Welcome to Design People! We celebrate design people all around the world and share their inspiration, everyday essentials, and important lessons. After reading this, I hope you can learn something or at least smile đ.
Meet Daniela
đŠ Twitter
6 years ago, Daniela left her job in the recruitment industry and has been her own boss since then. Sheâs a designer, self-taught developer, and indie hacker.
âI love making things and I always have. As a kid, I built a lot of legos, Meccano cars, and little robots. So my overarching goal is to be able to work on what I want, when I want, without thinking about money, and to help people at scale in the process đ.â
But first, new to the term indie hacker? Hereâs how Daniela explains it:
âAn indie hacker is someone who has the freedom to work on whatever they want, by bootstrapping their projects.â
Danielaâs Journey to Today
As Daniela writes in her blog, how2human, Daniela has always preferred math, physics, chemistry, or any other ânerdy science.â She also loved to draw and be able to bring things from her brain into the real world.
âMy interest in design started when I was a kid. I loved to draw. So because in school, I was obsessed with mathematics, physics, and all sorts of sciences, I ended up doing architecture for my degree. When I moved into the tech world, I used all that knowledge and experience and translated it into digital design.â
Although she loved her university experience, after she finished her bachelorâs, she decided she didnât like the idea of working for someone for a very long time.
She ended up taking the first job she could, which was commission-only door-to-door sales. After that, she held a couple more jobs in sales and recruitment. And she hated it. But then one day, her life changed.
âSo with no way out, one day, I just fucking left the job. No real plan. No Savings. Nothing besides some ideas. I will never forget that day. It felt like a weight that sat on my brain, for a long time, was liftedâŠI was once again free.â
- Daniela, How2Human âHow I got to this point in timeâ
She then started building and taking the problems she experienced in the recruitment industry into her own hands. She started tinkering with the idea of making a platform where people would be algorithmically matched with available and fit jobs. She started learning how to code (while working part-time jobs) and even pitched it to investors. In the end, she ended up pulling the plug and going back to the drawing board.
âI had a million other ideas, stuff that was actually exciting and that I could make myself, without needing anyoneâs permission!â
- Daniela, How2Human âHow I got to this point in timeâ
As you can see, the VC route wasnât for Daniela. Enter indie hacking. She decided to bootstrap her own projects, giving her to freedom to make whatever she wants and test it quickly.
Daniela on Indie Hacking
Today, Daniela runs a productized design service called Odsgns and builds a product called CtrlAlt.CC.
About CtrlAltCC
Easily find find cool tools that sometimes fly under the radar but will make your life easier đ§ââïž
âI started CtrlAltCC at the beginning of 2021. My goal for CtrlAltCC is to become the spot where makers constantly find users for their products. This way, makers can focus on building the best products instead of having to worry so much about traditional marketing.
CtrlAltCC had a slow start, but people who knew about it loved it from the beginning. This made me keep working on it. This year is when things started to fall into place. My next tangible goal for CtrlAltCC is to stabilize the number of average daily unique visitors to a minimum of 100/day.â
âïž Q&A
Whatâs the happiest part of being an indie hacker?
For me the happiest part is making something that existed just in my head, into reality and then seeing people use it đ. It's like magic! Last week, for example, I made this little project with AI and I had so much fun with it. I documented my whole process on Twitter.
Whatâs the scariest part of being an indie hacker?
The scariest part for me would have to be not being able to do it anymore for any number of reasons.
Though I'd like to think that I've made the situation so that, as long as we have internet, I'll be fine hacking away at my projects. Even if the landscape or my conditions change, I could pivot from one space to another.
What advice do you have for someone who also dreams of being their own boss?
Just do the thing. Whatever you dream of doing (as long as it doesn't hurt anybody..) just go and do it. There will never be a right time, enough money in the bank, enough knowledge, etc.
There will always be a million reasons not to do something. But, they all mostly boil down to being fearful of failing in one way or another. Don't be afraid of failing. It's all part of the process.
With everybody looking like an expert nowadays, it might be easy to feel inadequate. But if you listen to all the BS " guru advice" out there, you'll end up doing nothing as in, in one way or another, all this âadviceâ is contradictory because there is no one way of doing things.
Go, try, fail, and find your own way đ
Thanks for reading this edition of Design People! If you liked what you read, please consider sharing it with a friend đ. If you know someone youâd like to see featured next, please let me know!
- Allison