In April 2025 Nomicly had the pleasure to welcome its first trainee/mentee, Maša. In this story you'll read Mašas thoughts on our journey together. It's been a pleasure Maša, all the best in your future endeavors and hope to hear from you soon!

> Robin

From Slovenia to Helsinki Seeking Indie Wisdom

I'm Maša, 23, a software developer from Slovenia. After graduation, I decided to take a gap year to figure out the next steps for me in life. While I've been working as a frontend developer, one of the plans for this year was also to go abroad. And because I like building side projects, I came to Helsinki as part of my Erasmus traineeship to make working on them my main quest for the past 3 months and to learn from Robin, because he does exactly what I aspire to do - a successful entrepreneur and indie hacker.

During my time here, I was working on launching 3 different projects of mine. I made the biggest progress regarding rapid development (idea to MVP and launch in 1-3 weeks), launch and marketing of my apps so far. I did market research, development, then started with the most important part - promoting, posting on forums, talking to potential customers, contacting leads, understanding their needs and perspectives, and iterating over and over again. The hard part and also the part where I made the progress for me was the marketing part because in software development, everything is pretty much straightforward, but when it comes to selling your product it's a whole different game, you are not sure what users really want and how to talk to them - there's no formula, and you are not sure if the product has market fit and a good long-term business model.

Each week, I had a meeting with Robin. I presented my progress and set tasks and goals for the next week that held me accountable. He was not only guiding me, but also giving me honest feedback on the things that I have done in the time since last meeting, sharing his own experience and probably saved me months of work where I would be going in the wrong direction or I would not be doing the right thing or procrastinating the thing that has the most impact in the specific phase of my work because he was asking me the right questions that made me rethink the whole thing and see it from different point of view. Robin pushed me out of my comfort zone the most when it came to marketing and getting my first users, so my ideas could actually make it out into the world and be tested in the real market.

I enjoyed the journey and got to experience full-time indie hacking, which was a rollercoaster with good and bad days - for example, wanting to quit when you don't see any results after almost two months and you lose the initial burst of motivation and momentum and you start questioning if the idea was ever that great in the first place. But then I had to remind myself why I started all of this and why I need to keep up the work. After hard work (80 commits and around 20 hours spent on marketing later), I saw the first Stripe notifications (one while writing this blog actually) that hit different, I could see my work paying off.

Indie-hacking sounds fun (especially with the build in public on X and vibe coding trends) but it's not so easy, it can be stressful as you carry everything on your shoulders and you have to be jack of all trades and also a master of all (development, selling…) to succeed. However, I still think that bootstrapping and a lean approach to trying out small online businesses (especially through fast idea testing) is a sustainable way to start.

I'm really happy I got to work with Robin as my mentor because he is humble and kind, always gave me honest feedback, and made things easier with a sense of humor. I also really appreciated the life lessons he shared, not just the professional advice. I didn't have a lot of expectations before I came, I just wanted to get better at doing things, but this has been the biggest step forward ever. I would do the whole exchange and mentoring experience again, because I definitely enjoyed the process and the time flew by quickly, and everything I've learned over the past few months will help me continue developing my projects and launching new SaaS ideas in the near future.

The story doesn't end here...