I gave up $100k salary to chase my dream

Hello there, I wanted to share my story with you. I used to work as a software engineer at Microsoft, but I gave up my $100k salary to pursue my dream of becoming an indie hacker.

I built a side project called Chirpy during my 9-5 work, which is an open-source comment system. Although it got 500+ stars, I struggled to monetize it and generate income.

After reading Make, the famous indie maker handbook, I realized that I had focused too much on engineering and not enough on resolving users' pain points. For example, I did a lot of migrations, e.g. GraphQL -> tRPC, apollo -> urql -> react-query, postgresql -> mysql -> postgresql.

I started building new projects with this in mind and found that I was able to ship them much faster. One of these projects was a ChatGPT-like chat app, which I launched in just a weekend. Although it didn't gain many users, I was amazed at how quickly I could develop it.

As I continued to explore new project ideas, I came across Feather, a website that allows users to turn their Notion pages into blogs. Inspired by this, I decided to build a similar website for Apple Notes users. After researching and planning for a few days, I quit my job at Microsoft in October and released the first version of my product in December. I launched it on HackerNews and was fortunate enough to make it to the first page, which brought in thousands of visitors and my first paid customer.

After months of hard work, I'm proud to announce the release of Quotion 2.0. This version includes new features such as customizable styles and layouts, built-in web analytics, weekly reports, and SEO enhancements.

Developing this product has been a great journey so far, and I'm excited to see where it takes me next.