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Comment by czue | Hacker News Reader

I've been doing the solopreneur / indie hacking thing on the side for the last 4 years, including meticulously tracking my time spent on each project.

I find that seeing the data to be a useful reminder that product businesses can take a long time to get off the ground, but can really pay off eventually. I hope maybe this inspires others to take the plunge and not give up!

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I just wanted to let you know that (as someone beginning their journey) this was incredibly inspiring. Thank you for sharing!

Thanks!

Hi Cory, I've seen you post Place Card Me a couple times on the passive income project threads on HN. I'm really happy to see that your efforts on that project and others are paying dividends, and I find your story and stats here really inspiring! Thank you for sharing :)

Thanks!

weird question I know: but how do you take the payments, report them for tax purposes? As someone who has done some things that were orders of magnitude smaller and decided not to charge for them because of the headaches involved I’m genuinely curious. Thanks!

Stripe. Everything is registered under an LLC, and Stripe provides the necessary tax forms and such.

thanks. i take it that you don’t have to collect sales tax?

Really cool! Do you mind sharing how much of this money was reinvested into the business (a breakdown of the expenses)?

Nice. What’s your next project?

I'm convinced my SaaS starter kit Pegasus[1] still has a ton of potential, so am planning on keeping it the focus of 2021 - and possibly building some adjacent products for the Pegasus audience/customer base (e.g. Django educational content).

I'm also interested in using Pegasus to build a proper subscription product. I have a few ideas brewing but no concrete plans as of yet.

[1] https://www.saaspegasus.com/

How have you reached your audience (outside of posting on HN/Product Hunt). Do you actively promote or pay for advertisement? This thing is awesome, kudos for launching!

I reach people mostly via SEO and content marketing. I started publishing articles about Django development back in 2018, and this year I spent a lot of time working on a series of guides to building a SaaS with Django[1] - basically documenting a lot of the things I had to do to build Pegasus. These serve as lead-generation and for SEO. Many of the guides have gotten picked up in Django communities/newsletters, etc. and bring nice traffic and product awareness in the community.

In the last month I've started my first experiments with targeted paid ads in relevant blogs. Still a bit early to say how well they're working.

[1] https://www.saaspegasus.com/guides/

Do you track time spent writing as time working on your side projects?

Just wondering if you are counting this as marketing time?

I track all writing that I do specifically for content marketing (e.g. the guides I linked above) as marketing time toward the product.

I don't count time writing on my personal blog on this chart - though I do track it - since it's less clear how it benefits any individual product if at all.

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