#177 – Mastering the Lifestyle-First Approach to Indie Hacking with Daniel Vassallo

**Courtland Allen** (0:07)
What's up everybody, this is Courtland from indiehackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers Podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I tried 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 in 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're 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 Hacker's account, and I went back to the earliest comment that you've ever made, which was on February 27th of 2019 So this is right after you left your job at Amazon. And I posted something asking everybody 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 upvotes.
And you said, I want to work on my own terms, doing the things that intrinsically motivate me.

**Daniel Vassallo** (1:58)
Yeah, that's, 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 more I'm going to get promoted, no matter how many more raises I'm going to get, no matter how much more money I'm going to be making, my lifestyle was unlikely to change significantly or to move closer to one that better matches my preferences, which I started to realize that my ideal lifestyle is one where I have lots of control on what I work on, sort of choosing from where to work on, choosing what not to work on, something that in a typical career, you're typically restricted. So I had started searching, and it took me probably a couple of years, two or three years, until I managed to take the plunge and sort of abandon a career that by every measure, by all metrics, was succeeding. You know, I was getting promoted. I was very much in high regard at Amazon. Everyone was telling me a very bright future. I was getting encouraged to stay. They were rewarding me financially extremely well, way beyond my wildest expectations. Basically, I managed to get to know many people quite closely that had been there either for a long time at Amazon or sort of similar big tech companies.
And to be completely honest, I really didn't like their lifestyles, and I started wondering for myself, is this it? Is this what I'm going to be doing for the next 10 years, 20 years? I had just had two kids, so I was sort of raising a small, a young family. I really didn't want to sort of be a person who, you know, leaves home before everyone wakes up. You know, you're a life home as soon as, almost as everyone else is going to sleep, right? You're exhausted. Even if you manage to work just a 40-hour week in that type of career, you're typically just mentally drained, right? It sort of takes all the energy out of you.
So, long story short, and we will dive more into the details, I think. I pretty much left at the beginning of 2019 in February without any concrete plans, actually, of what I was going to be doing. I was extremely lucky. I think I had a very healthy amount of savings. I had managed to save about over five years worth of expenses. So, that gave me some peace of mind to spend some time exploring and experimenting and figuring things out. And yeah, that's what I did. And maybe we'll sort of go into some of the details of how that turned out to be about a year and a half later.