Hakan Deryal

2 years of hell, countless lessons learned. But not giving up. Coming back stronger, wiser, with the right team this time.

New chapter begins! 🚀

First up: Building what I started with - an app for event organizers. Full circle moment.

Focusing on Turkish market with 3 products total.

Previous projects shelved until financially stable.

But finally turned corner!

Partnered with my best closer friend - he gets 30% of my company, I get 14% of his agency. Angel investor took 10%.

Perfect combo: I build, they sell. Back to where I'm good at, building.

My autistic brain is both gift and curse. Great at focusing, thinking, building. Terrible at finishing and shipping my own products.

10 years trying to put a buy button on internet, 2 years failing publicly.

The plan was perfect: build the product while doing the work manually, pay off debt, have ready customers with a proven product at the end.

Single point of failure: getting paid by the client.

And yeah, they delayed, and eventually cancelled.

Everything came crashing down.

April '24: Finally recovered. Found amazing idea & opportunity in AI marketing. Duct taped a demo together, validated with 30+ companies, 9 ready to buy when it's ready.

But needed funds to build.

Made risky all-or-nothing bet on a $35k deal with one of them that would've solved everything.

Got beta customers, things looked promising. But I was running on fumes. Years of failures finally caught up - crashed hard.

Spent 4 months in depression, couldn't even open my IDE without physical pain.

Mid-2023: AI boom hits. Tried raising $50k with innovative revenue-share model. Got good feedback but couldn't close enough investors. Managed to get a loan instead (turned out to be a bad idea).

Dove into building an AI website builder.

Team disbanded, I was left holding the bag. Tried launching solo but burned out.

Back to freelancing, but the builder's itch wouldn't go away.

And fell into the classic trap: trying to both freelance and build products without much runway, failing at both.

Dec '22: Wrapped up freelancing to dive into indie journey, started build digital events platform with 3 friends.

Market was hot, customers lined up. I went all-in, built 3 products in 2 months.

But others weren't committed - red flag I ignored. With a great cost...

Quick intro: I'm a solo dev/designer/builder who's been freelancing for 20+ years, built 40+ products end-to-end for clients.

Leaving freelancing behind and earning a living from the products I've built is a lifelong dream of mine.

Now here's where the recent chapter begins:

Hey #buildinpublic of Bluesky!

Thought it's time to properly share my indie story here also. Two years of building, failing, learning, and finally beginning turning things around.

Here's the full saga:

1/10

So happy to finally see this. Best of luck!

I was afraid of that, kind of. Half the people I follow are still here, half of them are back at X.

Not sure what to make of it.

Today is the first day back at home office... and I really missed this.

Last I worked from home was ~4 years ago, around the time our baby was born.

I've been bouncing around since then. Shared workspace, coffee shops, outside, you name it.

Having a permanent workspace is a blessing.

I've a background process in my brain that is always working while I'm coding, thinking about how can I improve how I'm doing things, how to organize the code better, what abstractions can I introduce/remove to makes things easier etc.

Yes it has a cost attached to it but I'm happy with it.

Hollywood should bring back "Person of Interest" with a new story arc. It's the perfect time, it has the perfect setting to explore the current unknowns.

Having a holiday at the same time every year has always fascinated me. In my part of the world religious holidays move due to being aligned with moon calendar. Both provides different benefits.

Bluesky discovery feed engine is the slowest learning one I've ever seen.

AI industry has 3 research areas right now

- Find more nails
- Transmute everything to nails
- Transmute hammer to anything (AGI)

It’s fun to watch 😀

After dealing with constant shitstorms of my own making for years, working without anxiety is a welcome change.

Even adults are having problems with that instant gratification offered my digital universes.

Kids have no chance against it.

All those moving things, colors, sounds, fun with little to no effort…

Next step on digging myself out of the hole. Got myself a nice, relaxed home office setup.

Nope, subzero temperatures for the last few weeks.

Ankara, Turkiye.

That sucks. Another option is to incorporate abroad, use it for subscriptions, then send monthly/yearly invoice from the corp in Germany to the abroad one.

Overkill at the beginning but I’ve heard a lot of people do this in Türkiye.

Yeah I've heard similar troubles about Germany also. I'm from Turkiye and it's similar BS in here too, plus no Stripe so I had to incorporate abroad.

You can also think about incorporating abroad. It can be done with US/Singapore/UK remotely and many do it that way.

Never happened to me, but then I only use the chat/apply/composer feature at most a few times in a day. File a bug report maybe?

Those people are assuming we'll have AGI. AGI will change everything, not just software dev.

That's why I'm not afraid or even anxious about AI.

The advancements so far only augmented my ability to build & earn more.

Need some of this over here. It's foggy everyday but no snow in sight.