🚅 Next Stop, Yaak
📣 I’m excited to announce my return to indie development to pursue Yaak!
I thought I’d take some time to expound on this decision because there are several reasons it could be a terrible idea:
- 👶🏼 Our first child was born 5 months ago
- 🚅 I still enjoyed my job at Railway
- 🌙 I swore I’d never build another “REST Client”
- 📈 Yaak is only at ~200 daily active users
So let’s start with the big.. uh.. small (?) one first. We had a baby 5 months ago!
👶🏼 Having a baby
Why quit a good, well-paying job when I have a new family to support?! This was the primary thought in my head when deciding to leave Railway.
Something huge changed in my thinking, however, after watching our newborn grow: the passage of time was now acutely obvious. Before the baby, it was easy to put things off; Dog walks, road trips, and woodworking projects would all still be there. But, as they say “they grow up so fast.” Her life was already flying by and I was missing it.
So I decided to take the leap and start investing in a life with more space for family, adventure, and projects.
It was time to quit.
🚅 Leaving a stable job
As someone familiar with self-employment, I know about the Income/Time Lever. If you can beat the odds and earn enough to cover required expenses, the lever appears. Depending on which way you tilt it, you can either:
- Work for more money
- Work for more time
Controlling of this time/money balance is the single biggest benefit to self-employment. A 9-5 will always be a 9-5, but working for yourself can look however you want. In my case, I plan work for time and have the life I want, also known as A Lifestyle Business.
Sure, there’s a high chance of failure, but the risk is worth it to me. Plus, I can always Cmd+z back to full-time (or even part-time) employment.
🌙 Building another REST client
I already wrote about why I’m building Yaak but all you need to know is that I built a very similar tool to Yaak in the past, called Insomnia.
Insomnia ended up being acquired (amazing at the time) but it’s now drifted in a direction that I no longer agree with—to put it lightly.
Once Insomnia no longer fit my needs, I needed new tool. So, I started working on Yaak as a side-project. Like the early days of Insomnia, people are resonating with it and it’s been growing in small bursts since releasing it 5 months ago.
📈 Betting on Yaak’s growth
Yaak is still very early with around 200 daily active users. However, the reception so far has been tremendous. People are actively sharing on social media, sharing feedback, and submitting lots of ideas to the Roadmap.
Strong user evangelism is something I witnessed while working on both Insomnia and Railway and the word-of-mouth flywheel it enables is huge. This, combined with the fact that I’ve done it before, is why I’m confident in this venture even at such an early stage.
So that’s the story about how starting a family drastically shifted my priorities and pushed me to go back to indie development!
The clock is ticking and I’m definitely scared, but I’m also excited at the opportunity to achieve the life I want.
As usual, I’ll be sharing as much of my journey as possible so follow @GregorySchier or subscribe to my newsletter below, for longer-form updates.