[00:00:00] Tim Condon: What is actually holding you back? Is it you're worried about not having money? Or is it worried about that you theoretically might lose money for a month?
[00:00:11] Antoine van der Lee: Welcome to the next episode of the Going in the podcast, the podcast that dives deep into the world of independent creators and developers. In this episode, I'm joined by Tim Condon, a key figure in the swift on the surfer world, and the creator of Broken Hands.
We discuss his journey to going indie, how we manage this time across projects like vapor, open source development, and running events like the Server Side Swift Conference. Tim also shares insights on hiring employees, building a sustainable business, and maintaining a healthy work life balance. Let's dive in.
Welcome, Tim. Thank
[00:00:48] Tim Condon: you very
[00:00:48] Antoine van der Lee: much. It's good to see you.
[00:00:49] Tim Condon: Nice to see you again.
[00:00:50] Antoine van der Lee: I feel like, um, we know each other very well, but you know, it's, there's like I run into you at every conference.
[00:00:57] Tim Condon: It is. We see each other in random cities in the world. It's quite a nice little, uh, yeah. Nice little environment.
[00:01:02] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah. That's the first, first cheat I wanna know, like, how do you manage to get at all those conferences?
[00:01:08] Tim Condon: Uh, persistence, persistence, uh, interesting things to talk about. Uh, yeah, just build it up. It's been, it's been, I've been talking at conferences since 2018, I think. Uhhuh and, yeah. Once you start getting in and people get to know you, then Yeah.
[00:01:25] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah.
[00:01:25] Tim Condon: Yeah. It's a lot easier to get talks in. Yeah. It, it's not the shorts. It's not the shorts. They're good branding. They're good branding. Right. Good branding. People recognize me for the shorts. Yeah. Uh, but no, I, hopefully it's the content.
[00:01:34] Antoine van der Lee: So there's now a new conference in Finland. Mm-hmm. It's like the north, the most northern.
Conference, I think is what you call it. Will
[00:01:42] Tim Condon: you
[00:01:43] Antoine van der Lee: still wear shorts
[00:01:44] Tim Condon: if you have to talk there? Most likely, yeah. I would do. I probably wouldn't show our shorts if we're skiing, but other than that, if we're inside, it's
[00:01:51] Antoine van der Lee: okay. Okay. So welcome, uh, to the, to the Going Indie podcast. Um, this is podcast where we inspire feature indies or those that already went indie.
Um, I know you very well, but my audience might not know you. So, who's Tim?
[00:02:05] Tim Condon: Tim? Uh, so Tim is, uh, a developer, uh, based in the UK in Manchester. Um, focused primarily on server-side swift and kind of pushing swift on the server as a, as a thing, uh, because it's still relatively niche. It's still quite new, um, but it has a lot of promise.
So that's basically Tim and I do that. I speak at conferences about server-side, swift and Swift. Uh, and you'll probably see me around somewhere wearing shorts in, in a city in the world somewhere. Yeah. And who, who was team before service? I Suite. So I've been around in the software industry for a long time now.
Going on 20 years, nearly 20 years nearly, right? Yeah. Right in software for nearly 20 years. Um, and I've done everything. I've been started all the way from like assembly level stuff to see, um, system development, backend and betterment development, mobile development, uh, frontend dev website stuff. So yeah, I've been around.
Um, it's been an interesting journey. And
[00:03:04] Antoine van der Lee: now, now you're stuck.
[00:03:05] Tim Condon: Now I've kind of found my little niche. Yeah. So I was, well, I did backend stuff for a while and then I went into mobile stuff and I was a mobile developer for a good few years. Uh, and I really liked Swift, the language, but I wasn't that interested in writing frontend apps on mobile apps.
And so when service I, swift presented itself as an opportunity, I thought, let's give it a go because it's, it marries up my two interests.
[00:03:29] Antoine van der Lee: Right, right. So is is it boiled down to, like, you don't really like being busy with ui? I just really wanna be in the backend.
[00:03:36] Tim Condon: It's more, it's the problems you solve in the backend tend to be a bit more interesting to me as it's like personally.
Um, and you have a bit more freedom in terms of what you can do. You are less constrained by the design guidelines and the, the limitations that you have. Um, so you can solve much more interesting problems, bigger scale problems, uh, dealing with, you know, hundreds of thousands of users, um, that kind of stuff.
So it is really like the scalability problems that Scalability problems, yeah. Integration problems. Um, yeah. How, how do you integrate stuff from say, 10, 20 different services and make it usable and quick and efficient?
[00:04:12] Antoine van der Lee: And how did you, how did you know, like Surfside Swift is, is the answer, right? Because it in a, in a way it's, I.
Interesting journey, right? Yeah. Like you mentioned so many things. You could also say you were kind of looking to find your, find yourself. Yep. Right? Like when did you know like, okay, this is where I want to seek
[00:04:31] Tim Condon: forward
[00:04:32] Antoine van der Lee: in,
[00:04:32] Tim Condon: like, this is where I wanna be. I mean, the real truth is, I, I didn't, I never have and I never probably will.
Um, I've fallen into every job I've ever had, mostly by accident. Um, and we're very lucky in tech in that, uh, things evolve quickly and things change. And change is part of tech. Mm-hmm. And it's very, it's very normal to change and adapt and go into different things and try out different areas and try new languages and try to, you know, backend, front end, that kind of stuff.
Yeah. And it's not too hard to switch. Um. So if you wanna make the switch, it's not, people don't look at you weird. They're like, yeah, go for it. Um, so in terms of service-side, swift, I was doing some backend stuff at the same time. I was doing mobile, I was writing at the time Object See, and Swift Kotlin and Java, uh, and Python and Ruby.
And I was like, this is, I'm getting kind of, this is too bad. She's too busy. Yeah. Um, and I really enjoyed Swift. I think it's got a lot of, a lot of promise. Um, it's definitely changed over the years, but it has a, it's got a really good kind of set of goals that really suited to the back end as well, especially.
So I thought I'd give it a go. Um, and I got involved when Vapor first kind of, uh, came on the scene quite early, so I think it Vapor was launched in February, 2016. I started contributing or kind of writing and playing about the stuff in that summer. Um, and then over the course of that year. I started writing tutorials and I wrote a big open source project that was kind of like a, one of the biggest open source projects for Vapor at the time.
Um, and was a good use case to showcase for how stuff works. And I just got more and more involved in the ecosystem. It was never a goal of mine at the time to work in it full time or do it as a job or do it professionally. Um mm-hmm. Uh, it just kind of fell that way. And yeah, as, as you'll probably find with most people going Indy, is that you start something on the side, you get really interested into it, and then it starts to take over more and more of your life.
And then if you're lucky, you can start to see income from that. Uh, so for me it was people asking for help, building stuff, like how do we do this thing in Vapor? Or how do I make this work in Vapor? Or Can you build me something? Or that kind of thing. Consultancy. Yeah, consultancy stuff. Um, and kind of little bits of contract work.
So I did a very similar thing to you. Um, I went part-time at the BBC when I was, I was used to work for the BBC, um, and I went part-time. I went down to four days a week. As a way of kinda trying out could I do this properly? Um, it was really good to have that flexibility and just kinda give it a go with very little risk.
Yeah. Yeah. 'cause if it went wrong, you just go back to full time. Right. It doesn't matter. Um, and so I tried that and that one day a week really allowed me to focus on building out the stuff I wanted to do and building the connections and kinda building a bit of a name for yourself. Um, and then eventually I was getting so busy I was like, right, let's give full time a go.
Yeah. Yeah. See, why not? Let's give it a go.
