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How I Went From a Freelance Developer to a Product Founder, My 10 Year Journey

by Igor BokyJuly 21st, 2023

Too Long; Didn't Read

The best product ideas could be born at the centre of your expertise, that's how it happened for me.

featured image - How I Went From a Freelance Developer to a Product Founder, My 10 Year Journey

How it all started many years ago

I was a happy student when I started to develop for money. It was a lot of fun, and it was super interesting: a lot of new technologies and a lot of challenges. I had no family at that time (too early), and I had all the time to develop things. I was kind of a geek, and I was always super strict with myself on deliverability.

The company I was working for was small and full of entrepreneurship, or better to say, startups, which was awesome. Otherwise, I would leave it earlier.

But even though it was a lot of fun, I decided to go further into the world of freelance. I was aiming to become an owner and boss to myself.

Owning the life being a freelancer

There were always a lot of "benefits" to being a freelancer; ones could imagine a person sitting on a beach of an island drinking a mango smoothie and working on a project... This is a nice picture to imagine, but for most freelancers, it's not like this at all.

It was a long standup for me. It was necessary to produce good reviews and build a few products for free.

But later, I managed to find one customer and then another.

Then accidentally, I was working with ten different customers at the same time: you know that, handling support vs active development.

Did I become super-independent?

No, not really. Instead of one boss at my previous job, I got ten.

Yes, I have increased my expertise quite a lot because I have joined more than 30 different projects in different niches, especially in e-commerce, travel-related, and fin-tech. But I didn’t get any way to become happier in that setup. It didn't work for me. So I had to quit and find a better focus for me. It was not something I would like to do forever. I didn't want to come to work at the office as well. So it was the moment when I had to switch to the product.

How do you get to product ideas?

I believe that the best product ideas could be born at the center of your expertise.

While working on different client projects, I always repeat the same routine again and again. Their routing is the thing that every developer does every day.

Every developer reinvents the wheel every day to build the bicycle.

Example: How much time it's necessary to spend to build a simple ToDo list with backend and frontend, DB, Email notifications, and such? Well, it could be various, but it will take at least one day if you are familiar with the deployment, you have good knowledge and high expertise on many aspects like

Hosting
DNS
Frontend Frameworks, HTML + CSS + JS
Backend Frameworks
Email Providers,
Email templates

Etc.

How much time do you need to spend to get such expertise and deliver faster enough?

Remember, we are talking about a ToDo list, the simplest app we can imagine.

These days I met John, who is started his work on Mars. It was a nice match; he got into the same set of questions but went a step further - he started to deliver a product that could solve this.

Let's build a ToDo List as quickly as possible.

Let's talk about the ToDo list again. One day I asked myself what could be the easiest option to develop a ToDo list app. For me, the answer is: don't develop it -> Reuse something that is already developed/tested/production ready.

The question is how?

From top to bottom in terms of the amount of knowledge required

You could find a few ready-to-go npm or *any-ecosystem* packages to get it faster
You could build something with AI - just ask to build UI and API and then improve.
You could find a GitHub seed project
You can use a low-code solution
You can use a no-code solution

So which option to pick depends on many factors like

Ability to customize
Amount of efforts
Running costs (cost of hosting and maintaining )
Long-term support and improvements

Let's focus on Customisability VS Speed of development

I have tried to compare options and made this simple chart

From my experience, the more you want the solution to be different from others - the more time you need to spend.

I have tried many no-code platforms, and they gave me good speed in the beginning, but I always had a lack of customization and simplicity of updating as soon as the project grew. At the same time, the fully custom solution I have developed for my clients is something I'm not able to support as well because the amount of custom functionality the product eventually introduce is huge, you need a team to manage this, which is ok, but it creates bigger running costs.

Then I took a look at low-code platforms; it was a bit "unclear" thing for me. In simple words, it's a kind of platform where you can code, but at the same time, you can use a no-code approach. It seems like a perfect combination for me, and that is where Mars is sitting.

How it works there

Everything on Mars is a micro-app. You can combine them, fork, reconfigure, etc. You can do a lot of changes without coding, and you can write a thing from scratch if it's necessary.

This is how I came to the product idea.

Mars seemed like an awesome platform for me, but it's just a tool, the same as many others. If I want to build a ToDo list on Mars, I need somebody to develop such a micro-app for me. Then I made a simple approximation on bigger products: an e-commerce store like Amazon, service marketplaces like Booksy, or Renting platform like Airbnb.

And I got this:

Many people develop similar big and complex apps today. And all of them repeat the logic. Every founder pays for this.

So, to make such founders' and developers' lives better, I could provide them with ready-to-go reusable micro apps built by niche experts.

Being a developer myself and having quite a huge experience in many niches after ten years of product development for clients, I was in the right shape to take it off.

That is how Fleexy has been founded. Or flew up!

The Team, or Crew

Teams build things together, and Crews starts the spaceships.

From the products I have worked with, I remember a few very talented guys. Perfect tech experience, passion for creating things, open-minded and honest vision of things.

Together with Alexey and Andrey, we founded Fleexy. We aim to build the biggest foundation of micro-apps for Your Future Product.

It was a nice moment. It was always so inspiring to build a new thing. You start light, you have no dependencies, and you feel like you can fly. So we did.

But we are a self-bootstrapped company. We have no investors, which means we don't have a lot of money to burn.

That means that we have to find a customer sooner than later.

Building a product is a lot of fun.

We started with an obvious thing: testing different niches where we could be helpful. That is how we get into 2 of them.

By doing these demos, we also created a solid number of micro apps we can use now for our next project/product. We were happy to share that with the world.

So we built a website and described what we are and why.

And guess what?

We got 0 visitors.

How Coders Switch to Marketing

That's where we are now. We are in marketing mode. We do posts; we do tweets; we literally spend days writing blog posts (and we still do), we do keyword analyses, and we do back-link building to get higher domain authority.

That already gave us some leads!

This helped us to get our first customers and even released one of them, The Daba. It has been built on top of the Services-Marketplace solution we have. It has a lot of customizations, especially in terms of UI, and it looks and works awesome.

The AI Era is here; why can’t we add it to the solution we have?

This pivot happened just a few weeks ago. We were sitting on our weekly call with guys and thinking aloud about the lead we had and the things we built. We were looking for a product we can easily sell which gives instant value to the customer, something that:

could be super useful for customers from the first step
will be based on micro-apps we have
mind-blowing to have a marketing effect

That’s how we come to Marketsy.

Marketsy.ai and the Future

We just released an AI marketplace builder. It’s something we actually super proud of already. We got people to build almost 500 stores on the platform just two weeks after the start.

That’s what we are focused on, 200% right now. We believe there is a lot of interesting impact we can generate on the industry of marketplaces/e-commerce this way. So we will do that until we know more. We will continue on this path.

And as for me

By checking out past years, I can confirm: It was a lot of pressure, and it still is. I lost a bigger part of the income I had, I had to learn new things for me, I had to adapt a lot, and now I have much more: