From Product Manager to Indie Dev: My Six-Month Reality Check

Six months ago, with the help of AI, I wrote my first line of code – not just a simple "Hello World," but a full-stack, AI-powered application with a front-end and back-end. I even tried to monetize it. Registered a company, integrated Stripe, and dove into social media marketing across various platforms, all in the hopes of earning a little side income, something beyond my regular paycheck.

Over 200 days, 722 code commits, and three major architectural rewrites later… I went from zero coding experience to picking up a handful of front-end and back-end frameworks, and even being able to write basic code tutorials. I gained over 300 users and even received some scattered "friendly support" income – think digital tips. So, back to that question: if I could talk to myself six months ago… I'd say:

It's been pretty awesome, even if I haven’t made a dime. At least I’ve been busy!

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Passion vs. Practicality: The Tax Season Reality

Once the Chinese New Year celebrations faded, tax season rolled around for businesses. Wrestling with tax forms became an unexpected review of my half-year indie dev journey. Crunching the numbers was quick and painless – let’s be honest, there weren't many transactions to count. Submitting the documents to my accountant, though, left me with a bit of a void. A fleeting thought hit me: Was this half-year of hustle even worth it? Am I really on the right path?

The lack of commercial success stung, and I knew why. I hadn't pushed myself outside my comfort zone to learn new skills, to reshape my old thinking. I was stuck in the mindset of "build it and they will come." The truth is, even if "customer-first development" – getting customers before building – is the ideal, even with a finished product, I needed to actively promote and get the word out, not just quietly announce "I'm done!" and expect magic. It’s the same logic as social media traffic: the wider the top of the funnel, the more you'll filter out at the bottom.

I'm not trying to sugarcoat my shortcomings here. I’ve been around the block in corporate settings, navigated internal review boards – I could easily spin this into some "path dependency" jargon, blaming my B2B background where customer acquisition usually happens before product design. But the truth is, putting this "knowing" into "doing" has been a real struggle:

On one hand, marketing and outreach are notoriously slow feedback loops, unlike coding. Code either works or it throws errors – fix the bug, and it will run. But with marketing, I haven't even begun to crack the code (pun intended). I can't find a formula that works for my product. Sometimes a casual rant about Cursor (a coding tool) gets tons of likes, while carefully crafted, insightful posts barely break double-digit views. This constant frustration breeds a real aversion to marketing. I don’t want to do it, but know I have to, which leads to pain, then poor results, and just deepens the negative cycle.

On the other hand – and maybe more importantly – my product might just lack Product-Market Fit (PMF). Even the best chef can't cook without ingredients. And this is something I hesitated about when choosing the “Human Resources + AI + To C” direction six months ago. Deep down, I knew it wasn't a killer idea. Low usage frequency, low willingness to pay, low price point, difficulty in demonstrating tangible value… plus, the underlying large language models are evolving so rapidly, they’ll likely eat up this niche application space soon anyway. Low barrier to entry all around.

For this project (mycareerhelp.ai), if I frame it as purely for the joy of coding or a trial run in the world of indie development, it's perfectly fine. That’s how I initially mentally justified it. But as my investment grew, and the joy started to show diminishing returns, it’s time to look at this project, and even my whole indie dev pivot, with a more rational lens. Where am I ultimately trying to go? And what am I willing to spend to get there?

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Rediscovering My Why: Back to the Roots

Coding has always been this idealized lifestyle in my mind. It's hard to pinpoint exactly when or why this seed was planted, this fascination with creation, with watching characters dance on a glowing screen, writing the rules of the world.

My earliest memory of computers was in fifth grade, after moving from inland to Shenzhen. That’s when I had my first computer class. It was all DOS systems back then. I still remember the cd .. command, and how to print graphics in the command line. (Wait, does that even count as zero-code experience?) Later in high school, when we had class presentations, I was the only one using Excel macros and PowerPoint’s interactive features. But I majored in International Economics and Trade in college, and my first job was overseas sales. Code seemed a million miles away.

It wasn’t until I transitioned to product management that code crept back in. Initially, without dev resources, I cobbled together the company's campus recruitment website using WordPress. Unsurprisingly, it was met with a chorus of complaints. But that naturally led to securing development resources, and I slowly moved into building recruitment management systems, and then down the enterprise digital transformation rabbit hole.

Maybe it’s the influence of all those movies and TV shows, but deep down, I always thought coding was just… "cool." As a PM, designing solutions to user pain points was satisfying, but I also crave that god-like control in the world of zeros and ones.

So, in that sense, it’s not just the act of "writing code" that I love. It's the ability it represents: to create a little world, and dictate its rules. (A really twisted example would be like USS Callister, the Black Mirror episode. If you’ve seen it, you kinda get what I mean, even though it’s a messed up story!)

That's why when I realized last year that AI was dramatically lowering the barrier to entry for this skill, I jumped in almost without hesitation. I had a clear path and expectations: first get my foot in the door, then nurture interest into ability, and finally, consider monetizing that ability or a product built with it.

On paper, that plan looked decent. But six months later, evaluating it now, I'd say step one was flawless, step two is tricky but doable, and step three… that's where the biggest problems lie.

There are tons of online tutorials and discussions about how newbies can code with AI. I'm even organizing my own learning notes from these past six months, including a complete code-level breakdown of my first project, which I’ll share later. Getting started isn't hard at all. If you’re willing to learn, know how to ask questions, you can get results in less than a week, maybe even just a few days. AI’s biggest value in learning to code is letting truly interested people quickly enter a positive feedback loop.