[00:07:30] Antoine van der Lee: So you were convinced enough, like based on that one day a week, I earn so much money,
[00:07:35] Tim Condon: it's enough to, I was having enough requests coming in that I could see that I would be able to do it full time. Um, and I had some savings. Um, I'd done a book, written a book which had some quite nice residual stuff and kind of passive income.
I. Book on Vapor. A book on Vapor. Yeah.
[00:07:52] Antoine van der Lee: And which year is this?
[00:07:53] Tim Condon: Uh, this would've been 2019, so
[00:07:56] Antoine van der Lee: we're like three years in After Vapor
[00:07:59] Tim Condon: was, yeah. Two or three years. Yeah. Um, so it was Vapor three at the time, back in 2019. Um, and yeah, I just thought, let's give it a go. I gave myself a year. Um, so see, see what I can do for a year if I can get to the point where I'm self sustainable in a year.
Um, I had enough savings and stuff to live on for a year. Um, and so I said, right, give it a year. I'm at a point now where I'm breaking even essentially. Mm-hmm. Then let's, let's go from there. And that was five years ago.
[00:08:29] Antoine van der Lee: And, and
[00:08:29] Tim Condon: how soon in the year did you know, like, okay, that, that
[00:08:33] Antoine van der Lee: year or the limit,
[00:08:34] Tim Condon: uh, is worth nothing?
I think it was about kind of, well, it's weird. So it's about six months in. Mm-hmm. Uh, and I had a couple of big projects that I had. Uh, one, I guess. So people are asking me for contract work or I, I pitched contract work to 'em and they selected it. So those kind of big projects really kind of solidified the idea that I could do this full time.
And then obviously Covid happened.
[00:08:55] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:08:56] Tim Condon: Uh, so this was like early 2020 when Covid happened, and, uh, it was a little bit, so this is like almost three courses the way through my year and then everything shut. Um, and when you are indie, that can be quite a bit of a scary time. Mm-hmm. Um, because your income just disappears.
[00:09:16] Antoine van der Lee: Well,
[00:09:16] Tim Condon: but I mean, COVID didn't mean there was no work
[00:09:19] Antoine van der Lee: anymore, right?
[00:09:19] Tim Condon: No, but, uh, it meant for me certainly doing all the kind of consultancy stuff is all the companies were like, right, we're not spending any money. So all the budgets just dried up.
[00:09:27] Antoine van der Lee: Right.
[00:09:28] Tim Condon: But within about a month or so. All the companies were like, oh, actually we need online presences.
We need online stores, we need stuff building. We need to, we're going all in on this remote work and, and tech stuff. Yeah. And then all of a sudden it was just like, ramped up massively. Uh, and then that, that was the kind of the point where I was like, okay, right. This is, this is where we were. And that's when I started to, to grow as a company.
And I had got my first employee in 2020, late 2020 I think. Um, and it's, it's grown from there.
[00:09:59] Antoine van der Lee: Many interesting points. Yeah. To, to the story. The first thing I realize, you're, to me, you are Mr. Vapor. Like, you're almost like Tim Vapor. Yeah. Which in a way is, you are
[00:10:09] Tim Condon: not the one that originally built Vapor.
No, I'm not. I, I, I'm not the one who originally created it. I'm not the only person who works in it. Um, I'm not the, certainly not the only person who contributes to it. Um, we have a great community, but yeah. I'm the person who's at all the conferences talking about it. Yeah. And probably has the biggest online presence about it.
[00:10:28] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah. I'm, I'm pretty sure that Vare is quite known to, due to all the work that you did in the Open. Mm-hmm. Well, you're definitely not the only one that built Vare, right? Like it's really good shout out, I think, to everybody contributing, uh, to the project. But then, so it's also interesting to me that Vapor was new, swift on the server was new, but back then we had no id, whether, whether it, whether it would be something that's going to be adopted, right?
Mm-hmm. Like we knew Swift quite well. We knew the language was evolving and there was serious contribution to it from Apple. So there was a future ahead. So in a way you could say like, yeah, probably Surfside Swift is going to be something, but to bat your indie journey on that, that's quite quite
[00:11:16] Tim Condon: a thing.
Yeah, it is. I mean, I think we are very lucky in tech in that, um, it's important to remember that in tech, even when times are quite bad, is that if we need to go and find work, certainly as you get, kinda get yourself relatively established as like senior and it's not that hard. So like the risk of of betting stuff on say, okay, I'm gonna go all in on server-side Swift, I know Swift Freight while I've got years of experience as a mobile developer, if it all goes wrong, I can go and find a mobile job.
Like the risk is relatively low. I know I'm not gonna be out to work for a year. I might be able to work for a month. Mm-hmm. So I need to account for that, but I'm probably not gonna be out of work for a year. So the risk of like doing it yourself is, is relatively low, I think, um, compared to, you know, the, the, the barriers for entry for tech are very low for building apps and stuff.
Like if you have a laptop, you, you're fine. It's not like we're manufacturing physical products where the, you've got like a big buying cost to set manufacturing lines and stuff like that. So the risk is very low and it, it makes it very easy to take those chances. I think. Um, I think for, for bet on server side Swift, it was, it was just, I was just going with the flow.
I was just like riding the wave and seeing what happens. Like the writing was on the wall, like Apple were backing it heavily. They were investing in it heavily for engineering efforts and building libraries and stuff.
[00:12:40] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah.
[00:12:40] Tim Condon: And you could kind of see where it was gonna go. It wasn't guaranteed. Certainly.
[00:12:44] Antoine van der Lee: And there were downsizes as well, right? Like I, IBM stopped doing things. Yeah, there were a, a few little
[00:12:48] Tim Condon: hiccups. So IBM had a service side swift framework. Similar to Vapor. It was kind of not competing, but it had a ton of different goals. It was more going for the enterprise stuff and yeah, they decided that it wasn't working.
Um, they couldn't make enough money out of it for IBM, which to be honest at the time is not that surprising for their kind of scale.
[00:13:06] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah. But did that do anything to your
[00:13:09] Tim Condon: trust
[00:13:09] Antoine van der Lee: in Surface? I Swift
[00:13:11] Tim Condon: personally, no. Um, I think for the community it did knock it back a little bit, but for me, not really. No. If anything it was great because it meant all the enterprise companies that were thinking about using IBM now essentially only had Vapor as the thing and I was the guy doing Vapor.
You saw it
[00:13:27] Antoine van der Lee: as an opportunity right away?
[00:13:28] Tim Condon: Yeah. Or
[00:13:28] Antoine van der Lee: was
[00:13:28] Tim Condon: it something you
[00:13:28] Antoine van der Lee: realized later? No, it was
[00:13:29] Tim Condon: right away. I was, as soon as they announced that it was dying, I was there like, if you need help my grading, I'm here if you want me to build up Google ads on IBM's project. Yeah, exactly. Um, it definitely got me more into focusing on what kind of enterprise people want as well.
So I now offer like SLAs and stuff for response times if things go wrong, which is never something I've done before. Um, so like saying if you have an issue in live, my company will respond within 24 hours to help you out and make mm-hmm. Make sure it fixed. So that kind of thing is definitely new and not something I've ever done.
It's, it's really good because it gives you that kind of passive income of companies have to pay for that. Even if you don't do anything, they have to maintain that level. So you're always on call, essentially, or your company's always on call.
[00:14:16] Antoine van der Lee: You created your own
[00:14:17] Tim Condon: Yeah. But it builds that passive income of, you know Yeah.
Stuff that you, you can rely on. Is that your recurring income trick? Yeah. That's your recurring, that's your monthly recurring revenue, essentially. Yeah. Right.
[00:14:27] Antoine van der Lee: Um, one, one thing that's fascinates as well is that you say like, I just go for it, or mm-hmm. You know, every job that I had, I just went for it. Yeah.
