Hakan Deryal

Hakan Deryal

@crafted.works

Freelancer turned solo maker, after building 40+ products for clients. Been through some shit. Burned out. Lost everything. Started again. #buildinpublic

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Hey #buildinpublic of Bluesky! Thought it's time to properly share my indie story here also. Two years of building, failing, learning, and finally beginning turning things around. Here's the full saga: 1/10

Hey #buildinpublic of Bluesky! Thought it's time to properly share my indie story here also. Two years of building, failing, learning, and finally beginning turning things around. Here's the full saga: 1/10

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First up: Building what I started with - an app for event organizers. Full circle moment. Focusing on Turkish market with 3 products total. Previous projects shelved until financially stable.

2 years of hell, countless lessons learned. But not giving up. Coming back stronger, wiser, with the right team this time. New chapter begins! 🚀

Hey #buildinpublic of Bluesky! Thought it's time to properly share my indie story here also. Two years of building, failing, learning, and finally beginning turning things around. Here's the full saga: 1/10

View full thread

My autistic brain is both gift and curse. Great at focusing, thinking, building. Terrible at finishing and shipping my own products. 10 years trying to put a buy button on internet, 2 years failing publicly.

But finally turned corner! Partnered with my best closer friend - he gets 30% of my company, I get 14% of his agency. Angel investor took 10%. Perfect combo: I build, they sell. Back to where I'm good at, building.

Hey #buildinpublic of Bluesky! Thought it's time to properly share my indie story here also. Two years of building, failing, learning, and finally beginning turning things around. Here's the full saga: 1/10

View full thread

April '24: Finally recovered. Found amazing idea & opportunity in AI marketing. Duct taped a demo together, validated with 30+ companies, 9 ready to buy when it's ready. But needed funds to build. Made risky all-or-nothing bet on a $35k deal with one of them that would've solved everything.

The plan was perfect: build the product while doing the work manually, pay off debt, have ready customers with a proven product at the end. Single point of failure: getting paid by the client. And yeah, they delayed, and eventually cancelled. Everything came crashing down.

Hey #buildinpublic of Bluesky! Thought it's time to properly share my indie story here also. Two years of building, failing, learning, and finally beginning turning things around. Here's the full saga: 1/10

View full thread

Mid-2023: AI boom hits. Tried raising $50k with innovative revenue-share model. Got good feedback but couldn't close enough investors. Managed to get a loan instead (turned out to be a bad idea). Dove into building an AI website builder.

Got beta customers, things looked promising. But I was running on fumes. Years of failures finally caught up - crashed hard. Spent 4 months in depression, couldn't even open my IDE without physical pain.

Hey #buildinpublic of Bluesky! Thought it's time to properly share my indie story here also. Two years of building, failing, learning, and finally beginning turning things around. Here's the full saga: 1/10

View full thread

Dec '22: Wrapped up freelancing to dive into indie journey, started build digital events platform with 3 friends. Market was hot, customers lined up. I went all-in, built 3 products in 2 months. But others weren't committed - red flag I ignored. With a great cost...

Team disbanded, I was left holding the bag. Tried launching solo but burned out. Back to freelancing, but the builder's itch wouldn't go away. And fell into the classic trap: trying to both freelance and build products without much runway, failing at both.

Hey #buildinpublic of Bluesky! Thought it's time to properly share my indie story here also. Two years of building, failing, learning, and finally beginning turning things around. Here's the full saga: 1/10

Quick intro: I'm a solo dev/designer/builder who's been freelancing for 20+ years, built 40+ products end-to-end for clients. Leaving freelancing behind and earning a living from the products I've built is a lifelong dream of mine. Now here's where the recent chapter begins:

Today is the first day back at home office... and I really missed this. Last I worked from home was ~4 years ago, around the time our baby was born. I've been bouncing around since then. Shared workspace, coffee shops, outside, you name it. Having a permanent workspace is a blessing.

I've a background process in my brain that is always working while I'm coding, thinking about how can I improve how I'm doing things, how to organize the code better, what abstractions can I introduce/remove to makes things easier etc. Yes it has a cost attached to it but I'm happy with it.

Hollywood should bring back "Person of Interest" with a new story arc. It's the perfect time, it has the perfect setting to explore the current unknowns.

Having a holiday at the same time every year has always fascinated me. In my part of the world religious holidays move due to being aligned with moon calendar. Both provides different benefits.

This may have been the most complex product I've built. Simple UI is hiding a ton of complexity behind it. Creating fintech apps is always fun. A charity app, powered by a digital money platform. Launching for Turkiye next week.

It took a bit of effort at the end, but managed to push through and finished the fintech project I was working on for the last 1.5 months. Shipping something gives me back all the energy that I've spent to build it.

Sometimes taking a few steps back is required to move forward. I didn't, and fell down to a deep financial hole instead. Not out of it yet, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. New partnerships, new products, new opportunities. Take off scheduled for next week.

Unless I overcome my mental blockers, I won’t succeed. My journey is the one where I need to push my own boundaries, get over hills of my own making.

I’ve been busy with doing cleanup of leftover projects, and came to the conclusion that I’m not going to build anything that will take more then a week to launch until I’m already rich.

The guy is leading the charge that’s changing the world. Electric cars, world wide sat internet, reusable rockets, pushing solar, goal of a Mars colony. Politics makes people behave in ways I don’t understand.

A few more people to join here from the other side and I don’t need to read it anymore.

Adam Wathan@adamwathan.com

Let's give this a shot 🙂 The biggest thing that has held me back until now is being mislabeled as one of the people leaving Twitter out of protest, but if this is where people are hanging out, I'll hang too 🤙🏻

NFTs was a brilliant idea that’s plagued by the wrong crowd. Digital proof of ownership & trade of real world things enables so many new opportunities. We are working on that with my latest project.

I’m using AI far less than I should be using. For everything. Need to finish the various tooling I’ve planned to do, otherwise it’s too cumbersome to use and I give up.

My office is in a tech center, which supposedly provides offices for high tech companies, utilities included. Among these utilities there is internet access. That internet access is behind a firewall. It’s configuration is shit. I can protect myself from phishing, thank you.

New moves on this new part of the #buildinpublic journey. I’ve partnered with a law professor here in Türkiye and we’ll be launching a local product that is in the charity space, more specifically about stipends/allowance for university students. Simple idea that can lead to interesting places.

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This is a pilot project for us that we aim to turn into a much, much bigger system where trading physical items will be as easy as sending money. We are planning to launch in a few cities as pilot programs and expand from there.

New moves on this new part of the #buildinpublic journey. I’ve partnered with a law professor here in Türkiye and we’ll be launching a local product that is in the charity space, more specifically about stipends/allowance for university students. Simple idea that can lead to interesting places.

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- Benefactors will be able to “buy” these and it’ll be credited to the students digital wallet as a physical item/service. - Students will then go and pick it up. We are basically digitizing the physical ownership of items.

The biggest advantage for benefactors is they will be able to use this donations as tax write off. Local businesses will get more business. Low income students’ needs will be met.

New moves on this new part of the #buildinpublic journey. I’ve partnered with a law professor here in Türkiye and we’ll be launching a local product that is in the charity space, more specifically about stipends/allowance for university students. Simple idea that can lead to interesting places.

It’ll be a marketplace to bring together students, benefactors and local businesses. - Local shops will register and list their products. Restaurants, clothing, groceries etc. - Students living in the city will choose what they need at the moment to be listed anonymously.