This journey actually did not start 1.5 months ago.

Early last year I realized that if I wanted any of my projects to see any success, I could not let my engineer brain be in control and keep building in a vacuum.

So now I had to start sharing things online and building an online presence. Like the tech person that I am, for me this meant X / Twitter. So that’s where I started.

My timeline was so polluted with political stuff that I had to go through a very thorough cleansing. I audited everyone that I followed, and I refused to engage with posts that were not the kind of posts I wanted to see. After a few weeks this started producing effects!

In March I started posting every day. I’d force myself to post stuff. Anything really. As long as I was posting. Then I would spend hours looking for things that I actually cared to reply to and start engaging with people. It was around this time that I got X premium, mainly because of the metrics. You can only improve what you can measure! And so I started measuring.

It was very exciting for almost 2 months and then I ran out of gas. Personal & work life caught up and even though I was starting to experiment with post scheduling tools as well, my whole workflow was still kind of random and aimless. Soon after I released (now deceased) BringOps it all went back to zero. Like I wrote in that post, I made the common mistake of building in my bubble and by the time it got released, it was doomed to fail and I had no energy to help it succeed. It just seemed an impossible task.

Come December I find myself with a renewed energy after my daughter was born in September and we finally get better with our sleep routine. So I start posting again. But this time I know it will have to be different. This time I focus on one thing only: long-term consistency.

It doesn’t matter how slow things move, so long as I keep showing up, there will be progress.

First problem: what am I building? I’m out of “original” ideas. So I look in my gazillion notes I’ve been piling up over the years

I’ve had so many ideas over the years that just stayed in the drawer until they didn’t make sense anymore. I always thought that they were not original enough, and so the effort to build them would just not be worth it. Besides, I would probably not be passionate enough about them to commit to that effort long term. So I always dismissed them.

But this time LLMs are a thing, and by December, models are incredibly good. And trust me, I was a skeptic. So now I really have something on my side: I don’t need to be passionate about the tool. It’s faster to build. So I will just pick something simple to start with and focus on the real learnings: everything other than building it.

So I started Gofwd.to (I pronounce it go-forward-to). The very first version was just a QR code generator. I then pivoted to URL shortening and even learned that there are already new and exciting companies in this space. Past me would then just stop everything because “it already exists so what’s the point”. And this has been another of my aha moments as of late: it doesn’t matter.

Being on X posting every day in the indiehacking space means realizing every other person is building a product launch website or a social media scheduler. And so many of them are selling and making money. I finally learned that the global market is huge, people have preferences, and it’s just easier to build for a validated market.

So without the pressure of having to spend way too much time building, for now I just build what I find useful for myself and think will be useful to others. By posting about it I’m now venturing into uncharted waters for me: marketing, SEO, personal brand, impressions, engagement, clicks, funnels, channels, affiliates, etc etc

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve heard about all of these in the past and I know in theory how they work. But being an engineer I never actually had to be the one putting in this kind of work. It’s all new to me. It’s overwhelming. In programming, if you want to learn “how to do X with Y” you go to the language or library documentation and it’s all there. Or Stack Overflow. Or LLM. With marketing, I keep finding just courses to buy. And if there is stuff out there for free, it’s often hard to translate it to what you need. It’s just a different field altogether.

But, like with everything, it’s probably a muscle you can train and with enough reps you can do it just fine. So I started posting. Every new update on my online presence I started sharing. Not only the features but also what went wrong, what turned out to be complicated.

So far the progress with the app updates:

• 17 updates in public -> here the last one
• screen share video since update 2
• screen share with my face since update 12
• talking on camera on last update
• experimented with multiple tools: Cleanshot X, screenstudio, screencharm, OBS, Da Vinci Resolve

Other milestones for me:

• expanded posting to LinkedIn, Threads and now YouTube
• posted every day on X since 9th December with planned scheduling
  • I have at all times over a week of planned posts so unexpected events won’t kill the consistency
• released a chrome extension
• released a macOS app
• wrote first product article (actually need to double down on this)
• created product page on a directory and have a pipeline of directories to submit to
• killed BringOps
• met some cool people

Mandatory screenshots with numbers:

Gofwd:

X:

Blog:

I’m genuinely excited about this journey and where it will lead. I’m already having ideas for other projects and I’m feeling more and more like I’m building the right workflows that eventually will bring success to a tool I build. Even if that is not GoFwd.

This one was a bit long, but I felt we needed to establish some context. Next one will be shorter and more to the point. Let me know what you liked about this one and what you would like seeing in future editions on any of the social platforms or in the comments below.

See you in the next one.