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This Founder Builds Power Grids (And Many More Things)

Today, I interviewed Zelkjo Savic, an experienced C++ developer with multiple startup failures and successes. He’s now working as the head of engineering for a startup building power grids and also building an analytics app for Apple Vision Pro as an indie hacker. Read on to know more.

Who are you?

I’ve been a software developer for about 12 years. I started as a developer building cloud infrastructure for banking systems in C++.

What are some of your previous projects?

Throughout my career I have tried different kinds of startups, being either co-founder or having shares. I had a lot of failed startups and also a couple of successes with big exits.

What motivated you to be an indiehacker?

The biggest motivation for being an indie hacker is the freedom to implement the idea that I would like and to push it. But my position is still different from the average indie hacker in the sense that I quickly iterate ideas and push them as fast as I can.

What are you building now?

At the moment, I am working on infrastructure software for Apple Vision Pro specifically, I’m working on building an analytics software. With that, I also am working in a startup as head of engineering building power grids.

How do you manage your side projects with your work in the power grids?

I am lucky that I do not need to fill up hours, I work goal-oriented, so it’s important to reach a goal not the hours in my work. I have the following split: I work from the morning and afternoon on my main work and then proceed to my solo apps projects. It’s important to note that highly focused work sessions are important to achieve productive work.

In the last 12 years, what has been the biggest change in the tech industry?

Definitely the AI sector and the possibility what a single dev can do where you used to need a team, you literally can come up with design, text, and simple logic as is with prompts.

Tell me more about your failed startups.

The biggest issue was that we were developers who were not able to sell a product, not knowing what the market wanted and not being able to sell to the customer. In 2014 we tried to make something like Instagram’s real-time stories stream. From a technical perspective, everything worked, but our community and user base did not grow, so we basically went broke.

What is the biggest lesson that you’ve learnt from your failures?

First, try to sell, then build!

What are your future plans?

As of now, I am building an MVP for Apple Vision Pro analytics and I try to get a solid user base of developers. If that works out, I will push the project more, if not I will move to another one.

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

Yeah, I like to cook especially pasta and I have a dog. For people who start out working on new products to launch, try already selling them before you start building.

Cool Products I Found On X

It’s very difficult for new product makers to reach out to potential users. Now that I have 200+ newsletter subscribers and 1800+ followers on X, I have decided to support some new startups for free every week.

DISCLAIMER: I haven’t used most of these products. I am not vouching for their quality. You can check them out if you find something interesting. Also, this disclaimer is not applicable to the last product😜

• MangoSqueezy by Amit: OSS affiliate marketing platform

• Bunjucks by Alin: A different way to generate custom static websites fast

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