In this episode I talk to Cavi, a 27-year-old developer who recently left a failed VC-backed startup after four intense years. Now Cavi is trying his hand at indie hacking but also feels like it’s “soulless.”
Transcript
This transcript is AI-generated
Introduction and Background
Andrew: Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Unblocking Podcast. Today I’ve got Cavi. Can you just tell me a little bit about where you’re at, what your story is, and what you’re feeling blocked on?
Cavi: Yeah, for sure. I’m 27. When I got out of college four or five years ago, I instantly joined a group of friends from university. For the last four years, I’ve been really in hustle mode. It was VC backed—we raised money in the States even though we’re mostly based in Portugal. It was a seriously intense experience. I felt like I invested a lot of my being into it and put a lot of things on the side from my personal life. For the last four years that was essentially my main drive.
The project failed and I left around January this year. In March, the business was closed. One or two years into the project, I thought “okay, this is being really intense. I want to see it through, but at the same time, by the end of this project, I really want to take some time off to think a bit more and stay with myself.”
Right now I’m experiencing that period. I put some money on the side. I’m running my own projects online, doing a lot of tweeting, meeting a lot of people, and trying to find out who I am outside of career, projects, and ambitions.
The Problem: Struggling with Purpose and Direction
Cavi: What I feel stuck on is that my relationship with work is a bit weird. I feel very blessed with some of the people around me who have a really interesting work-life balance. They were able to align the work they have with deeper meaning, and I would love to achieve that, but I’m not entirely sure how or what experiments to make to bring me closer to that.
I got pulled into the indie hacking ecosystem on Twitter because the premise is really interesting and enticing, but at the same time I feel like it’s soulless.
The Loneliness of Indie Hacking
Andrew: It’s like indie hacking reminds me of something even worse than just living alone in the suburbs with your family, because at least you have your family, right? It’s like, if you think the nuclear family is a bad idea, imagine thinking that indie hacking could possibly be a good idea. Rather than having your own family in the suburbs, what if you went out to the suburbs, bought a very large house, and just lived there alone with nobody for the rest of your life? That’s how these people want you to run your career. It’s completely inhumane.
Cavi: How about the indie hacking sphere? Is your argument only that you shouldn’t do it alone?
Andrew: You need a team who aligns with you and pulls the best out of you. A career is a community. A career is a network. A career is like a group of people who go through life together. If you try to do all that stuff alone, you’re first of all going to feel alone, and you’re going to have all the problems of being alone—you’re not good at everything, you have weaknesses, you have bad days, you get depressed. There are a million reasons why being alone is impossible for us. We’re incredibly social animals.
There are a couple really weird people who can work completely alone, but autodidacts are about 1% or less of the population. A lot of people think “if I was really serious about educating myself, I would just be studying in my free time,” but that’s just not how people learn. It’s like wanting to be a solo parent because somebody convinced you of the indie parenting lifestyle.
Cavi: That was perfect because I came to the same realization one or two months in. After spending four years with a very driven team surrounded by intelligent people who pulled the best out of me, I realized I work way better as a team.
But my second realization was that I tried to pull my real-life friends into starting something online, and that wasn’t a good mix. We weren’t invested in the project to the same degree, and our work methodologies didn’t really click on the builder level.
Understanding What Career Really Means
Andrew: Are you pretty confident that you want to be entrepreneurial in the first place?
Cavi: That’s a great question. I love the problem-solving aspect and the freedom to pursue my own curiosity, which entrepreneurship offers. The amount of intensity, stress, and business decisions that come with it sometimes brings me anxiety that I’m not sure matches my persona. But I definitely would like to experiment more with it, especially being on a more decision-maker level.
Andrew: My opinion is that careers are about selling things to society generally. What do we mean by society? It’s typically not our friends, because we tend not to want to sell stuff to our friends. You want to be able to gift things to your friends. You want to do your career and business with society at large.
It’s about your relationship with society and what you want to do with it. Specifically, it’s the parts of society who want to pay for the things you can give them—the people who can pay. It’s about selling things to those people. That’s not just entrepreneurship, that’s career.
If you’re a software engineer, you’ve decided to sell knowledge work and engineering to businesses who can use that engineering to make money. They give you leverage—you don’t need to sell, talk to people, make friends, farm, or bring things to market. All you do is sit and think about coding problems. If you want to sell software, maybe you want to be an entrepreneur. If you want to sell engineering, you want to be an engineer.