Of course, if you want to go further and truly develop ability from interest, you still can't skip the traditional learning curve: build a solid foundation, then engage in intense, repetitive training. There are no shortcuts to real skill. It’s not like The Matrix where you just upload a skill card and suddenly you’re doing wire-fu. Real-world skills require hard work and accumulation.

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Lesson Learned: Monetization is a Skill in Itself

Up to this point, things were still relatively smooth. Even with only six months of dev experience, I could deliver a few reasonably mature products and projects. Maybe it was the early, easy wins, or maybe it was seeing fellow indie devs around me starting to achieve commercial success, but I started getting itchy to move into stage three: monetization.

And that’s when I hit a wall.

In my previous thinking, "monetizing skills" meant selling my time – either taking a corporate job or doing freelance gigs. “Monetizing a product,” on the other hand, felt more like traditional retail: product hits the market, users subscribe or buy, revenue comes in. My initial plan treated monetization as a natural next step, a foregone conclusion. I assumed with "skills" or "product," making money was just a matter of time, and directly proportional to those skills or products.

Reality flipped that script. The logic of the commercial world is demand-first: identify a need, then fulfill it with "skills" or "products," balancing supply and demand through pricing.

In other words: Indie development as a hobby? Peaceful and fulfilling. But indie development for profit, no matter how small? That's a completely different game, requiring a completely different skillset.

Writing good code, creating beautiful designs, crafting great user experiences - these are all skills on the same plane, just in different directions. But monetization ability is on a completely different axis, perpendicular to that plane. And just like any other skill, developing monetization ability requires "building a foundation and then intense, repetitive, targeted training."

PMF research, technical writing, conversion attribution, understanding trends and viral content marketing… these are all components of monetization skills. But before pivoting to indie dev, I'd barely even considered them, let alone studied or practiced them. So, it’s no surprise how utterly defeated I felt when I eagerly and confidently stepped into the third stage of monetization and crashed headfirst into reality.

That's when you have to tell yourself: Nobody's watching your life that closely. Just dust yourself off, learn the lessons, and try again.

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Moving Forward: What's Next?

Back to the initial questions: Where am I ultimately trying to go? And what am I willing to spend to get there?

If indie development is just a hobby, I’d give myself a solid 70 out of 100. I’m confident I can now build from scratch any product feature or solution I designed as a product manager. I can even integrate AI into business scenarios. I finally have the "qualifications" to actually chime in during technical design review meetings!

But if the goal is to take it further, to build a profitable indie dev business, to achieve commercial success… honestly, I'm starting to feel a bit daunted. I just want to "peacefully code," live a life of quiet contentment in my own little digital world. Or, as a blogger I follow, "@在悉尼和稀泥" mentioned, and I paraphrase: if you're a regular person wanting to make money, why choose coding as the longest path? There are literally a thousand quicker ways to make a buck – why insist on product development as the only route to riches?

Every so often in the online "Build in Public" communities, someone throws out questions like: "If you were offered $10,000 right now to shut down your side project, would you take it?" Or another variation: "If you knew your current side project/product would never make any money, would you still keep working on it?"

Ten grand isn't quite enough. Add a zero, maybe we can talk.

Just kidding… mostly. But seriously, looking at it today, the key is to differentiate between passion and profit. Making money from passion is great, but it's not something that just happens to ordinary folks.

"Indie development," if you're just talking about the hobby, is just building products, writing code. But once you tie it to entrepreneurship and making money, the more accurate term becomes "sole proprietorship," or "freelancer," or "business owner." Because then the core focus isn't "indie" or "development," but what you can deliver to meet market demand. Code and products are just one form of delivery, no different in essence from selling pancakes and spicy soup on the street. To make money in business, you build what the market needs, not just what you are interested in. If you can combine both? That's hitting the jackpot, a rare stroke of luck.

So, I’ve decided to let passion be passion, and profit be profit. I’m not chasing monetization through indie development as the primary goal, and I won't fall into the trap of "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Writing code and building products freely is the lifestyle I aspire to; happiness is priceless.

But a business that doesn't make money is unsustainable. I still need more income to support my passions. So, I still need to learn how to monetize. This project didn't find PMF? Okay, onto the next. This marketing is weak? Time to study how others do it. Conversion rate is too low? Let's research how to boost it. Even if 100 projects fail to monetize, I can always pivot to being a "startup failure" blogger in the content creation space, selling training courses!

Monetization is a skill that needs to be learned. No shortcuts. Only consistent learning and intense, targeted practice will get you there.

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Final Thoughts

In these past six months, I’ve ridden two major emotional rollercoasters. The first was after four weeks of marketing after the initial launch, and it didn’t make a ripple. I was utterly disheartened, felt like a complete failure. The second was around New Year’s, seeing other indie dev “大佬s” (big shots) hitting MRR exceeding $10K (USD!) or selling out training courses, while my project was still flatlining. My mind was blown, and I spiraled into endless self-doubt.

These emotional swings are nothing like work-related stress. This is intensely personal. It's like someone's brutally showing you a giant screen flashing "YOU ARE A FAILURE," right in your face, like a Sophon beam hitting your retina, nowhere to hide. When you’re co-founding a startup, you can at least vent to your partners. But going solo? You just have to throw on a jacket, head downstairs at 2 AM, take a few drags of a cigarette under the streetlights, and then try a different approach the next day, searching for that elusive formula.

The road less traveled is indeed tough. You rarely have the time or headspace to stop to smell the roses along the way. But don't forget why you chose this path in the first place. If you could go back to the beginning, would you make the same choice again?

I think I would.