Uh, you, you make it sound like, you know, I just did it or, you know, but it's, it's a big decision to go from the thing that you do to something else. Right. Like, you did assembly. How did you know assembly was not the thing anymore. You went for the other thing and. Now, eventually you did Vapor mm-hmm. And you went for service at Swift.
How, how can you make that decision sound so easy? Because I think for many people, this is actually something really hard, right? Like, they're, they're in their environment, they know what they're doing, they have, uh, a great team around them. They're friends with their colleagues. Mm-hmm. And then an opportunity like Surfside Swift pops up, I just go with it.
Right? Like, that's, that's how, how it sounds now.
[00:15:16] Tim Condon: Yeah. I mean, yeah, it is probably a bit more involved than that. But essentially, yeah, for me it's broken down into enjoyment and comfort. So when you're in a really good job, you enjoy it and you're comfortable, you have your good colleagues, you work with great people, you have a nice environment, like maybe nice offices you work on call apps and stuff.
That gives you a lot of enjoyment and a lot of comfort. And that's kind of makes the, the leaving point, the point where you leave very difficult. For me, it was when that enjoyment started to drop off. I'm pretty happy being uncomfortable in terms of like not having guaranteed income or doing stuff I don't know, or learning stuff or working on stuff I've never done before.
So that, that kind of comfort level for me is, that's almost exciting, like getting to learn new things and trying new stuff out. But the enjoyment thing is a big factor for me. So if I'm doing a job and I'm not enjoying it, I'll go find something else. So for me, the assembly stuff was interesting to start with and then I realized I'm not that good at it.
Um, it's not something I massively enjoy. I get that. Yeah. Uh, I, I was doing, I quite enjoyed the low level stuff when I was writing low level stuff. Um, so like my final year thesis at university was writing an operating system in assembly and sea and that was really interesting 'cause you gotta learn about how things worked and stuff.
In the real world, most people don't write assembly. The main reason for knowing assembly is when you are decompiling. Apps. Mm-hmm. So one of the things I used to do is work on, uh, is working in cybersecurity and decompiling malware to work out how it works. It sounds cool. It's not that interesting if your brain doesn't take that way.
And for me it doesn't. Yeah. So, um, when I got to the point, I was like, I'm just not enjoying this. I went and found something else. It was related. I was still doing cybersecurity stuff. I started doing more software than, uh, reverse engineering stuff. And so you kind of do those diagonal jumps to find stuff that you enjoy to get your comfort and enjoyment balances at the right level.
[00:17:18] Antoine van der Lee: But how do you set that aside to, 'cause I think what I see with previous jobs that I had, where my old colleagues still work there. Mm-hmm. And I think the hardest challenge for them is to leave behind the colleagues in the convenient environment they have. And I totally get your point, right? Like you, you will see that something is boring and it's not your thing anymore.
But how do you convince yourself? 'cause the fact is that a new company, you will find new colleagues. Mm-hmm. You'll find new friends. But how do you convince yourself that, that you need to dare and take that step?
[00:17:56] Tim Condon: I think it depe, uh, like a lot of it depends on the kind of person you are as well. I suspect a lot of people listening to this will be people who want to work for themselves. They want to go nd they wanna have that freedom. They wanna have that responsibility or kind of badge of, I work for myself. And the people who want that tend to be quite comfortable jumping into new things.
In my experience, the people who don't wanna be nd who don't want to, who are less, uh, willing to take those risks, tend to stick in the, in the big jobs. They work for the big companies. They have great lives and that's their stuff. And great for them. Like, it's, it's not your thing. It's not your thing. But the people who want to go indie tend to wanna work for themselves.
They don't like working for big companies. In my experience at least, and certainly personally as well, I. I hate working for big companies. It's the politics and the, the red tape of things that just don't make any sense. Um, so I think it, a lot of it's like the kind of person you are as well. Um, and for me it's, I I can almost feel like the itchy feet when I get to a job and I'm like too comfortable.
I'm not enjoying it. I can feel like you kind of, you stop, you lose the enthusiasm of going to work, of what you're working on. Um, and you can see the shiny thing over there, so it's all right, I'm gonna go and get the shiny thing, the potential. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and try that out. And yeah, as I said in tech, if it doesn't go wrong, I'll go back.
[00:19:16] Antoine van der Lee: Uh, yeah. This one was really helpful for me to convince my wife, right? Like, uh, you know very well what you're doing. Mm-hmm. But your wife might not always understand because it's technical. And if she's not really into tech, then that's tricky to make her understand. You can show some numbers and stuff.
Yeah. But taking the leap is really a big step. Or switching jobs is the same. It's mm-hmm. You step away from some secures, you get a new contract, you need to see if they will wanna keep you after the first month or something. You know, going in the similar, but telling her like, Hey, we are in tech. Uh, there are so many, uh, opportunities out there that if something goes wrong, uh, I can always go back.
Yeah, exactly. It's really, really great safeguard, I must say we're recording this now in November, and the job market seems a bit more challenging nowadays.
[00:20:05] Tim Condon: This year has definitely been a lot more challenging, I think. Yeah. But there is stuff out there.
[00:20:08] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah, and that's the thing. There's e even if your project doesn't work out, say Surface at Swift wouldn't work out.
You still know what you're doing. So you could do conservancy on something else. Right. There's, there's always something different that you can do as an, as an entrepreneur, isn't it?
[00:20:22] Tim Condon: Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, there's a, there's a few points to that. Um, the first one is like convincing people is it's definitely a cultural thing.
When I decided I was gonna go and work for myself, the reactions I got from people. Certainly in the UK compared to like, people in America we're very, very different.
[00:20:40] Antoine van der Lee: Really.
[00:20:40] Tim Condon: People in America are like, yeah, go for it. It sounds great. Go and work for yourself. Try it out. They have that kind of entrepreneurial spirit over there.
People in the UK are like, Ooh, that's risky. What happens if it doesn't work? And it's like, remember speaking to my moms that I've quit my job, I'm gonna work for myself. She's like, what are you doing? Like, how are you gonna, how are you gonna pay your mortgage? I was like, mm-hmm. Oh. Like if I work in tech, it's not that bad.
It's like I have a year's worth of savings to keep me thrown. If it looks like I'm running out, I'll go and find a job. It's not that bad. Um, and then to, to your other point, um, I've completely forgotten about that. Uh, what
[00:21:17] Antoine van der Lee: was, what were you saying at the end of it? You, you can always do something else that's co consultancy, right?
You can, there's always something else. Yes, exactly.
[00:21:23] Tim Condon: So, yeah. Um, and so to your other point as well, the, the skills that you need to be able to find, I. Consultancy work. Um, it's, it's different to working on say, in the apps, but I think it's still the same applies, is that a lot of that is networking. Like a lot of the way that I get my work in is networking, like it's speaking at conferences, it's speaking to people.
It's being online, being on discord and slack and answering questions and stuff, and building your kind of personal brand and relationships and relationships and getting to know people. So if you are very good at that and you focus on that and you work on that to build that point up, the, the skills you need or the reputation and the kind of personal brand you need to be able to find contract work is very similar to the skills that you need to be able to find a job.
So I remember Sean Allen was exactly the same. He's built up a great online presence of big brands. Hold this one.
[00:22:16] Antoine van der Lee: Sean Allen. There's a spider right on top of your head. Oh, is there? You can, no, you can still see it if you put your head up. You can see it. There you go. Oh, hello. Pop him down. Yeah. He wants to be, uh, wants to get you on the podcast.
He wants to be in the going. Any podcast. Yeah. Maybe he's indie. I don't know. Yeah, I never know. He was trying to get his own job. This episode is sponsored by the Swift Concurrency course. Swift six is bringing major changes to concurrency and staying ahead is crucial. The Swift Concurrency course makes ay actors and Sendible easy to understand with real world examples.
