Latest / The Indie Hacker Podcast with Fexingo: Solo Developers, SaaS Side Projects, and Independent Tech / When Your Side Project Passes Your Salary
Transcript
- Lucas: So you build a little tool on nights and weekends. It starts making a few hundred bucks a month. Nice, right? But then it hits a thousand. Then five. Then suddenly it's pulling in more than your day-job salary. What do you do? Luna: That's the dream, right? But also terrifying. Because the day job is the safety net. Lucas: Exactly. And our guest today, Sarah Chen, lived that exact moment. She's a solo developer who built a SaaS tool called InvoiceFlow — it handles invoicing for freelancers. By month eighteen, it was making eighty thousand dollars a month. And she was still working full-time as a backend engineer at a mid-sized logistics company. Luna: Eighty thousand a month? That's not a side project anymore. That's a real business. Lucas: Right. So the obvious question is — when did she know it was time to quit? And the answer is more nuanced than you'd think. She didn't quit the day the side project passed her salary. She waited eight more months. Luna: Eight months? That's discipline. Or fear. Maybe both. Lucas: A bit of both. She told me the first month InvoiceFlow made more than her salary — about twelve thousand dollars — she thought it was a fluke. Second month, same. Third month, slightly higher. It wasn't until month six of sustained outperformance that she started really considering the leap. Luna: So she used a rule of thumb: wait until your side project revenue exceeds your salary for six consecutive months. That's actually smart. Smooths out the variance. Lucas: Exactly. And she had the data to back it up. She showed me her spreadsheet. Month over month for eighteen months. There was a dip in month eleven — dropped to nine thousand. But by month twelve it was back to fourteen. So she had enough history to know the trend was real. Luna: I think a lot of people would have quit at month three. Or they'd have quit the day it passed their salary. But Sarah waited. What changed in month eighteen? Lucas: Her employer found out. Not in a dramatic way. A coworker noticed she was logging off early a lot, asked around, put two and two together. Her manager called her in for a chat. Not hostile — actually curious. They asked if she wanted to go part-time or consult. But Sarah realized that once the cat was out of the bag, staying felt awkward. She gave two weeks' notice the next day. Luna: So the employer finding out was the catalyst. But she was already financially ready. That's the key — she had the runway. Lucas: She had six months of personal expenses saved up separately, plus the business was generating cash. She told me the psychological shift happened earlier though. Around month fourteen, she started treating InvoiceFlow like her real job and the day job like the side gig. She'd do her best engineering work in the morning, then coast through meetings in the afternoon. Luna: That's honest. I think a lot of people do that but won't admit it. So what's the actual number? What did she need to feel safe? Lucas: She had a specific threshold: the side project needed to cover all her living expenses plus taxes plus a buffer. For her, that was fifteen thousand a month. At the time she quit, InvoiceFlow was doing twenty-three thousand. So she had room. Luna: That's a concrete number. I like that. Most people say 'enough' but don't define what enough is. She defined it. Lucas: Right. And the interesting thing is, after she quit, growth accelerated. In the first three months full-time, revenue jumped from twenty-three thousand to thirty-eight thousand. She attributes that to focus — she was shipping features every two weeks instead of every six. Luna: So the leap paid off. But it's a case study in preparation. She didn't just jump. She waited for the data to confirm. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the takeaway for anyone in a similar spot. Don't quit when your side project has one good month. Quit when you have enough history to believe the trend is real, and you've defined your personal 'enough' number. Luna: We don't run ads — that's a deliberate choice. If you want to support that, buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo is the place. Lucas: Yeah, it's a small gesture that makes a big difference for us. Keeps the conversations like this one free and accessible. Luna: Alright, back to Sarah's story. She also told me about the day she told her parents she quit. They were worried, obviously. But she showed them the revenue numbers. That helped. Lucas: I bet. Parents want stability. But she had the numbers to back it up. That's the power of having a real business, not just a hobby. Luna: One thing I found interesting — she didn't take any outside funding. No angel investors, no venture capital. She bootstrapped the whole thing. And she's now at a hundred and twenty thousand a month, two years in. Lucas: Fully bootstrapped. That's rare at that scale. She told me she turned down a fifty-thousand-dollar investment offer early on because she didn't want the pressure. She wanted to keep the side project fun. And that mindset — protecting the fun — might be why she stuck with it long enough to succeed. Luna: That's a great point. A lot of indie hackers talk about 'keeping the side project a side project' for as long as possible to avoid burnout. Sarah lived that. Lucas: Yeah. And now she's building a team. She hired her first contractor at month twenty — a part-time customer support person. But she's still the only developer. She likes it that way. Luna: So the question for listeners is: what's your number? What would 'enough' look like for you? And do you have the data to know when you've reached it? Lucas: That's the homework. Sarah's story shows it's possible. But it takes patience, discipline, and a spreadsheet. Luna: A spreadsheet and the willingness to wait. That's the hidden ingredient. Lucas: Exactly. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with another indie hacker story.