Notebook is what I call this site because that's what it is — every product I've shipped, plus what I learned doing it. Honest income, honest mistakes. No course, no newsletter funnel.
Five products, three still running. I list them in MRR order because that's the metric that gets me out of bed.
An RSS-plus-keyword tool for engineers who want to track 40 niche feeds without skimming 800 posts a week. Started as a script for me, became a side project, then most of my income.
I bought too many games on sale. So I wrote a Steam watcher that emails me when a wishlisted title drops more than 25%. Apparently I'm not alone — 600+ people pay $3 a month for it.
Honest: the smallest one, just barely covering its Resend bill. I built it because I hated newsletters but kept signing up for them. Still in invite-only beta.
I shipped this for 14 months and never used it myself. Sunset note here; refunded every annual plan that hadn't expired. Lesson logged: build things you actually open.
The tool I write everything in. Folder-based, plaintext, no database. I sunsetted the hosted version because I didn't want to host other people's notes for $4/mo for the rest of my life.
Quarterly income reports, occasional essays, two talks I was nervous about. Twelve entries below — full archive on the writing page.
I quit my Series-B engineering job in 2022 to see if I could make a living building tiny SaaS products. I haven't replaced my salary yet but I'm getting closer every year, and I'd rather keep doing this than go back. I write about it openly because the indie hacker space lies a lot.
Before solo I spent six years as a backend engineer — Atrium, then Forecast, then a one-year detour at a fintech I will not name. I was good at it and increasingly bored. The boredom turned out to be a real signal, not a phase.
Most of my products start because I wanted them. The ones that didn't start that way (Halcyon, RIP) are the ones I sunset. I keep a written rule above my monitor: if I wouldn't pay for it myself, I cannot in good conscience sell it.
Working on a new product — Pebble Notes, a small notes app for people who type too fast for normal note-taking. Open beta in Q3 2026. Codex Tags and Pivot Alert are on autopilot; I touch them about 4 hours a week.
A paragraph is better than a meeting. I read every email; I reply to most within 3 days. I'm not available for contracting or consulting.