Whether you're migrating existing code to Swift six or starting Fresh, this course gives you the confidence to migrate successfully and helps you write threat. Safe, modern, asynchronous code in Swift. Get started today@swiftconcurrencycourse.com. Thanks for sponsoring this episode. Um, Sean Allen.
[00:23:06] Tim Condon: So, yeah, so like a great example of that is Sean Allen.
So he's built up this great online brand and personality and people know him really well. And then he decided he wanted a, a proper job or proper job. Hey, you wanted the, um, environment of working with people and working on a team and stuff. So he just put out a tweet and say, I'm looking for a proper job.
And I think it was like a day and he had a job lined up because he's built that brand and that thing. So if you're doing the same thing as an indie developer, like working in an apps, people get to know you and say, okay, now I'm looking for something new.
[00:23:34] Antoine van der Lee: That's also a thing. You're not unknown
[00:23:36] Tim Condon: in that
[00:23:36] Antoine van der Lee: case.
Yeah. Yeah. But the crucial part here is to have, be able to build a relationship with something. Mm-hmm. Be able to go out in the community. It's also intimidating. It is, definitely. Yeah. And we both speak at conferences. We are quite social, I think, you know. Um, but if you, if you aren't and you still wanna go Indy, like, do you think it's really crucial to be able to build a brand, build a presence, build relationships?
Is that really, would you be able to be here as an indie?
[00:24:08] Tim Condon: Without that? I think it would be a lot harder. So like if you don't have that kind of personal brand when you launch your apps, doing the marketing and stuff and getting it out there and getting people to know it, it's hard if you're not there talking to people and showing them.
So if you are launching an app and you do wanna do your own app and you build it and you launch it, you need to tell people about it. You need to go out there and, you know, show them about it. You need to go to the conferences and explain and talk about it and like show them and kind of speak to as many people as you can about it.
And I think if, if you are not comfortable doing that, it can be a lot harder to. Build the, the app, unless you kind of go viral. But those things are pretty rare. Most of the apps are slow burners that have that kind of exponential growth. Um, and that's done through efforts and hard work.
[00:24:59] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah. And this is a mod in my course.
Mm-hmm. It's, it's really about building relationships, audience growth, marketing. Right. Like in, and in that module I talk about the opportunities that you can't see yet. Hidden opportunities. Right. You talk with people, you spend time on conferences, you do open source work. It's not measurable that it'll return something
[00:25:20] Tim Condon: ROI and things like that.
[00:25:22] Antoine van der Lee: It's really very difficult. Yeah. And may, maybe that's actually a nice segue into this, right? You do a lot of these things. Mm-hmm. You do a lot of conferences and you do a lot of open source, like from, from, from the, from the surface. It almost looks like you only do those things in. It's not even really clear how you make money.
You never promote yourself as a consult. You feel like maybe I just didn't see those. I could probably do a bit of a better job. Yeah, yeah. But still, you're doing great. Mm-hmm. Um, right. Like how do you know that the things that you're doing are worth it and are worth the investments, so to say?
[00:25:56] Tim Condon: It's hard to measure, certainly.
I think for, for things like conferences, they tend to be pretty, like zero costs if you're doing, if you're speaking. So if you're speaking at conferences, essentially travel and accommodations paid for, so the cost of me going to conferences, very little. Um, you might be a few meals here and a taxi to the airport or something like that.
Yeah. But the actual kind of getting to the conference and speaking and staying there is, it doesn't cost you anything. So it might take me, you know, 20, 40 hours to write a talk that I can give a few times and stuff. It's not a huge amount of, um, work that requires 'em to going into that. Then any kind of work that you get out of that is kind of almost great.
Return, free return. Yeah. And it is hard to measure that, but I, I can clearly count like several occasions where I've got consultancy pieces of work from speaking to people at conferences, whether it's people seeing my talks or whether it's talking to them afterwards or talking to them at the parties or talking to 'em in the pub or stuff.
And like you have those kind of connections and then people remember you'd be like, oh, actually I'm doing this. Do you think, how will this work? And you have that conversation, then all of a sudden you've got like a two month piece of work lined up.
[00:27:11] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah. I think for Kuer, I'm using Vapor as well, and I think it always made totally sense to pick Vapor because I knew it was the project that's been spoken about at conferences.
Mm-hmm. Probably mostly by you, so Yes, pretty much. Yeah. And I recognize what you're saying as well with Zim, where I'm, I'm speaking at conferences too. I always mention Zim and there's always teams approaching me afterwards. And either they talk about features they want or. Actually telling me like, Hey, we wanna buy licenses.
How does it work? Right. So I think combined with the fact that indeed, you know, it's actually fun. You go to a conference, I mean, it's not a hard life, is it? It's not a hard life. Travel around the world and
[00:27:47] Tim Condon: meet your friends at conferences
[00:27:48] Antoine van der Lee: e Exactly. And it's, it's being paid so it costs you time. Right?
Mm-hmm. Especially if your family that is, that is tricky, but Yeah. But still, it's also investment in your, it's part of your work. Yeah. In a way. And maybe especially as an indie, and then the relationships you get out of it, that might not even return something directly, might eventually, well, it brought you here as well, maybe.
Right, exactly. Like this podcast. Um, so it it has many different outcomes over time, even. Yeah. But once again, you need to be able to go to a conference and speak out there. Right. So maybe, maybe some people are listening. I'm imagining they aren't like us yet. They, I. Would love to give a talk. Mm-hmm. But they aren't like that yet.
And what I wanna know is, have you always been so social? Have you always been able to give talks or do you remember your first
[00:28:40] Tim Condon: talk? I do remember my first talk. It was awful. Um, I'm not like a massively extroverted person. I'm generally quite introverted. Oh really? Uh, I have a very different stage presence than I do normally, which I find very fascinating.
There's definitely something going on there. But my first talk was terrible. Um, it was, it didn't go very well. It wasn't very clear. Um, it wasn't like well delivered the flow and the timing was completely off. Um, and it's just practice. Like no one's born a great speaker, no one's born as a great conference talker.
Um, it's just practice. Um, so for things like that you can use like meetups and stuff that have very low, um, like requirements and. Stress and pressure, like there's pressure. Smaller audience. Yeah. You might be talking to 10 people, 15 people over, which can
[00:29:31] Antoine van der Lee: be more intimidating for
[00:29:32] Tim Condon: some It can be, yes. Um, but it's like the, the pressure on meetups, like you just go in the evening, it's, it's not like you're traveling somewhere.
You go in the evening. You can go regularly and kinda get to know people first, and then, and then talk. Um, and I always do my conference talks and I meet up before I actually give them at a conference.
[00:29:47] Antoine van der Lee: Okay.
[00:29:49] Tim Condon: Because I find even practicing talks out loud, it doesn't work unless you're doing it in front of people.
Um, so that kind of, I use that as practice to work out, do my talks work, is the flow right? Is the, the timing right? Do I need to tweak stuff? Um, but yeah, like in terms of learning to speak at conferences, it's just practice. Like most things in life, it's just go out there, try it and practice it. Um. You might enjoy it.
I mean, if, if you don't, that's fine. Like you can go down other avenues of doing personal branding and, and stuff like that. But it's, it's not a difficult life. You know, the, the stuff we get to have, there's a lot of investment and there's definitely time issues. And if you've got family, it can be hard being away and stuff, but getting to travel around the world and, you know, hang out with your mates in random cities in the world and Absolutely.
It's not bad, is it?
[00:30:39] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah.
