José León is a Spanish software developer with more than ten years of experience building websites. He quit his job in 2019 to try to bootstrap a company. A year later, he reported that he had lost money on his projects.
He started posting more about entrepreneurship and is currently building a career as a writer.
Becoming A Writer
Mid November, 2020, José wrote a post on Indie Hacker titled After losing $38676+ as an Indie Hacker. I can’t do it anymore. I quit. The post went viral in the community and he got a lot of feedback. Within 24 hours, he had 90 new Twitter followers, 453 visits to Nomadmail and 77 comments on the post.
He wrote about the viral response at I wrote an article that changed my life… and paid my rent!
He decided to leverage that traction for two writing projects.
Balance
Balance is a newsletter for Indie Hackers and Bootstrapped Founders who want to design their life. He created the sign-up list after his Indie Hackers post went viral.
By the time he sent out his first letter, he had 108 subscribers and his first sponsor.
You can check it out at Substack.
Ebook
José is currently working on an ebook titled How I Failed At Everything I Tried: Lessons From a Failure Entrepreneur of Things That You Don’t Have To Do.
He got 6 preorders within 2 days.
He currently has is available for pre-order on Gumroad.
Projects
José is working on a number of side projects. He has discussed some of them in his posts:
Nomadmail
José started working on Nomadmail in December, 2019. He spent 6 months working full time on the project be
He wrote more about the process at Why I Quit and Why You Should Quit Too
He had planned to stop the project after getting no sign ups. He changed his mind after receiving feedback from the community.
CoffeeList
CoffeeList took a week to build. José created a landing page and added one feature: to create a profile and be part of a community in Slack.
You can check it out at CoffeeList.
nomadnest
José wrote about creating Nomad Nest at How I launched a side-project in one weekend.
Check it out at nomadnest.