Indie started as a side project in 2015, and went live in 2016 with Tempo. In August 2019, I switched to working full-time on Tempo in pursuit to make Indie a sustainable business. You can read more about it here — Going Indie.
The general spirit of independently building high-quality, useful products stays the same.
Following was originally published around May 2016.
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A builder is always building, experimenting with curious ideas. Some of those projects turn into useful products. Indie is home for such projects by Rahul Matta.
Indie Computing Labs is just me, Rahul Matta, building and selling software independently. I have built a lot of software over the years and it has always been gratifying. These days I mostly freelance to build iOS apps.
Indie is a setup to try new ideas that I find interesting and useful to build. It took me a while to come up with this name; but I figured it's best to imply what it's meant for: Curious ideas (aka side projects) that begin as small experiments (as in a lab), and if over time an idea feels right, launch it as an indie product. No gimmicks, no VC, no fancy accelerators; just enjoy my craft, build, and ship.
Indie is to provide a structure - legal, financial and social - for my projects. It is an ambitious goal for me to sell and sustain software products that I build. There are a bunch of ongoing experiments happening in the labs. My plan is to launch some of the good ones over time.
My Work Background
- Professionally making software since 1998.
- Spent too many years doing server-side development in Java.
- Had 2 tenures at Orbitz: first one was all about foo happening on server-side. Part 2 was all about break open the server-side foo to make the best iOS travel apps out there. We won some awards for it and even got inducted to the App Store Hall of Fame.
- Did some Ruby on Rails work with the talented founding team at Viewpoints.
- Have also been part of teams working on iOS apps at Cars.com, HotelTonight, TuneIn and few other apps here and there.
- Tried my hand at founding a dream too big or go home startup to sell grouped tours. Spent over a year building the full stack, fronted with a fancy iPad app. Crashed and burned to walk away with a lot of things I know not to do anymore :)