1 year 'streak' as an indie hacker parent

Just yesterday we celebrated my son’s first birthday. With that, my wife and I had been parents for a full year now. A one year ‘streak’, in the familiar lingo here in Lifelog. Not that I was tracking, and I can’t break the streak even if I wanted to, LOL.

This is not a post about my son – I’m usually reserved about talking about my family. What I would love to talk about is how the whole experience had shaped me in other areas of life, especially my work as an indie hacker:

The power of constraints

I would have never imagined that I could have done this much on so little sleep, time and money. But yet, the story seems to corroborate with the comments I often hear from other parents. You have to leave the office on the dot by 6pm, so you can’t dawdle during office hours. The constraints help you focus on doing what you need to do.

The nighttime feeds, the disruptions, the pandemic crisis happening outside, were all super challenging. It was always too hard. But it’s precisely because of these constraints that removed the luxury of procrastinating, being lazy and not doing anything about some of my old bad habits which didn’t always serve me well. No time to work out? Find ways to do tiny workouts during the day. Sleep deprived due to night feeds? Fix sleep through biohacking. Not enough time to do deep work? Wake up at 5am despite being a night owl. Getting a unhealthy dad bod from all the bad sleep and sedentary lifestyle? Take drastic measures into the keto diet. Money running low due to COVID-induced economic fallout yet still need money to feed the family? Re-examine money habits, hustle hard on monetization and marketing.

I’m not sure how but despite all these constraints, I managed to launch several COVID-related social impact projects last year, learned coding and launched Lifelog. If there wasn’t a fire up my ass, I’m not sure if I would havehad the mindset to hunker down and just do the f**king work. Procrastination, it seems, might be for those who have the luxury of time.

Trailblazing a deviant path far away from the mainstream

We had decided to go with a home birth right from the start. That decision took us far, far away from the established and familiar medical system, and it was up to us to make our own decisions about what it means to give birth to a child, our own child. And a big how. It almost feels like doing the equivalent of trying to survive out in the wild on your own. Or quitting your job to do indie hacking fulltime, without a project. It was empowering but also scary.

Thankfully, we didn’t have to literally do it on our own, despite dropping out of the system. There’s a quiet but supportive home birth community out there, with many loving and gentle birth practitioners who guided us through it. They say it takes a village to raise a child. I say it take a village to even give birth to one. Community was certainly key, not quite unlike the indie hacker community I feel. Because few people had done this, and even fewer friends (we counted just two) so, we had to be resourceful and dig far and wide to find our tribe. Oftentimes, the process felt familiar yet different – familiar, like any indie hacker project; different, because the stakes felt much higher this time, almost life and death (though we made sure to plan to not even get there). I think this is but a taste of things to come, now that I’m also considering homeschool in the future for my child, a crazy path within a highly regimented and rigorous education system. Dealing with the ambiguity, being resourceful, leaning on a community – all felt like skills any indie hacker needs. It definitely felt like a power up for me, even though it was in a different field.