So I recently hit 1111 (nice) consecutive days of posting a to-do on this thing, and I realized I never introduced myself.

I think I initially skipped it because of my ongoing deeply paranoid secrecy regarding how much I share publicly: I work a 9-5 in big tech, and the language in my contract regarding side projects is hostile enough to make you feel like a potential criminal just for owning a domain name. So even though I play by the book (never using corp equipment or working on company time, etc.), and all my projects are tiny, I still get twitchy about oversharing.

Anyway, HELLO. I'm Cacho, originally from 🇺🇾UY, based in 🇮🇪IE for the past decade, and I've been building and bootstrapping websites for fun on the side for like 20 years. You can see some of my timeline here: cacho.io

For the longest time, I didn't even realize there was such a thing as indiehacking. I had picked up some basic HTML at a graphic design course in the early 2000s, then learned a bit of PHP from YouTube videos, and started quietly launching shitty sites, mostly to amuse myself and my friends. As a self-perceived fake wannabe developer, I didn't care about how something was coded, only that it kinda worked. I edited php files on notepad++ and threw them inside a shared hosting with FTP. I hit errors all the time and googled them and landed on stackoverflow where the real programmers were pedantically discussing how to do things correctly. 

Then one of the sites went somewhat viral, and started making some money with ads, so I kept going, shipping more crap with even more imaginary pressure of not doing things 'right', but still enjoying the process. I actually started making decent pocket change, and then eventually with other simple SaaS projects enough money to pay my rent, so I kept going.

And then one day during the pandemic I stumbled across levelsio’s Dojo Bali talk, and it hit me right in the middle of my fat fucking face. Few things in life have resonated with me so instantly. It was the first time I saw my exact reality validated: that you could just mess around with whatever tech stack, ignore standards and orthodoxy, build apps people use, and completely bypass the VC or corporate world, all without ever needing (or wanting!) to fit into the professional programmer box. Things break all the time and you just fix them quickly, who cares?

So now here I am, spending some spare time typing English into my terminal, ssh'd into my VPS via Tailscale, so that Claude Code can do all the coding and the sysadmin shit for me while I continue actively not being a programmer, lucratively. It's the best time ever to have this hobby.

At the rate these ai tools keep becoming more powerful and easier to use, the prospect of ditching trad worklife and going full retard indiehacker seem more likely.

In the meantime I'd like to thank @marc  for randomly inviting me to WIP (previously WIP.chat) back in 2020 during his promotional experiment of sending people from twitter some cool stickers (after which I waited like THREE YEARS before actually registering 😆)

Most recently I am a couple of weeks into becoming 💍 Lord of the Job Boards with #joblist a network of niche job boards using high quality .io domains.
inb4 another job board -- yes, I know, but what better time to launch multiple job boards than the absolute bottom of the job market in the middle of AI panic, right?

Less recently, I've been maintaining #propertyvendors   since it launched in 2011. This is a niche industry-specific company directory, and the first project to make me ramen profitable. It has been consistently making like ~$4k/mo for many many years. I've been kinda complacent with it not growing beyond that point because it just complements my day job very well with minimal effort; but I do intend on overhauling it with Claude Code as my next project.

Also keeping #preguntame   alive since 2016, a silly quiz generator, making ~$500/mo in ads. Currently having Claude redesigning it to finally ditch Bootstrap after a decade.

I’ve already been picking up job-board-specific improvement tips just by reading todos and tweets over the past couple of years, but any explicit growth insights, especially from those of you running 5-figure/mo job boards would be invaluable. Also, my linkbuilding game has always been weak, so I’m looking to dive deeper there.

Likely very little, ask Claude for help 😂