Start Indie Development as a Side Gig, Not a Leap of Faith
The post turns indie development from a romantic all-or-nothing bet into a staged entry plan, so developers can test products and earn side income without giving up a paycheck. It also normalizes failure as part of the process, which lowers the psychological barrier to starting.
Independent development splits into four modes: amateur (job plus spare-time building), part-time (no job, but too few hours), full-time (no job, ample time), and mixed (job plus a squeezed side gig). After years on this path, the author argues the full-time leap is the wrong move for most people. The one exception: a concrete idea, the motivation, savings to cover the risk, and time to burn.
Product choice is not the bottleneck. The familiar trio of to-do, accounting, and navigation apps still , and so do plugins, browser extensions, mini-programs, and desktop tools. The advice for picking something that pays: copy what's already working for others, or start with what interests you and collect experience until you hit. Even a company like Wumakeji produced only three remembered products over ten years, and it buried more failures than successes along the way.
The four-mode classification treats independence as a risk-management decision, not a philosophical identity, offering a more practical frame than most online advice.
The advice to copy others' profitable products ('drink some soup if you can't eat meat') implies that execution and marketing outweigh originality in small software.
The author locates the biggest obstacle not in lack of ideas but in an overcritical, distrustful mindset, pointing to psychological barriers rather than technical ones.