product design, user psychology, retention, monetization, analytics, storytelling, distribution. Even if every app tanks, the skills still compound.
Biggest mindset shift I've had recently: sometimes the real return isn't the money from the project.
It's the person you become while building it.
So yeah. This is the beginning. A random engineering student trying to turn ideas into products on the internet.
Let's see where this goes.