Right now, I have six ideas open in my head.
RoastRocket just got its first users and is politely asking for more attention. Sync Motion and Brida IT are actually paying rent. OrangeTable is trying to become the default invoicing tool for Austrian solopreneurs who hate spreadsheets. Alpine42 is… doing whatever Alpine42 is doing this week. And Marvin is still roasting codebases like a depressed android who has seen too much and would like to see less.
My brain feels like it went through a blender set to “indie hacker.”
This is not the glamorous startup story. This is the real one.
How Most Indie Hackers Actually Start (The Portfolio Trap)
Everyone tells you to pick one idea and go all in. Focus. Ship. Scale.
What actually happens is this:
You build something. It gets some traction or at least doesn’t die immediately. Then another idea appears. It looks interesting. You tell yourself you’ll just spend a weekend on it. Then another one shows up because apparently you can’t help yourself. Suddenly, you’re not running a company — you’re running a portfolio.
And the portfolio is slowly killing you.
I didn’t plan to become a multi-project founder. It just… happened. One project at a time. Like a very slow, very expensive form of self-harm.
The Current Situation (As Of This Week)
Here’s the portfolio, ranked by how much they’re currently destroying my focus:
RoastRocket: AI that brutally stress-tests startup ideas before you waste months building them. Five planets. Fifteen questions. One honest verdict. First users are in. They’re either impressed or deeply offended. Both are fine.
Sync Motion + brida it-solutions.: Industrial software for factories that actually makes money. OT/IT integration, monitoring, the kind of work that pays invoices instead of creating them. This is the responsible adult in the room.
OrangeTable: All-in-one office software for Austrian one-person businesses. Invoices, quotes, reminders, receipts. Basically, the tool I wish existed when I was drowning in admin work. Still early, but the direction feels right.
alpine42: My current AI systems experiment. I am the founder and the AI Systems Engineer, which is a fancy way of saying I’m building something and hoping it eventually makes sense to other people. Status: ambitious and slightly chaotic.
RoastedByMarvin: The depressed android persona that roasts code and architecture because apparently that’s what I do for fun now. Brain the size of a planet. Roasting your code anyway.
Six projects. One brain. Zero chance of feeling on top of any of them at the same time.
Brain Fry: The Real Indie Hacker Tax
The worst part isn’t the work. It’s the switching.
A typical day looks like this:
9:00 — Open RoastRocket support. Someone’s idea just got absolutely destroyed by the AI, and they’re mad about it. Fair.
9:47 — Suddenly remember I promised to fix an industrial protocol edge case in Sync Motion. Context switch. Brain makes unhappy noises.
10:15 — OrangeTable has a weird invoice calculation bug that only happens in Austria because, of course, it does. Switch again.
11:30 — Try to remember which project even has the feature I was supposed to ship this week. Open three different codebases. Close all of them. Open them again.
By 2 p.m., my brain has the consistency of warm yogurt.
This is the context switching tax. Every switch costs you 20-40 minutes of real productivity and some amount of your soul. Do this eight times a day, and you end up like me: functional, but only barely.
The worst moments are when you mix things up.
I once spent twenty minutes trying to remember why I had added a “roast” button to an industrial monitoring dashboard. I hadn’t. I was in the wrong project. My brain had just… given up and started hallucinating features across codebases.
Another time, I replied to a RoastRocket user with industrial terminology. They were very confused. I was very tired.
This is the part nobody talks about when they say “just build in public” or “ship fast.” They don’t mention that your brain will eventually start leaking between projects like a poorly isolated container.
Would I Do It Differently?
Probably not.
I like building things. I like solving different kinds of problems. I like the variety. But I would have built better mental guardrails earlier. I would have documented more aggressively from day one. And I probably would have killed one or two projects sooner than I did.
Or maybe not. It’s hard to say when your brain is currently running on three different codebases at once.
The Bottom Line
If you’re thinking about starting your first project: do it. Just know what you’re signing up for.
If you’re already running multiple projects and your brain feels like warm yogurt, you’re not broken. You’re just doing the indie hacker version of running a small conglomerate with no employees and no HR department.
The brain fry is real. The context switching tax is real. But so is the freedom to build whatever the hell you want, whenever you want, without asking anyone’s permission.
Some days, that feels worth it.
Most days, it just feels like a lot.
Either way, the projects keep going. And so do I.
Mostly.