{"id":7003,"date":"2020-05-04T21:49:07","date_gmt":"2020-05-04T16:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ahmadawais.com\/?p=7003"},"modified":"2020-05-04T21:53:22","modified_gmt":"2020-05-04T16:53:22","slug":"fears-of-an-indie-maker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ahmadawais.com\/fears-of-an-indie-maker\/","title":{"rendered":"Fears of an Indie Maker"},"content":{"rendered":"

\ud83d\udc4b Hello, it’s Awais<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As a full-time open-sourcerer, I’m humbled to share that I’ve won awards for my open source work and prestigious titles like Google Developers Expert. But as an indie-maker just like any of you, I struggle with many basic things, have all kinds of fear, and haven’t figured out life.<\/p>\n

In this post, I share what it feels like being an Independent Marker, Full-time Open Sourcerer, and a course author. Especially nowadays, amidst the coronavirus outbreak.<\/p>\n

\n

I pre-launched a course NodeCLI.com<\/a> \u2014 this is my first time pre-launching a course with pre-order stuff and all. And honestly, it was super scary to do that.<\/p>\n

Takes a lot of guts. The constant fear of failure after taking people’s money is not a good thing. As you may know, I launched VSCode<\/a>.pro before this one, which has done very well. Over 14,192 developers learning power user workflows and switched to VSCode.<\/p>\n

I wanted to launch this NodeCLI.com<\/a> course weeks ago but just kept testing the entire setup, in hindsight I might have been dealing with imposter syndrome, procrastination, and fears of being an indie maker.<\/p>\n

So, first of all, I’m happy to check-off that milestone \u2014 Woohoo! \ud83e\udd73\ud83e\udd73\ud83e\udd73<\/p>\n

Fears of Indie Makers<\/h2>\n

As an indie-maker, I wanted to talk about this in a bit more open fashion. As a creator, we struggle with a lot of things. It’s about time I share mine. Maybe some of you can relate.<\/p>\n

Fear of Failure<\/h3>\n

What if no one buys what I am building?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When I was working on my VSCode<\/a> course I was afraid. What if I failed? What if everyone found out, my workflows aren’t that great. You know maybe this just me who likes to create multiple cursors and write quickly.<\/p>\n

Fear of Success<\/h3>\n

What if I succeed?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Took about 1.5 years to launch my first course. I wrote about how I created my own course platform<\/a>. Then when I launched my VSCode<\/a> course, I had a great first two months; I hit about 900 sales and about USD 75,000 in revenue.<\/p>\n

Then it hit me. The fear of success. Why did I succeed and now that I did, am I teaching something wrong. Because believe me, there were hundreds of people who tried to put me down.<\/p>\n

I received emails, tweets from grumpy developers someone thought I launched the course they eventually wanted to launch, someone said “it’s all available for free”, and one person actually reached out to tell me how I’m the worst person on this planet.<\/p>\n

I dealt with all of this in my way. I gave away thousands of free subscriptions and to date over USD 100,000 worth of course materials to people who need it. Donated to the Laptops for Developers<\/a> initiative in Nigeria.<\/p>\n

And some times, I felt so down, I just tweeted about it<\/a> and the Dev community came to rescue. It’s all kinds of weird. Creating products, putting yourself out there.<\/p>\n

Fear of Pre-launch & Pre-Order<\/h3>\n

Now that I am creating a new course on helping developers automate their repetitive grunt work with Node.js, I thought instead of waiting for the course to be complete, I should get out of my comfort zone and announce it right away.<\/p>\n

But wait. This time it’s different. Yes, I have done this before but I never really asked for developers to bet on my work in advance. That’s a different animal. So, instead of announcing the course, I started testing it again and again.<\/p>\n

Fear’s Side-effect: Over-Engineering<\/h4>\n

Yes, I found a couple of things that should have been fixed but hey it just delayed everything. I thought, not everyone would want to buy the course that’s still being recorded. So, I built a way to help people subscribe for free.<\/p>\n

That was actually a good idea, now that there are around 678 people subscribed to the list, I know for a fact that people want to learn how to build CLIs.<\/p>\n

Fear’s Side-effect: Launching Free Stuff<\/h4>\n

Now that the NodeCLI<\/a> site was ready. Instead of announcing it, I thought maybe I should build a couple more CLIs first. You know to show everyone that I know what it takes.<\/p>\n

I have literally built hundreds of automation projects<\/a>, most of them are open source. But have I really build a good CLI? I should build something super fancy right. How about graphs in the command line? And table layout with all the statistics of #COVID19 coronavirus disease.<\/p>\n

\u2026and that’s exactly what I did. I went ahead, built, and released corona-cli<\/a>. So, far I have spent several hundred hours improving (read as perfecting<\/em>) the CLI.<\/p>\n

Well, yes it has worked wonders. It ranked #2 most trending JavaScript project for about a week. I was listed as the #1 Top JavaScript Developer<\/a> on GitHub trending and lived to tweet about it<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

corona-cli<\/a><\/h4>\n

Free and open-source:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • \ud83d\ude80 Get worldwide Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) reporting<\/li>\n
  • \ud83e\udd2f Active daily reporting of your country’s COVID-19 statistics<\/li>\n
  • \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8 Get US States data for Coronavirus disease reports across the US<\/li>\n
  • \ud83d\uddc3\ufe0f Data: Country, Cases, Deaths, Recovered, Active, Per Million<\/li>\n
  • \ud83d\udcc8 Charts: Plot statistics inline charts both regular & logarithmic<\/li>\n
  • \ud83d\udcdf Sort: cases<\/code>, cases-today<\/code>, deaths<\/code>, deaths-today<\/code>, recovered<\/code>, active<\/code>, critical<\/code>, per-million<\/code><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    In hindsight:<\/p>\n

      \n
    • \ud83e\udd2f Over 200 hours of development time<\/li>\n
    • \ud83e\uddd0 50 versions released – changelog<\/a><\/li>\n
    • \ud83d\ude32 1 Billion+ API requests, over a million visitors, hundreds of forks<\/li>\n
    • \ud83e\udd29 14 contributors, 40 closed issues, 25 accepted PRs, 12 open PRs, 20 open issues,<\/li>\n
    • \ud83d\ude48 ONE<\/strong> single human developer, an indie maker managing all of this<\/li>\n
    • \ud83d\udcb8 Made exactly ZERO x Hundred Thousand Dollars<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

      \u2026let me sum that up for if you missed the point here.<\/p>\n

      In an effort of releasing a pre-order \/ pre-launch stage course where developers could buy the course at 60% off and save a bunch of time automating grunt work, learning Node.js \u2014 I felt guilty and thought I must prove my worth. That led to the side-effects of over-engineering and launching stuff for free \u2014 that’s all super helpful to the community, sadly doesn’t help pay the bills.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      Quiet Announcement<\/h3>\n

      What an oxymoron? That’s seriously what I did. I announced my course super quietly there on Twitter in the form of a tweet<\/a>.<\/p>\n

      \n

      \ud83d\udd25 Announcing https:\/\/t.co\/WRl9fD7nAJ<\/a> Automation course. Pre-order now at 60% off. 1000s of devs use my CLI DevTools. <\/p>\n

      \ud83e\udd16 Learn to build CLIs
      \u26a1 Min-effort automation
      \ud83e\udd2f 10+ Hands-on       @NodeCLI<\/a> Projects
      \ud83c\udfa9       #CodeNewbie<\/a> Friendly #OpenSource<\/a> <\/p>\n

      Support an indie-maker during #COVID19<\/a><\/p>\n

      — Ahmad Awais (@MrAhmadAwais) April 8, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n