It all started in 2015. I had ambitions, like I always have, large ones, optimistic ones. One of those was speaking at conferences: the idea of flying around the world, the flight and hotel being arranged, and meeting fellow engineers from all over the world was simply a dream. However, my proposals were almost never accepted so the dream remained a dream.
In 2015, I was working at a local digital agency. I was happy at my job, did amazing national-large scale app projects, but I never had any international reach. I did not have a following on social media and the agency did not have a recognizable name. Let me be clear: conferences reject talk proposals all the time and this is completely normal, but I truly believed I would make my dream come true by stepping up.
March 2017 I decided to join WeTransfer, a known name in the international industry. I also decided to start my Swift blog and called it SwiftLee: a combination of my last name and the coding language I write about. The goal was to create a personal brand, combined with the known name WeTransfer to fulfill my dream of speaking at conferences.
May 2017 I started publishing an article every week, every Tuesday. Something I’m still doing today, quite the streak! What happened is pretty wild: developers created an expectation of a new article arriving every week, resulting in rapid growth over the years to now 140K unique visitors every month. Altogether, I was able to make my dream come true and I’ve now presented in countries like Argentina, Singapore, and many European countries.
August 2019, a friend of mine asked me: why don’t you monetize your blog? I was not close to the 140K visitors I have today, but I already gained quite some momentum. After contacting a few potential sponsors, I managed to get my first sponsor to pay €750 for three months. While the absolute number is small compared to what sponsorships cost today, it was an import milestone: I realized I could turn my personal brand into a business.
I did not dare to dream about going indie, but I did start to fully focus on growing my brand. I added a newsletter that growed to 20K subscribers today and I launched a Mac app called RocketSim targeting the same audience. That last point is crucial: being able to target the same audience with all the initiatives I was working on was a major win-win.
I was still working full-time at WeTransfer, so making the most out of my time was an important focus. Having multiple apps for different audiences means doing marketing, promotion, etc. multiple times. I could now research knowledge for a new RocketSim feature, write about it on SwiftLee, and promote it in my newsletter. Let alone all the promotion I did on my social media accounts that supported the personal brand SwiftLee.
January 2023 I decided to transition to a 4-day work week. The growth for SwiftLee, SwiftLee Weekly, and RocketSim created more potential and made it promising to go Indie someday. I needed to validate this potential and decided to increase the time spent on these projects. Up until this moment, I did everything on the side: during evenings, weekends, public holidays. Small bits of time combined together make you reach larger milestones in the end.
I couldn’t forsee the impact of working one day a week full-focus on my products. RocketSim’s monthly recurring revenue growth statistics:
The impact of the 4-day work week became apparent and even more opportunities arrived. Altogether, it made me realize how much more growth I could make if I would go full-indie.
March 2024, I decided to go full indie. The income of SwiftLee & RocketSim combined were more than enough to pay the bills, not even considering the impact of the extra time I would invest in pushing for new growth.
I’ve had ideas I didn’t start building since I only had 1 day a week available. Focus is key for growth, I did not want to divide my focus over multiple large initiatives. Yet, I did know that I could start creating courses and promote them against the same audience: another win-win.