Adam earned his first internet money by solving a real problem

Meet Adam Bárta.

Adam is a 22 year old student living in the Czech Republic, studying, and working as a front-end developer.

He likes to push himself to try new things. From being a video game journalist for a while - filming and writing videos. To trying out teaching at his old high school (which was less fun than he expected), and now indie hacking.

Speaking of indie hacking … Adam’s focus is currently on Dev Blocks.

The story told by Adam Bárta

My indie hacking journey

Most of people think you need to go viral or have some insane idea to make money on the internet. I did too. But over time I learned that it's quite the opposite.

I just started building stuff and posting about it on X. The general advice I found was to stay consistent and keep trying.

And so I did. The first two of my projects (Korektorr and Blog boost) didn't gain any traction at all. Mostly because I focused on coding instead of validating my product first and marketing it after.

And so I built stuff that nobody wanted. Just like most of us developers do when starting out 🙂

What is Dev Blocks?

For my third project, I decided to build something dead simple but validate it with potential users first and focus on marketing more.

I made a few posts on Reddit to get feedback:

• Feedback wanted: Template for new founders to simplify product launches

• I'm building a template for indie hackers to simplify product launches

• Most developers forget about this when launching

This resulted in about 100 users fo rmy waitlist. Only then I actually started building it and gave it a name - Dev Blocks.

The funny part is that it really is my simplest project yet. Just a Notion template that helps developers like me to launch their projects.

But the thing is it solves a real problem. A problem I had too and wanted to build a solution around.

Below a few screenshots from the template.

My first internet money

After the launch on September 19th 2024, I started to focus on marketing. I knew Reddit might bring me some customers so I shared my project there;

I made a template to help indie devs launch their products

And bam! Just like that I got my first customers.

I also shared the launch on X

After that I shared my story about getting the first internet money. That got me even more customers and it snowballed from there.

In about 2 weeks my product gained 34 paid customers and went from $0 to more than $700 in revenue! With another 140 users claiming my free preview.

Below is the analytics from devblocks.app. I saw some pretty nice spikes when promoting on Reddit, but lately I focsed more on converting X users and updating the website - so views have declined.

Growing with the X community

Getting the ball rolling also boosted my growth on X. Sharing my journey with everyone in the community has been awesome and I have gotten so much great advice.

I honestly could not do it without the support from the X community.

To any indie hacker starting out I recommend to get out there and connect with like-minded people.

You will learn so much and make some great friends.

You can reach out to Adam here:

• X

• Reddit