[00:30:39] Tim Condon: I, I witnessed
[00:30:40] Antoine van der Lee: you drinking baby Gus and we ate pizza and, uh, no, it's ab absolutely great. And I think I totally agree with that. It's practice that, that, you know, results in getting more convenient, uh, in it. And I've seen many first time speakers doing a great job. Oh, yeah. But what's fascinating to me, like your first talk, I'm bad that you didn't get any people coming after you, right after, like, Tim, you did a terrible job.
Or did they? Oh, no one gave me bad feedback. No.
[00:31:06] Tim Condon: So it's really your own, it's your own internal critique.
[00:31:10] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah. Right. So in a way you could also always say like. People want you to succeed. Mm-hmm. Definitely. Yeah. They want you to be doing a great job. And there's always somebody, even though you maybe didn't present it the way you wanted, you still present valuable content.
Exactly. They still learn from it
[00:31:28] Tim Condon: and everyone's got valuable content. Like I speak to lots of people being like, oh, I'd love to do talks, conference about nothing interesting to talk about complete rubbish. Like everyone's worked on something interesting or a difficult problem or something. And people might think, oh, but everyone knows about this and they really don't like having those kind of interesting talks of stuff you've actually done that you are passionate about that you know is far better than talks about random stuff.
Um, and so if you wanna start talking and you've, there will be interesting stuff you can talk about, um, from your experience and your work.
[00:31:59] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah. Stay close to what you know. Yeah,
[00:32:01] Tim Condon: exactly.
[00:32:02] Antoine van der Lee: Which already makes it easier to talk about it. Mm-hmm. If you forget worse, you, well, it's not breakfast because you talk about something you already know.
So it is
[00:32:09] Tim Condon: inherent knowledge. Yeah.
[00:32:10] Antoine van der Lee: Every time you give the talk, it'll probably be different. Illness, you're really scripting everything out, which makes it really hard to stay on track. And if you're lost off track, then stay close to who you are, what you do, and then giving a talk will be much easier.
That first talk didn't went so well. Did you get people to approach you
[00:32:30] Tim Condon: with positive things? Yeah, I mean, like the, I remember I got off stage, so it was in, it was a conference in Chester called Code Mobile in 2018, I think it was 20 17, 20 18. Uh, and I got off stage. I'd done a live demo that hadn't done, gone very well.
Classic. Yeah, classic. My slides didn't look great. Uh, I'd forgotten to say half the things I was thought I was gonna say and that kind of thing. Most people don't know that, like no one knows that, oh, you're gonna say all this stuff, but you didn't say that. They just know the, the content you gave. And so I got off stage and I had like five or six people waiting to talk to me.
Like, oh, I've got this question about like, this was a terrible talk. Yeah. This is my terrible talk. And that kind of feedback of like, oh, no, actually people did enjoy that. They, they were interested. It's like, oh, okay. No, maybe it wasn't that bad. I mean, I still think, looking back, I think it was a bad talk just from my experience, but of course, you've gotta start somewhere.
Right? And the people watching it didn't think it was a terrible talk and didn't get anything from it.
[00:33:32] Antoine van der Lee: Super fascinating. It's also when speakers say something, oh, sorry, I, I didn't have to say this. And then they continue to talk.
[00:33:37] Tim Condon: Mm-hmm.
[00:33:38] Antoine van der Lee: I'm like, oh, now I know you didn't plan on saying this. If you just continued.
I had no clue. Mm-hmm. Right. It's, it's all about just get, get going with the flow and yeah. Let the slide speak for you and dare to stand there and at least say something. Mm-hmm. That, that's basically it. Right. And the first step is always the biggest, but your second talk will already flow better. And if it's the same talk.
Even better. Yeah, even better, right? Like, it makes it easier. Fun fact is that when I gave my first conference talk I was called 24 hours before, um, they knew from a meetup just like you, that I gave that talk already. Mm-hmm. It was actually, uh, actually do iOS where I remember that talk where you'll be speaking, uh, tomorrow and I was, I was scared as well and my, my hand was shaking.
I was, I think I was drinking a Red Bull or something. I'm not sure what it was. But eventually when I got off stage, somebody approached me from WeTransfer and that's how I got my job at WeTransfer. And that led to, you know, eventually me starting my blog and going indie, you know, if you think about it, that, that, that one decision of saying yes to that call I got 24 hours before the conference made all the difference.
Yep. So in a way, it's not only daring to step up and give the talk, it's also about creating your own opportunities.
[00:34:54] Tim Condon: Yeah,
[00:34:54] Antoine van der Lee: exactly. Isn't it Standing, making yourself feasible. Go to the conferences and let them see who you are and, and open that door. Uh, for being approachable. Before we dive back into this episode, I want to quickly share something that could change your journey.
If you're dreaming of turning your side project into full independence, my going Indy course is designed to guide you every step of the way. Visit going indy.com and let's make your indie dreams a reality. That's going indie.com. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Which brings me to the second point. Giving a talk is one thing, but being present at a conference and speaking with all those people.
Some, some are really, like you, you're an introvert yourself. Mm-hmm. Normally.
[00:35:40] Tim Condon: Normally, yeah. I would,
[00:35:41] Antoine van der Lee: I wouldn't
[00:35:42] Tim Condon: say so. Depends how much beer I've had.
[00:35:44] Antoine van der Lee: Gotcha. Okay. Oh, that's the trick. Now we know it. Um, but how, how do you deal with people? Like, have you always been, been good at that as well, or was that something you
[00:35:54] Tim Condon: had to learn too?
It's something you have to learn as well, that you have to learn to. Almost force yourself to talk to people. Esp like it's a lot easier when you are a speaker and especially when you kind of get more established as a speaker because people will come up to you and talk to you and have questions and stuff.
But in like the early days, yeah, you have to like force yourself to go and talk to people. Um, and just like, yeah, put yourself out there. And it's hard, especially if you're not like used to that and you don't enjoy that. It is really hard, but it gets easier. And it gets easier. And then the more you talk to people, people come to talk to you and the more you talk at conferences, people come to talk to you more.
And now, yeah, like I'm pretty confident I can go to a conference. And I probably know people there anyway, but even if I didn't, people are gonna come up to me 'cause they knew, know who I am, they wanna talk to me, they wanna ask questions about Vapor or Swift or they wanna talk to me about, about my talk and stuff.
And that makes it a lot easier because then the onus is on them to come to you. Um, but yeah, you just need to put yourself out there and if it helps go with colleagues, your conferences, so you have people that you know, and then you can kind of start to bring people into the group as you're talking and stuff.
Um, yeah, it's just a, it's taking that step and making yourself a little bit uncomfortable and seeing the, the growth from that.
[00:37:09] Antoine van der Lee: What do you think it makes it uncomfortable? Like, do you think people are afraid that people don't wanna talk with you or?
[00:37:16] Tim Condon: Yeah, I mean, I think it, it depends on the, on the kind of person you are.
But like for me personally, when I first started, you think, oh, I've only got questions that people know the answers to. So it's gonna sound stupid if I ask questions. Um, people aren't gonna be interested in what I say. Um, people are already talking amongst their groups. Everyone knows everyone. I dunno.
Anyone here like. I'm on my own. Um, and none of that's true at all. Like no, it's all mindset, right? Yeah. It's all mindset. There's no stupid questions. Um, like you might ask a question to someone who knows the answer, and that's why you're asking them. But three people who are in, in that group, talking to them, don't know the answer, and they're interested to learn.
And what is the worst case? Yeah. You, you find out the answer Exactly.
[00:37:57] Antoine van der Lee: Or they don't really wanna talk with you, and you continue your journey and you grab a coffee and hey, you're suddenly talking with somebody that also wants coffee.
[00:38:04] Tim Condon: Right? Yeah. And, and frankly, at conferences, most, like, almost everyone's friendly, like no one's gonna be mean to you or horrible to you, or
[00:38:13] Antoine van der Lee: people are there as well to connect, isn't it?
