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This Founder Is Building a Community of Developers

Today, I interviewed Rohit Lakhotia who runs a technical newsletter called “Hello, World!” read by 10000+ developers around the world. Read on to learn more about his work and vision.

Who are you and what motivated you to be an indie hacker?

It was never about being an indie hacker but rather about building products that people would like to use. Turns out there’s a term for it which people call indie hacker.

What are some of your previous projects?

I have built a few projects, which include a community platform, a no code domain portfolio creator, (have closed both of them) but the most recent project was a Ghost theme called Inkwell (yet to launch), it was focused on writers and creators. Was able to sell some copy of it through affiliates and cold DMs.

What are you building now?

Been playing with many projects, one is Hello, World! It’s a newsletter that helps you learn a new technical concept every week. Currently, I have more than 10,000+ readers which includes engineers from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.

I have also been working on a niche Job board which I have a lot of interest in, design engineer which is something I have been learning about. This is a project that I am working on with Shreyas Prakash.

There are also 2 more projects that are currently ongoing, one is an AI project and another is a niche tool. (Both are done but yet to launch). Looking at the list you can say that I should launch them before building anything new now.

Tell me more about Hello, World!

I was running a newsletter about book summaries before starting Hello, World! I was able to get it to a decent subscriber base which gave me confidence about starting a technical newsletter which is something in my niche.

The name came as all the developers might know. Hello, World is the first program that majorly all developer writes irrespective of the language they use.

It started just as a new concept every week and now we also send curated jobs to the readers every Saturday and we are also looking to move slowly into system design content as the next step in the content ideas.

What are your future goals with Hello, World!?

The next minor goal is to reach 100k readers for Hello, World! But the longer-term goal is to build a community of developers who support each other and grow together.

Are you planning to double down on any of your products i.e. focus on it much more than others?

At least for the next couple of months, will be doubling down on Hello, World! to automate things since that is something that has been working out for me. Other than that I will be focusing a lot on Unicorn Jobs.

Automate things so I have more time and fewer headaches.

You have Ex-Software Engineer in your bio. I'm assuming you left your job. Why?

I wanted to take a bet on building something of my own and wanted to take some time off to evaluate my next role. That’s a major reason for me to learn about Design Engineering and taking a keen interest in that field.

What's the next big thing you have in mind?

I have some more ideas, which will take time to build but won’t be working on them as I already am working on too many things. Mainly focusing on what’s working and scrape what’s not working. Go lean!

Anything else that you want to share with the world (might not be tech related)?

Touch grass and focus on your health and coffee as a market is rising!

EDIT: Rohit’s latest project - https://www.contenttoolkit.co/

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