184 - Dominik Sobe

Dominik Sobe is an indie hacker and the founder of HelpKit. HelpKit turns your Notion docs into a hosted self-service Knowledge Base for your customers – no code required.

Follow him on Twitter, where he openly shares his journey as an entrepreneur building SaaS products.

Items:

• Macbook Pro
• Nextstand K2
• Magic Keyboard
  
• Magic Mouse
• Airpods Pro
• Secrid Slimwallet
• Samson Q2U Microphone
• MOFT Z Sit-Stand Desk
• Bose QuietComfort 35
• Olympus MJU II
  
• Fuji Superia 200 Film
• Ikea POÄNG Chair
• Generic LED Ring Light
• Generic iPhone Stand

Books:

• Traction (Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares)
• The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman)
  
• Hooked (Nir Eyal)
• Tales of an American Summer (Ben Bernschneider)

Software:

• VS Code
• Notion
• Figma
• Alfred
• Fig
• Spark
• Slack
• Texts
• iA Writer
• Xcode
• Tuple
• Spline
• Sip

How do you keep the work-life balance?‍

I personally don't really believe in work-life balance. There's this quote by Alain de Botton: "There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life." As a solo founder, currently running multiple projects in parallel working on my computer definitely takes up a large portion of my time. That said, I truly love what I do and therefore don't see it as typical work in the traditional sense. Besides, I am trying to work out at least three times a week. Working out in the gym helps me not just stay physically fit but also mentally. It has such a huge impact on my mental wellbeing. My biggest hobby is surfing which also helps balance my exposure to those bits and bytes.  

How do you overcome loneliness as an indie hacker?‍

Loneliness does play a role in being an Indie Hacker. We are typically all by ourselves trying to build cool and profitable businesses while juggling development, design, marketing all at the same time. Like other freelance jobs, this can lead to feelings of isolation. What helped me personally the most is our own little group of close friends that also happen to be Indie Hackers. We try to do monthly gatherings to help ourselves out and keep us accountable. Especially in the beginning you will probably not know many other Indiehackers personally. Luckily more and more communities are popping up trying to solve exactly this issue. The best example is Indiehackers.com itself. There are Telegram groups such as "Isolated Founders", communities such as Makerlog or even weekly remote-coworking gatherings such as Weekendclub that all try to connect Indiehackers. If you are an Indiehacker and feel lonely right now, reach out to me and I'll try my best to help you :)