Everyone's in the same boat has, and probably they are scared to talk with you as well, so you in a way, you, you know, you can help each other. Yeah. You taking that step brings them in and then it makes it easier for everyone. So it all comes down to, if we put your whole journey all together, it all comes down to just doing it.
Yeah. Essentially putting
[00:38:31] Tim Condon: yourself, just taking that step and seeing where it goes. It's, it's a lot of what my life from the outside definitely appears to be winging it. There's definitely, I think there's a lot of effort that goes into it and a lot of hard work, but it's just taking those jumps and like, where's this gonna go?
I dunno. And we'll see. Super interesting
[00:38:50] Antoine van der Lee: stuff. So, back to your life journey. Uh, we're now in 2017 when you started to give a conference stocks, we know that you, that you are almost the, the branding of Vapor while you're not the original, uh, one behind Vapor. It's al almost like Elon Musk with Tesla in a way.
Um, I I won't call it Tim Musk or something. I won't do that, but, so eventually you, you also made it sound really easy that you, I hired my first developer or my first colleague in a way. Like, um, how did that decision point came around? Because if I look for myself and I'm Indy, I'm more concerned about my own income.
And if I add another person to my team, yes. That will likely result in more growth. It's also more risk and more depth. Yeah. And you, this was in the time of Covid to draw the picture. I It's 2020. Yeah. And I got my first employee. Yeah. So it was uncertain times. But on the other hand, also certain times, 'cause many people wanted to go on online businesses and stuff.
Yeah. Can you draw that, that journey, how you ended up hiring your first colleague and, and employee and, um,
[00:39:55] Tim Condon: yeah, of course. So I'll say that the hiring people and employing people is probably the most stressful thing I've ever done. Okay. Or in, in terms of like the risk factor. Because as an indeed developer, if you don't pay yourself for a month, it's probably okay.
You've probably got savings and stuff that you can live by, and it's not the end of the world. You prepare for it, you prepare for it. If you miss payroll for your employees who are relying on your that income, then that's a big problem. So that step is definitely, that was the, the biggest, most. Thought out step I've probably had in terms of right, am I gonna start to employ people and can I do it?
Um, it was definitely the hardest point, but the point where I got to the point was in Covid and I had, um, a big long-term contract that I was working on. I was doing my open source stuff. I had another smaller contract that was also working on, and then I got another request for quite a big contract. So I was probably doing like, the hours were supposed to be like, you know, 10 hours open source, 20 hours on this big project, 10 hours on this little project.
And then there's like 20 hours a week coming in. They're like, can you do this for 20 hours a week? I was like, well, I'm already working more than the 40 hours. I would like to, I don't really have the capacity to do like 60, 70 hour weeks consistently. Um. And so I was like, well, maybe I should Now is the point to reach out and, and hire someone.
[00:41:29] Antoine van der Lee: So did you hire somebody or did you sign somebody for your company? 'cause that's two different things, right? Did you get an employee or did you get a contractor?
[00:41:38] Tim Condon: So it technically it was a contractor because it allowed me to do, to hire remotely because the employment laws certainly in the UK, meant that if I was to employ someone for my company, they'd have to have the legal right to work in the uk, which after Brexit got very complicated.
So it was, they hired, they were hired as contractors, but it was still like a full-time, you know, 35 hours a week contract. And is this a normal same expectations? Terms? Same terms, expectations? Yeah, still working full time, still working and, and representing my company and me and stuff. Um, so they were a broken hands employee essentially.
Yeah. Um, and Broken Hands is your company and Broken Hands is my company. Yep. That does. Service-side, swift training and consultancy essentially. Um, we, we need to talk about that name later. Yeah, we'll get onto that. Definitely. We'll get to that. Um, and so, yeah, so I was like, right, let's, let's start hiring someone.
And, and I started talking to a couple of people and they were, I got a lot of interest and I was like, right, I'm gonna do this properly. So I put out an open call basically saying I have a job, um, work for me full time. Um, the perks are, I, I've kept this perk is that you get to do 25% open source time. So, um, any hours that you do, you'll get 25% of those hours to work on open source stuff.
So it'd be 75% client work, 25% open source stuff, which is, it's a big way of getting good people. 'cause people wanna do open source stuff because it's interesting. Mm-hmm. I think I had like 40 people apply for this role. Okay. Um. Part of that was because I have this brand and like people know me and they wanna work on Swift, and this wasn't server because it's interesting, this was in a time where everybody had a job,
[00:43:20] Antoine van der Lee: right?
Yeah. The job market was different than today.
[00:43:22] Tim Condon: The job market was different today. Well, so getting
[00:43:23] Antoine van der Lee: 40 people to applies.
[00:43:25] Tim Condon: Yeah. And I mean, it was hard sorting through them. I think I did interviews for like eight or nine people, um, and eventually chose someone who turned out to be fantastic. Uh, really good.
Uh, they worked with me for about a year and a half, I think. Um, and that was the start. And then that kind of grew the company to the point where I was had now essentially I was doing as a company, 70 hours a week of contract work and then more requests come in and then more requests come in. I was like, okay, well now I wanna get up to 90 or a hundred hours a week, so maybe I'll get someone part-time and do 20 hours a week.
[00:44:03] Antoine van der Lee: I, I love how you con connect and it, it's, makes total sense, but you connect the hours of work that you get in to the, uh, hours of. Uh, people that you can hire. Mm-hmm. In a way, did you literally also pay, like, 'cause you, you started with just an extra client that brings in 20 hours per word. Mm-hmm. Per week.
But you hired an employee full, full time. Yeah. So how did you fill up the gap?
[00:44:26] Tim Condon: So I actually cut my hours down to allow myself to work on more open source stuff, right? So the, the person I hired was doing full-time, um, and doing more work. And then, um, I went, turned on to working more on my own stuff and more open source stuff
[00:44:43] Antoine van der Lee: with results and more visibility, more growth, which brings in more clients, you can hire another employee.
It's almost like a flywheel, isn't it?
[00:44:50] Tim Condon: Yeah. It's, it's a big snowballing thing, and the more you put into it, the more you invest it kind of, it grows itself. Um, and
[00:44:56] Antoine van der Lee: did it scale like that? Because you also hire employees, which also brings in more work for you to manage, you know, like, um, taxes, salary.
[00:45:05] Tim Condon: Yeah. I mean the, the overheads are.
Do grow a little bit and you've got, you know, you have to have, you know, you Slack subscriptions and GitHub subscription, GitHub seats and stuff like that, and anything else they need and things like that. And, um, it does the overhead start to build up a little bit, but I mean, I'm on what, three or four people now?
Um, and it's not that different to one or two. Um, I think when you kinda get to actual employees in 10, 20, 30, that's when it starts to get a bit more complicated. Um, and can we,
[00:45:36] Antoine van der Lee: because you do client work, right? And that's super easy to connect to how much money there will be in. And, uh, you also said earlier that you have your own, uh, recurring income definition mm-hmm.
With the SLAs. Um, how would this work for somebody that has several apps, would you say? Like, okay, if you reach like 10 k monthly recurring revenue, um, you hire somebody for five or 4K per month mm-hmm. And then you split your own income in a way, but then. Like how can we draw something for somebody that Yeah.
Doesn't do client work?
[00:46:10] Tim Condon: Yeah. So if, I mean, if you're doing like app work and stuff and you wanna, let's say you've got an app and it's getting really popular and you wanna, you've got all these ideas for features that you wanna do, you don't have the time because there's only so much time that you can put into it.
Yeah. If you get to the point where you are like, okay, well I need this much money to live uncomfortably, let's say, I dunno, five KA month is like a figure just made up. Mm-hmm. Um, now my monthly recurring revenues now 10 KA month. I've got that five KA month buffer that I can then do something with. I can either put it towards savings or I can reinvest it in, uh, different things like ads or hiring a designer to make the app look better.
