Indie Worldwide: Anthony Castrio
Anthony offers valuable insights into the challenges and rewards of being a founder and provides tips for aspiring entrepreneurs.
Anthony Castrio
Anthony Castrio is a nomadic software engineer with a passion for helping others. He's traveled through two dozen countries in the last four years, getting things done from his laptop.
Recently, Anthony quit freelancing to focus on indie hacking full-time. Unfortunately, despite being a software engineer by trade, most of Anthony's indie businesses are almost no code. So this year, he's spent a lot of time "un-coding," ripping out things he'd coded in favor of no-code alternatives that have vastly simplified his life.
For the last four years, Anthony has been freelancing as a fractional CTO and software engineer for hire. Now that he's a full-time indie hacker, he's not coding much; instead, he's doing 80% of marketing tasks. Admittedly, Indie Worldwide is the farthest thing from an overnight success story - it's taken him years to grow it to its current size - but that doesn't bother him.
What can encourage more founders to tap into the startup community for advice or partnerships?
Joining the right community can instantly give you most of the benefits of a big audience.
It's the best part of Twitter in the form of a private community for indie hackers.
People unblock each other on whatever business problems they have. Sometimes that's helping debug an app. Sometimes it's making an intro or deciding to partner up.
Indie Worldwide is most useful for founders who are already launched, have some traction, and are looking to grow.
If you could have a superpower, what would it be?
As a nomad, teleportation would save me a lot of money on flights and make it much easier to visit home often.
What advice would you give to aspiring founders building online communities?
Plan for years, not months.
How many sick days have you taken in the past year?
Don't track them. Take off whenever I feel like I should.
Do you prefer cats or dogs?
Both are great.
What are the Pros and Cons of remote work?
If you travel too frequently, it can be hard to get any job done. That's a con, but it's a con you control.
It's hard to build a sense of local community if you don't stay in one place long enough to invest in any local community. So that's a con too.
But if you get energy from novelty, if you love to travel, if you want to save money, then there are a lot of pros.
What are the critical ingredients for a successful content creator?
Just be one thing at a time. It's easier to people to understand why they should follow you if you have a focused brand than if you try to do everything at once. Build a core audience, then expand.
Who are some of your biggest influences?
I love hearing about founders who've succeeded across multiple domains, but no particular people are coming to mind now.
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