From Google Engineer to Indie Hacker: What I Learned in Year One

The Decision

After 3+ years building ad systems at Google at scale, I left to build things of my own. Not because Google wasn’t great — it was — but because I wanted to own the full stack of a product, from database schema to marketing copy.

Here’s what year one actually looked like.

What Google Taught Me That Still Pays Off

Design Docs Are Underrated

At Google, you wrote a design doc before touching code. In indie hacking, I still do this — even a one-pager forces you to confront assumptions before you’ve sunk 40 hours into the wrong abstraction.

Reliability Thinking

Building for scale at Google means asking “what happens when this fails?” I apply the same lens to my SaaS products. Idempotent webhooks, graceful degradation, retry logic — these aren’t premature optimizations, they’re table stakes.

The Code Review Habit

I have no team now, but I still review my own PRs the next morning with fresh eyes. Catching issues before they ship is a discipline, not a process.

What Didn’t Transfer

The Timeline

Google timelines are long by design. In SaaS, if you’re not shipping in weeks, you’re probably overthinking. I had to actively fight my impulse to “do it properly” when “done” would have been more valuable.

The Identity

Your title at Google carries weight. As an indie hacker, nobody cares. The only currency is: did you ship something useful? Did someone pay for it? That shift is humbling and clarifying.

The Real Metrics That Matter

Year One Outcome

I shipped two SaaS products, got my first paying customers, and learned more about product thinking in 12 months than in 3 years of enterprise engineering. The income isn’t Google-level yet. The satisfaction is.