Or maybe I could hire someone for. Three or four KA month, um, however many hours that works out for them. And I can start to implement all of these features that people are asking for. And, you know, you'll have a feature, less a feature set that people have been asking for. You might use, uh, you know, different, uh, apps or, uh, forms or different feedback things to get feature requests in and stuff.
And you know what people want. And you'd be like, well, I can hit these, you know, the kind of rough estimates of like, that's gonna take a month, that will take two months. Yep. And then you can start to see, well, if I can then invest that and grow. And then you can basically just track your monthly recurring revenue of, okay, well it was 10 KA month here, slowly growing.
I then hired someone. So my monthly recurring revenue is still 10 KA month. My costs have now gone up. Yeah. And then a month or two later you can see that, that that graph starts to go up. Hopefully. Hopefully. Yeah. Fingers crossed. And you make that money back of the, let's say 4K or however much you're paying your employee.
[00:47:48] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah.
[00:47:48] Tim Condon: Now you are back to making that 10 K buffer and you've got your 5K buffer, but your product grows faster, but your product grows faster. And then yeah, that monthly recurring revenue should go up and up, hopefully.
[00:47:57] Antoine van der Lee: Should you focus on the features that the users really want, or should you hire somebody to focus on more growth features that are for sure bringing in more money?
How, how would you make that decision?
[00:48:08] Tim Condon: It depends on, on how well you know your app in the market. I think. Like if you know that you implement something and that's gonna bring in people, um, then yeah, I'd, I'd go for that. Um, there's always also the thing of tech debt and how much time do you spend updating to Swift Six, for instance, which there's gotta be that at some point, but does it bring any benefit to your users?
No. Is it gonna grow your monthly recurring revenue? No, not in the short term. Certainly it might help in the longer term because your app will be more stable and you'll get less crashes, so people are gonna stick with your app. So it's, it's a hard trade off to balance that I think. Um. But yeah, I think just implement the features that, you know, people want that are gonna help grow the, the revenue, if that's, if that's what your goal is.
[00:48:53] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah. Because that's the thing. Have you, have you considered not hiring somebody for, for development, but hiring somebody for marketing? Maybe, or, or like a different position? I think in your case it made sense because you got contracting. Mm-hmm. But I can also imagine that somebody's pretty good at development, but just lacks marketing skills.
Mm-hmm. So it makes more sense to hire somebody to take over that investment, isn't it? Have you, have you had that, that, that thought process for your first employee?
[00:49:25] Tim Condon: Um, not really, no. It was always like, I know that this work needs to be done and I have these hours and I, I need to get it done. I think as, as you kind of grow more, there's definitely a bit of, okay, maybe I should start to look at someone to do sales and outreach and stuff and to get more work in, because certainly as, as you get more and more people.
You have to have that work keeping coming in and contracts stop, stop and end and start and stuff. Mm-hmm. Um, and so you want that kind of pipeline of work keeping. Um, so when you get to the size of where you have people that you wanna keep going, then maybe it's worth getting someone to do sales or bring in money or marketing or stuff to make sure you have that pipeline.
Yeah. Um, but that's, I think, I would think that's a very kind of personal decision in terms of where you are personally.
[00:50:13] Antoine van der Lee: And how did, how did it change you as a person? Because before you were probably full-time developing because you were the only one at broken hands and you did all the client work. And the more employees you get, the more work you give away.
Yep. So if we, if we, if we compare Tim in 2017 to Tim today, Uhhuh, are you, are you still happy and are you different? Or like what changed? Uh, because that could be a reason to not hire employees, right?
[00:50:39] Tim Condon: Yeah. It, it could, well be fair. I mean like when you start to hire people, you've got to. You've gotta manage them.
Like, and you can have fantastic employees and I've got amazing people, but you still have to manage them. You still have to make sure they're happy. You still have to make sure they've got work. And uh, if you have, like I've done internships as well, so I've worked with universities in Belgium and Italy to have people come work with me for a few months as an intern.
And you've gotta make every day have like an hour meeting with them and manage them. And that's an investment. Like, um, it's time that you are spent not working, not earning essentially. Um, but one of those people now work for me full time, um, and do a great job. Um, I spend a lot of my time managing clients, um, which is part of the downside of contract work compared to your own apps is that yeah, you have to manage the clients and manage the expectations and make sure they're happy and, uh, make sure they see the progress of what you're doing and stuff.
Um, so I think like these days I do spend more time. On kind of more businessy stuff. Um, and it's the same with Vapor as well. Like we have sponsors, we have like website stuff and marketing and uh, we have a, a shop online shop where you can buy merch or we will be by popular time. This is mm-hmm. Uh, live at least.
Um, and all those things take time and effort and stuff. And it's not dev work, it's new. You're not writing code. That's what I mean. Um, and it's, it's a balance on the trade off. It's like, what do you enjoy? Because I could outsource a lot of that, the management stuff less so. But things like building the vapor website or getting stock in for online shops and, uh, managing clients, you can get account managers and client relationship managers and stuff to do all that.
Um, and part of that is a control thing, I think. Yeah. In that it's very hard to let go of your baby if you've grown the company from scratch. Absolutely. It's like I own everything, but it's the same if you're working on an app, is that. When it's just you all, that code is just you and you are very protective over it.
As soon as you start getting people doing pull requests and that you've hired, you have to kind of let go a little bit. You have to say, okay, it might not be the exact way that I write the code, but maybe that's a good thing. Maybe having that diversity of thought, of seeing different perspective on how you do thing would be a good thing and maybe you can learn as well.
[00:52:53] Antoine van der Lee: This is what scares me the most. I, I'm still the solo developer on Rocket simm. I, I maybe once invited somebody to the code, but I also feel like hiring somebody makes my code available to that person. Yep. And if I stop that contract, they will still have that code. 'cause I'm sure they will keep it.
Mm-hmm. I don't know. You, you can't, you can't see that the way that kit works. Yeah. Is it really
[00:53:14] Tim Condon: trust
[00:53:15] Antoine van der Lee: and
[00:53:15] Tim Condon: just Yeah, I think it's, it's a little trust. I mean, like, uh, you, you can definitely write in your contracts of who owns the IP and stuff and. You know, if people start to sell that often there are legal repercussions.
Like some of the clients I work with are like education and healthcare, and we have some quite strict rules around, um, in terms of who can have, have access to the code and, um, making sure, but that's all written in, in contracts and stuff and make sure that people are, you know, you cannot share this and stuff.
Like Yeah, you could try. Yeah. And, um, there'd be a, if one of my employees started sharing confidential codes of one of my clients, then that's a big problem. Yeah. Yeah. But it's the trust thing. Like, you hire people that you get a good feel for and you know, you're not gonna hire someone completely random.
You interview them, you kind of get the vibes. You, you might know them through the work you've done or open source communities or stuff like that.
[00:54:08] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah. I think for you it's different that, that it's the code from the client, right? Mm-hmm. Like if you're an indie developer, you have your own project. Yeah.
Then you give away your baby that brings in your salary. Yeah. And if somebody gets that code and. Ubs it in a way, you know, uh, and this is doom thinking, right? Like, yeah, it's, it's definitely, um, probably the hiring process or maybe mm-hmm. Maybe hiring somebody that you've worked with before that, you know, like it's almost a friend.
He would,
[00:54:32] Tim Condon: exactly. Yeah. I think like that's, and that's another great thing about going to conferences or being involved in the community or doing meetups and stuff like that, is that you can build those relationships and get to know people. And that when it comes to the point of you're working on an indie app and you want to hire someone to work on some features, is that you'll probably know who you wanna hire.
