What's up everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founder's profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they get to where they are today? How did they make decisions, both of their companies and in their personal lives, and what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet businesses. If you are enjoying the show, take a minute to leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts.

In today's episode, I sat down with Daniel Vassallo.

Daniel was working a dream job as a software engineer at Amazon.

His salary had ballooned to over $500,000 a year when he made the unthinkable decision to quit and become an indie hacker.

I think it's pretty

easy to imagine that the story ends poorly, and Daniel himself was very worried that it might end that

way. But it turns out that he's done a stellar job. He's made hundreds of thousands of dollars

and less than a year and a half since quitting. And this is his story.

You know, when I think about you, I think what's particularly cool is that you are into

lifestyle design. You've really thought about how doing what you do as an indie hacker can

give you a better life. It doesn't seem like you're just in it for the money. In fact,

I mean, we'll get into this, but you obviously left a very high paying job to do what you do. In doing some research for this episode, I found your indie hackers account, and I went back to like the earliest comment that you've ever made, which was on February 27th of 2019. So this is like right after you left your job at Amazon. And I posted something asking everybody, you know, what their top reasons were for becoming

indie hackers.

Why were they indie hackers?

And you had the number one comment.

I don't know if you remember this, but you got like 18 upboats.

And you said, I want to work on my own terms, doing the things that intrinsically motivate

me.

Yeah, I don't remember that, but it sounds like something I would have said

back then. Yeah, I think at one point I realized that I had been at Amazon, I think. So in

total, I've spent eight years at Amazon, but I think about five years in. At one point, I looked

around me and I sort of realized that no matter how much

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