Leaving a full-time head of growth role to be a full-time indie hacker - Corey Haines, Swipe Files and more
Indie Bites
Indie Hackers - What's Your Biggest Challenge With Building Your Projects?
I think speed is vastly underrated and underappreciated for aspiring entrepreneurs, indie hackers, anyone who's building something. I would say just make a lot of stuff and get it out of your system and test things out because there's no safer time to do that when you have a paycheck. Get yourself in a good financial position, the more savings the better, but also the more traction initially the better as well.
Corey Haines is the founder of Swipe Files, he also runs refactoring growth, mental models for marketing, hey marketers and he was previously the head of growth at Baremetrics. I've been a follower of Corey for a while and impressed by the level and consistency of everything he produces.
In this episode we talked about:
- What projects Corey is currently working on
- Why he left Baremetrics
- What it's like leaving a stable, full-time job to be an indie hacker
- How he manages his time between projects
- How much revenue he makes
- How to build things quickly
- Deciding on what ideas to focus on
- Advice for indie hackers wanting to live the dream
Recommendations
- Book: Atomic Habits
- Podcast: Akimbo
- Indie Hacker: David Perrell
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Full Transcript
James: You've got a lot going on. Tell me a little bit more about your various side projects, where your main focus is right now.
Corey: Yeah. So I don't know, maybe I just caught the entrepreneurial bug or have an itch to create stuff. But, about two years ago I started just making stuff on the side. I started with a newsletter actually that ended up shutting down later, but it was called the TLDR on SaaS marketing. And that was like my first entry point into creating something and sharing it online and it's actually the reason why I created my Twitter account in the first place. and then, yeah, it's just been through a little bit of. serendipity and connection between projects.
um, you know,
I was talking with a Baremetrics customer, actually. And he's like, Hey, where do I find someone like you?
where would you post a job if you were hiring yourself? And I was like, actually, I don't know. There isn't really like a job board for marketers. So I went out and built it. Later on I was talking about different mental models and frameworks that I've found really helpful for my work at Baremetrics.
Other people were asking for the Notion doc and you know where to learn more about it. So I figured out why don't I just package this up into a course, same thing with B2B SaaS marketing, with what we've done at Baremetrics is figuring out how to create this new course too. Now Swipe Files, I would swipe something and I would write some notes, some bullet points about here's, what I think is great about it and then I noticed this is actually pretty useful because there's a few sites out there, like swipefile.com and Swipe Worthy, or I think it's swiped.co, which are fantastic sources of inspiration, but you still have to do the work to figure out what you want to glean from it.
So Swipe Files is my attempt to build a library of content where I will tell you and show you what it is you can take away from it instead of having to deduce it for yourself. And now I've got a bunch of other things I'll do in the future, but, yesterday went full time as a creator on my own stuff.
James: Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about that. So previously you head of growth at Baremetrics. How long were you there for and, what went into making decision that now is the right time to leave?
Corey: I was there for almost two years and had a fantastic time, experimented with a ton. We grew about 30% which was great for a bootstrapped company. I really changed a lot and I was all over the place with, trying to find different channels and breakthroughs, and really what we came to was that company wasn't at the right spot to really support a growth role with the budget and the engineering time that was needed to really push the ball forward and so just decided to part ways. And I was already the place that I wanted to go full time and my own stuff anyways I think coincidentally, a little bit serendipitously was perfectly the timing for me to start working on my own stuff full time and, head on to this new chapter of my life.
James: So with your various side projects, or they're not side projects now that you're full time projects, How do they each look in terms of revenue what's making the most for you?
Corey: Yeah right now the breadwinner are the courses, refactoring growth and mental models for marketing and I've done about 36,000 in the last 10 months.
I couldn't do what I'm doing today without that revenue on the side, to be able to, fund myself into going full time as a creator. The other one, now that I'm trying to build into becoming the breadwinner is Swipe Files. And to date I actually, I couldn't tell you the revenue that has done, I think it's probably done a couple thousand in revenue because it's split between monthly annual in lifetimes.
It's a little bit more difficult for me to... I didn't go through Stripe and do the math beforehand. but, um, it does about like the MRR today is about a thousand dollars. and then, Hey Marketers, to be honest, I've started to neglected for the last year. I launched it and then I spent a good four or five months working really hard on it. And then figured I would outsource it to my nephew, who is a poor college student and, and needs some cheap, manual labor.
It still does $100 to $300 a month, maybe. And it's a pay what you want model too. So sometimes I'll get a job posting for one dollar and sometimes I'll get a job posting for a hundred bucks. But it depends.
James: so you've got all of these projects so much going on now. How do you squeeze it all in? And how did you manage your time before? I guess this week?
Corey: The answer is I didn't, and I'm going to figure it out now. When I was with Baremetrics full time, I was very much working in these sprints. With Hey Marketers; I created the job for within three weekends and then I would just work here and there nights and weekends, especia...
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