The Money Question vs. Building Cool Stuff
Cavi: It doesn’t feel like a chore. I don’t really care about the selling aspect to be honest. I want to build cool stuff. I feel like a lot of my realization is about building cool stuff that people extract value from. If I can sell it and improve my own life, that would be great, but I’m pretty sure in a hypothetical world where everyone has basic income, I would still be doing my projects. When I was a child, I learned to code precisely to build my own stuff and had tons of fun with it.
Andrew: So for you it’s about wanting to be building stuff all the time. Do you know what is cool? Do you have lots of ideas of what is cool?
Cavi: Software to me is like a means to an end. I code because it’s the closest thing I have to a superpower, but it’s the end result that really entices and empowers me.
To me, what’s cool is what captivates my curiosity and always relates to issues I find relevant in my own life. To be honest, I haven’t found anything revolutionary. I’ve been working on projects that solve viable problems I think should be solved, but I’m not incredibly passionate about the process of building them. They don’t shake my world.
Current Projects and the Search for Passion
Cavi: The latest project I’m working on is an automation tool for finding a house in the Netherlands—very specific because I used to live there and the process is very tiresome. Before that, I built a random activity generator for when I was bored at home.
These are small projects that I found interesting enough to sink my teeth into, but they weren’t “wow, this is it” moments. I really envy how passionate some people are about their projects. When I talk to them, they feel so motivated and driven, and I feel like I haven’t found that yet.
Financial Reality and Timeline
Andrew: How much runway do you have? Do you have any financial scarcity right now?
Cavi: Until the end of the year, I’m not financially scarce. I could keep the experiment going for a while, but it would drain my finances to a point where I’m not entirely comfortable. The agreement I made with myself is to take this year. If I don’t have any financial upsides or confidence in my ability to make money without a job, I’ll probably get a job beginning next year.
Finding a job in the beginning of the year felt like “no, I really want to do my own thing.” Right now I’m switching to thinking that finding a job might not be as bad, even if it’s corporate. But I would be really fulfilled if I could somehow align my own objectives with the job, and that seems like a really hard task.
Andrew: Do you think getting a job would be hard? Do you not have the right background or degrees?
Cavi: No, getting a job shouldn’t be too hard. I have interesting enough experience and I know my stuff, especially about software. But in my last company, the only motivation over four years was “I really want to build a startup that grows hugely and I want to have money and be able to say that I did something as ambitious and big as this.” I feel like that’s kind of a superficial thing to live by.
I would love something where the problem is big enough that I really want this problem to be solved for the sake of the problem itself—something that fascinates me and draws me to overcome it.
Reframing Success and Money
Andrew: I agree that if you’re working on a sports gambling startup, it would be superficial to just want to make money and succeed. But most startups are solving real problems. The idea that you want to make money by solving any real problem that lots of people face—you’re allowed to use the money itself as the signal of value. You don’t need to invent your own concept of value to trust that you’re providing value. You can just use the money.
You should add more checks to that because you can make money off externalities, by polluting the commons, or by rent seeking. But I want to be the voice that says it’s okay to just want to get rich, because getting rich means you are adding value. That perspective is fine to hold. It’s not evil and it’s not going to hurt you.
I personally am drawn to work that I think is unique—that no one else would stumble across or do. But you add a lot of restrictions to your career that way.
The Path Forward: Deep Introspection
Andrew: The right questions to journal about and talk to people about are: Why did the startup fail? Why aren’t I making money right now? Why am I building something and not selling it? Don’t beat yourself up with these questions—use them as tools to actually get answers until you get to the real answer.
There is some reason that you’re failing at business, and it’s probably a good reason. Once you stumble on the reason, you’ll think “that makes so much sense, it explains everything.” Then you can choose: you can keep failing at business if you want because that’s a good reason, or now that you know the reason, you can decide to satisfy that some other way so you can add more traditionally successful business stuff into your process.
You have five or ten hours of unpacking your relationship with business, work, and money—not because you’re traumatized, but because you don’t have complete clarity on why you do what you do right now. If you did, all of a sudden you’d be able to pivot.
It feels like you’re trying to navigate your career using very blunt changes and blunt instruments. But actually, since you are your career, you can take a scalpel to it and know exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing, why your days go the way they go, why your team dynamics are the way they are, why your leadership style is the way it is.
All these things can be known with precision and clarity until they fully click and you think “I know exactly who I am. I know exactly who I am as a leader, as an engineer. I know what my desires are.” Having faith that you can get to that within ten hours of serious introspective work, and prioritizing that—realizing it’s more important to know what’s going on than to ship the next feature this week. You need to debug this system before you continue building for the next eight months.
Cavi: Thank you so much. That was really helpful. I’ll do exactly that.
Andrew: No problem at all. Bye, dude.
