How to build a product when you've escaped the war, lost your job, and trying not to die in a new country

My answer is: I don't know. Actually, I'm not giving a fuck right now.

If anybody ever reads this I wanna say that the start of the journey wasn't as super fun as any of the startupers could imagine.

The year 2022 was really harsh for me. More than you could think. I was living in Kyiv when russia started the war and attacked my home.

I've spent 3 months in a small city in the west of Ukraine, being responsible for the safety of my 2 dogs, wife, and myself.

When things got more or less stable I went back to Kyiv planning a long-term evacuation from the country.

Long-story short in this part: I've managed to move from Ukraine to Poland with all the family. But the company that I've worked for remotely decided to cut my business unit.

So here I am.
November 2022.
New country.
I don't know anything.
I've lost my job and I've got money for ~2 months of living.

For sure the first thing I made — I needed to secure myself and my family. So I found the job (pretty nice one, I'm happy that I have interesting tasks and valuable product I'm working on).

Now when I'm safe I can't spend all other time on building my future.

I was always experimenting with startups but never took them seriously. This moment is definitely the milestone in life when I need to decide.

And I've made my decision to move forward with the ideas I believe in and ideas that bring value to real people and don't follow others' dreams only do jobs for other people.

I was a freelancer myself for more than 8 years before joining the companies and switching from freelance design to product management.

So I've started thinking that way. I went back to my roots thinking of what I know and I how I could help others.

That's how I came up with the idea of building an extremely simple yet powerful platform for running your freelance business hassle-free.

I wanted to help people like me reduce the time taken to support all the processes around client management, papers and communication.

The focus is to help you to create and manage invoices, contracts, and proposals. And manage your customers as well.

As I'm not a coder I'm building it with no-code (bubble). I've never done it before so it takes some time to go through the whole learning curve of the no-code solution.

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Right now I'm still finishing the basic version of the product.

Yet there's no happy ending of how I'm getting my ramen profit MRR and everyone leaving a happy life.

I'm still fighting and trying to balance between a full-time job and indie hacking. I have a $0 income because the product is not even on the market.

But I truly believe that consistent work and honesty will bring results in the future.

I would be glad if you can check out the landing page https://onigiri.one or follow me here (or on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kimelnick) to ride along.

I'm opened to any feedback and help.

I would love to speak in DMs / email or anywhere else with all of you who are freelancing to know your current problems better so I can bring you more valuable products.

Cheers 💪