Indie hacking is a Cult. I was a member for two years.
My journey to $3,000 MRR, a mountain of debt, and the truth about the algorithm.
Imagine your Twitter feed only showed lottery winners.
Every day, you see people posting screenshots of their jackpot. “I’m profitable!” “Just quit my job!” “Hit $10k MRR!”
Within weeks, you’d start to think winning is normal. You’d start to believe you’re just one ticket away.
This was my reality for two years.
It started with a spark. Three months before I was laid off, I was already building a complex B2B SaaS for restaurant chains. I couldn’t stop myself. I coded at night, after my day job. It was my secret project, my escape plan.
Then the layoff call came. And standing at that crossroads, with a head full of success stories from Y Combinator and YouTube, I made the call. I wasn’t going back to a job. I was going all-in.
About a month later, I got my first taste. A payment for a hundred bucks or so. It was the first money I’d ever earned from code I’d written myself. That small win felt like a jackpot. It was the algorithm whispering in my ear: «See? It’s working. You just need to learn how to play better.»
So I played harder.
I joined the community of full-time lottery players. Every small win was amplified. “You’re on the right path, bro! Keep going!”
What they didn’t see was the reality behind the curtain. This wasn’t a simple app. It was a mission-critical system for restaurant chains. If my code failed, real businesses lost thousands of dollars in real orders, right now. The pressure was crushing.
My life became a frantic cycle: sell a feature to a client, then lock myself in a room and code frantically to build what I just promised. Each new sale wasn’t a win; it was just another layer on a teetering tower of obligations.
I pushed the MRR to $3,000. On Twitter, that number made me a winner. In reality, I was spending $5,000 a month to keep the machine running. I was in a cult, and the price of membership was my health, my sanity, and a growing mountain of debt.
The years went by. I still saw the daily stream of winners on my feed. But I was still losing. And I started wondering.
Why am I not winning? Is there something wrong with me? Am I stupid?
There was nothing wrong with me. I just made the mistake of believing the algorithm. I woke up to the fact that “indie hacking” isn’t a career path. It’s a casino disguised as a movement.
And in that moment, I felt liberated.
What if the goal isn’t to become the next levels.io? What if the real prize isn’t the MRR, but the skills you build along the way?
What if you, a developer, build a small project not to get rich, but to become a killer salesperson? What if you use it as a testing ground to land a Product Manager role? The project’s “failure” to hit $10k MRR would still be a massive personal success.
This is the game I’m playing now. This is Prometheus Protocols.
This is not another newsletter selling lottery tickets. This is my public log of building a new system. A system where the goal isn’t the jackpot, but building antifragile skills and small, resilient assets.
We will not go all-in. We will make small, smart bets. We will use leverage, like AI, to build in 4 hours what used to take 40. We will design projects that make us win, even if they never make a dollar.
If you’re tired of playing a rigged game, then welcome. You’re not a loser who gave up. You’re one of the few who woke up.
Let’s build our own game.