iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 28/01/2025

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

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 28/01/2025

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.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 28/01/2025

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.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 28/01/2025

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.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 28/01/2025

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.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 28/01/2025

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.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 28/01/2025

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.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 28/01/2025

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.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 28/01/2025

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.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 28/01/2025

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...

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 28/01/2025

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:

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 28/01/2025

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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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 24/01/2025

So happy to finally see this. Best of luck!

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 24/01/2025

I was afraid of that, kind of. Half the people I follow are still here, half of them are back at X. Not sure what to make of it.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 25/12/2024

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.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 25/12/2024

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.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 25/12/2024

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.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 25/12/2024

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.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 25/12/2024

Bluesky discovery feed engine is the slowest learning one I've ever seen.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 25/12/2024

AI industry has 3 research areas right now - Find more nails - Transmute everything to nails - Transmute hammer to anything (AGI) It’s fun to watch 😀

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 24/12/2024

After dealing with constant shitstorms of my own making for years, working without anxiety is a welcome change.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 24/12/2024

Even adults are having problems with that instant gratification offered my digital universes. Kids have no chance against it. All those moving things, colors, sounds, fun with little to no effort…

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 24/12/2024

Next step on digging myself out of the hole. Got myself a nice, relaxed home office setup.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 21/12/2024

Nope, subzero temperatures for the last few weeks.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 21/12/2024

That sucks. Another option is to incorporate abroad, use it for subscriptions, then send monthly/yearly invoice from the corp in Germany to the abroad one. Overkill at the beginning but I’ve heard a lot of people do this in Türkiye.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 21/12/2024

Yeah I've heard similar troubles about Germany also. I'm from Turkiye and it's similar BS in here too, plus no Stripe so I had to incorporate abroad. You can also think about incorporating abroad. It can be done with US/Singapore/UK remotely and many do it that way.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 21/12/2024

Never happened to me, but then I only use the chat/apply/composer feature at most a few times in a day. File a bug report maybe?

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 21/12/2024

Those people are assuming we'll have AGI. AGI will change everything, not just software dev. That's why I'm not afraid or even anxious about AI. The advancements so far only augmented my ability to build & earn more.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 21/12/2024

Need some of this over here. It's foggy everyday but no snow in sight.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 21/12/2024

Marketplace like MoR platforms like Gumroad makes sense to me, but for subscription SaaS it just feels wrong. You are doing everything yourself but the official seller is the MoR platform. That's weird.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 21/12/2024

That depends on where you are incorporated. If you pay per invoice yeah that would be more costly. I've incorporated in UK where this is a non issue and reporting is done yearly & accountant requires just an excel sheet.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 21/12/2024

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.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 21/12/2024

Automate 4, ignore 3 until you reach a meaningful income that pays for the accountant (always pay the taxes where you are incorporated)

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 19/12/2024

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.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 19/12/2024

Thanks Patrice. It has been hell of a month.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 19/12/2024

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.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 07/12/2024

There was an issue called staingate where the coating on the screen came off due to manufacturing error and Apple ran a screen replacement program, where they replace the entire screen for free. They refused it on mine because by screen had a dent just like that. 🤬

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 01/12/2024

Hey @marclou.bsky.social, I routinely asked by newbies to point them to a resource that teaches how to build SaaS products indie way, and CodeFast seems like a perfect fit. Can I get a timed access for free to evaluate it?

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 01/12/2024

Does anyone know an AI mail app that uses local LLMs? Maybe an Apple mail extension?

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 01/12/2024

I’ve tried to finish it 3 time now. Farthest I went is the end of last season, couldn’t find the energy to watch the last 2 episodes 😀

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 01/12/2024

CF is selling them at cost, all my domains are there for some time now. Using porkbun for .ai

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 01/12/2024

Starter packs was the latest iteration here. 😀

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 01/12/2024

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.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 01/12/2024

Growing pains. Probably similar to “Fail whale” period of Twitter.

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Hakan Deryal @crafted.works · 01/12/2024

It’s taking me a lot of time & energy now that I only do it twice per month max. This wasn’t that case when I was younger.

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