You might have someone in mind, you might know all the people doing indie work or wanna do some contract work and stuff because you've met 'em at conferences and you kind of got to know them a little bit. And once you've kind of built that kind of initial relationship, it's a lot easier to trust someone than someone random you've met off the internet who just sent you an email.
[00:55:06] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, totally. So, and your company quite evolved. Um, how does it influence your work life balance? Because if you hire more employees, it's more depth. Mm-hmm. It's more, mm-hmm. Uh, things to worry about. Mm-hmm. Potentially you scale up your clients, you have so much more on your plate. Did it affect your, your, your, your personal life, your Yeah, it definitely does.
[00:55:31] Tim Condon: Um, running your own company is hard work. Like no, like, no. Getting around it, like, uh, building your own app is hard work. There's no getting around it. Like,
[00:55:41] Antoine van der Lee: you work 60 hours do not have to having to work 40 hours. Yeah, exactly. You
[00:55:45] Tim Condon: have to put in the ground, especially at the start, is that you have to put in that hard work.
There's no shortcuts to building a successful company, building a successful app, building anything successful. It's like you have to actually put in the effort. Um, and it's, it's part of, it's a calculated risk of like, okay, well I know that for the first year I'm gonna have to work more than I probably would want to or would like to.
But if you're doing something that you enjoy and you're passionate about, it's a lot easier to. To work those slightly longer hours and stuff. Um, in terms of work life balance, you have to, um, actually be proactive about it. 'cause it's very easy. Um, depends on your life as well, but it's very easy to keep working until like midnight without thinking about it.
And then it's like, oh, I haven't like, gone outside today or spoken to anyone or seen my family or seen my friends and stuff like
[00:56:35] Antoine van der Lee: that. Does does that still happen to you these days?
[00:56:37] Tim Condon: Uh, occasionally. I mean, I, I'm in a difficult position where my clients are all over the world. Tim, I, I've seen you working at a conference while we had Well, so the conferences are an interesting thing because.
I do 10, 15 conferences a year. Yeah. If I wasn't working at those conferences, I'd never get any work done. So I have to kind of work at conferences anyway. Okay.
[00:56:54] Antoine van der Lee: Okay. Fair point.
[00:56:55] Tim Condon: Um,
[00:56:56] Antoine van der Lee: that was a great escape. Yeah, it was a great escape. Yeah.
[00:56:59] Tim Condon: Um, but yeah, you have to be proactive about maintaining a good work life balance.
You know, make sure you go to the gym, make sure you get outside, make sure you walk your dog or whatever it is that you do to relax. Don't just work because you will burn out. Um,
[00:57:12] Antoine van der Lee: and the, the company name Broken Hands, does that mean that you're constantly spending that money or
[00:57:17] Tim Condon: has that some
[00:57:18] Antoine van der Lee: something to do with
[00:57:19] Tim Condon: somebody else in your
[00:57:19] Antoine van der Lee: life
[00:57:20] Tim Condon: or?
Nope. Uh, so broken hands. So I set up the company originally with a friend of mine. Um, I ended up just doing it on my own, but we set up, when we started talking about it, we wanted a name that was slightly fun, slightly memorable, not corporate, and like. Boring. And there's a heavy metal band called Broken Hands.
Oh. And we thought, that sounds fun. We'll have that. Uh, so that's where the name came from. And it's actually worked really well because two things. Number one, the logo, uh, which is like a hand that's kind of broken, looks very like the Swift logo, and people think it's deliberate and it's really not. It was completely coincidental that it looks like Swift logo.
Uh, and number two, it's a very memorable name. I get lots of people ask me, why is it called Broken Hands? Like, what's the meaning behind that? That's true. But people remember the name so that everyone knows what Broken Hands is. It's not like it's Tim Development Limited or whatever. It's broken hands.
It's kind of a fun name that people learn and remember and yeah, it's, it's getting out there. The company name's out there.
[00:58:20] Antoine van der Lee: It's almost like your Twitter handle somehow. I always remember that too, because it's, I think it's zero Xti. Yep. Right. Like, yeah. If you're developer, then. It resonates. Right? This is a nice, uh, marketing tip.
[00:58:32] Tim Condon: Uh,
[00:58:33] Antoine van der Lee: yeah, Tim,
[00:58:34] Tim Condon: I think you need to have, if you're trying to market stuff, the same with app names as well.
[00:58:38] Antoine van der Lee: Yeah.
[00:58:38] Tim Condon: Is you need something that's not boring. You need something that stands out or is kind of catchy. People will remember. Certainly people remember, certainly people can spell easily. Um, we increase the pressure now of the name that you
[00:58:49] Antoine van der Lee: pick for your
[00:58:50] Tim Condon: company, for your, you know, like, it's, it's so important.
You can change it though. If it doesn't work, you can change it.
[00:58:56] Antoine van der Lee: That's true. Yeah. Alright. And um, yeah, we're, we're, it's funny how we end with this question. It, it, it must have been in the beginning, but it's funny how that, how that flows. And, um, I always like to end an episode by thinking about what, what tip would you give to somebody that's currently listening?
Mm-hmm. And they have a side project they're working on and they're, I mean, the episode is full of tips already, right? Like go give that conference talk and such. But if there's one thing, what would you, what would you say to those that have a side project and dream of going independent? Take
[00:59:30] Tim Condon: the risk?
Like what is actually holding you back? Is it you're worried about not having money or is it worried about that you theoretically might lose money for a month? Can you cope with that? So I, I would like, you know, write down the pros and cons. Are you in a financial situation to be able to do it? Because frankly, like there are some people who might not be, if you, you're a single parent, you've got no savings and like you have to just work to put food on the table.
A actual job with a guaranteed income might be a bit better for you until you have the buffer where you can maybe spend a few hours working on stuff. But if, if you, in like, in a kind of a position where you can do it, you know, write down what the benefits are, write down what you want, and write down what's holding you back.
And it might be at that point when you've written all those things down, you're like, well actually this is a really easy decision for me because like we've said throughout the episode, the risk is very low. Try doing part-time if you can, because that makes it even lower and very easy to switch back. Uh, and just give it a go and try it.
And if it doesn't work, then take it as a learning experience. No one's gonna, um, critique you for trying and failing. Um,
[01:00:41] Antoine van der Lee: that's, that's also right, like make sure you have that way back. Mm-hmm. Either by knowing your job market or by starting with one day a week. Yeah. So you still have that four days week income.
[01:00:52] Tim Condon: Mm-hmm.
[01:00:53] Antoine van der Lee: Great tip. And I, I feel like it's, um, aligning very well with what we've discussed. I think so, yeah. Your, uh, your, your in the journey definitely consists of many decision points where you dare to make that step on, on stage, giving that talk, hire your employee, going on that, that insecure vapor journey.
Mm-hmm. Um, absolutely. Great. Uh, thanks a lot for, for joining me today. If somebody wants to follow you, where, where can they find, find you? I, I told the Twitter head already. Yeah. I mean, I'm XX
[01:01:22] Tim Condon: Tim on pretty much all of the social media so he can come find me there. Uh, and then yeah, broken hands dot I or Tim c Do Dev are my two sites.
[01:01:29] Antoine van der Lee: Amazing.
[01:01:30] Tim Condon: Thanks a lot,
[01:01:30] Antoine van der Lee: Tim.
[01:01:30] Tim Condon: Thanks for having me. It's been awesome.
[01:01:33] Antoine van der Lee: That's it for this episode. Every indie journey is unique and you might find inspiration in other episodes as well. If you enjoyed the show, please like, subscribe or leave a rating on your favorite podcast platform. It helps me reach more creators.
Would dream of going Indie. Thanks for listening and see you next time.