Programmer's Time is Limited: Learning to Make Code Work for You is the Greatest Investment

During the busiest times at Baidu, I often found myself working day and night, ensuring major events and fixing critical online issues.

I remember waking up from a dream one night, sitting on the bed, and suddenly a question popped into my mind: "When will this endless busyness end? Does it even have meaning?"

I wrote a lot of code, but I never actually used the corresponding products, or only used them for testing and validation. Some products were quickly abandoned after launch, too many to count on both hands, so the code I wrote felt worthless.

This question haunted me for a long time, until I finally figured it out recently.

Become an indie hacker, write code to solve real needs in life, rather than experimenting for the company.

This sentence is simple, but how do you actually do it?

If there's no positive feedback, it's hard to persist. Or if there's no income, it's hard to continue.

Now this problem has been solved.

The business model is simple: Google AdSense and user subscription model.

The rest is just implementation.

The meaning of the above image is very clear and concise: commercialization is the foundation, without commercialization, nothing can be sustained.

Demand mining and operational growth are the key points.

1) Demand Mining

You can mine through Google's new keywords, or through your own and your surroundings' needs. If you can combine the two, that's perfect - this way you don't have to worry about traffic, and you can retain users.

2) Operational Growth

• SEO for websites and web pages: This is a big subject that requires dedicated topics to explore.
• Social media traffic: High-weight websites include Reddit, Twitter, ProductHunt, IndieHacker, Zhihu, CSDN, etc.

3) R&D Implementation

N/A. For people with R&D backgrounds, and in the AI era, there are basically no problems, so N/A is sufficient.

From this, we can basically identify that the focus for indie hackers is mainly on demand mining and operational growth. So invest the most precious resource that people have: time and energy in this, and then achieve the goal mentioned in the title: write code for yourself, with positive feedback.