“I’d rather build something that ten people love than something a million people just use.”
Lukas Weber grew up in a suburb of Munich, the son of a mechanical engineer and a primary school teacher. He was the kid who took apart his Game Boy to fix the screen and built a rudimentary weather station with an Arduino at 14. After a Bachelor's in Mechatronics, he moved to Berlin for a Master's in Engineering at TU Berlin, where he fell in love with the city's startup energy and cheap rent (back then). His first side project was a newsletter about urban mobility that attracted 200 subscribers and then died. The second was a tiny API that let developers generate PDF invoices – it made €200/month for a year before he got bored. Now, at 28, he works as a backend engineer for a mid-sized SaaS company while pouring his evenings into a no-code automation service he calls ‘FlowBridge’ – a retainer-based offering where he builds Zapier-like workflows for local bakeries, cafes, and small e-commerce shops. He has three potential customers lined up but hasn’t closed any yet. His biggest constraint is time: the day job demands 40+ hours a week, and he’s often too drained to market himself. He recently decided to kill two other half-built projects (a habit tracker app and a restaurant menu scraper) to focus on FlowBridge. That decision took him three weeks of agonizing spreadsheets. He tracks every euro from his side project in a Google Sheet, reinvesting 50% into tools (Retool, Bubble, a cheap landing page builder). Money is a tool for freedom, not status – he still wears the same Uniqlo hoodie from four years ago and bikes everywhere. Lukas is skeptical of hype cycles (he ignored crypto, retreats from AI discourse) and believes in slow, sustainable growth. He’s read ‘Rework’ three times and quotes it often. His social life orbits around a small group of indie makers he met at a Berlin hackathon – they now co-organize a monthly meetup. He has no romantic partner; his last relationship ended because he coded through too many date nights. He dreams of hitting €3k MRR so he can quit his day job and spend a month working from a hostel in Chiang Mai. But he’s also scared – scared that he’ll fail at sales, scared that he’ll miss the stability of a salary. Every morning, he checks his side project dashboard first thing, hoping the numbers have moved.
A day in their life
7:30 – alarm, check side project dashboard (revenue, new signups) while still in bed. 8:00 – filter coffee, quick glance at Hacker News and Product Hunt. 8:45 – bike 20 minutes to office. 9–12 – focused coding on day job features, with one 10-minute break to stretch. 12–12:45 – lunch at desk, reading three indie maker newsletters and replying to Twitter DMs. 1–5 – meetings (stand-up, sprint planning, one-on-one with manager), mixed with code reviews. 5:15 – bike to bouldering gym, climb for 1.5 hours. 7 – home, shower, heat up prepped dinner while listening to an episode of The Bootstrapped Founder. 8–10 – side project work: building a new Zapier integration or writing documentation. 10–10:30 – wind down with a chapter of ‘The Mom Test’ or a documentary. 11 – lights out.
Lifestyle
Lukas lives in a shared apartment in Neukölln with a rotating cast of flatmates. His room is half office – a standing desk, a whiteboard covered in flowcharts, and a shelf of engineering textbooks next to a bouldering chalk bag. Mornings start with a strong filter coffee while checking yesterday’s side project metrics – he tracks conversion rates and email signups obsessively. After the day job, he either heads to the bouldering gym (three times a week) or meets a friend for a cheap döner and a co-working session at a café. He meal-preps on Sundays (lentil curry, quinoa bowls) to save money and time. Financially, he’s disciplined: 50% of side income goes into a separate account for future business expenses, 20% to travel, and the rest to his modest lifestyle. He avoids subscriptions he doesn’t need, uses the library for books, and bikes everywhere. Social life is a mix of indie-maker meetups (he co-organizes a monthly ‘Berlin Builders’ gathering) and quiet nights with a few close friends playing board games or watching documentaries.
Work life
By day, Lukas is a backend engineer at a 250-person SaaS company that builds workflow automation for HR teams. His stack is Python, Django, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes. He works four days in the office, one remote. His team is young and remote-friendly, but there’s pressure to ship features fast and keep uptime high. He spends about 60% of his day coding, 20% in stand-ups and code reviews, and 20% in Slack threads about tech debt. He often uses lunch breaks to read indie maker newsletters or sketch out side project ideas on his phone. The day job is stable and pays the bills, but he sees it as a means to an end – it funds his side projects and gives him health insurance. He’s careful not to let burnout creep in, so he sets hard boundaries: no after-hours work unless there’s a production incident. Coworkers know he has a side hustle and some are curious, but he keeps the details vague to avoid awkward conversations about ‘why aren’t you working on our product?’
Relationships
Lukas is close with two university friends (also engineers) who run their own side projects – they meet every Thursday at a pub in Kreuzberg to share wins and vent. His parents live near Munich; he calls his mother every Sunday and visits twice a year. No romantic partner currently – his last relationship ended partly because he spent too many evenings coding. He finds community and validation in the indie maker Twitter sphere, where he follows 150+ builders and occasionally gets encouraging replies. A handful of those online connections have become genuine friends he’s met IRL at conferences. He also respects a former university professor who now runs a boutique consultancy – that professor’s advice on ‘build in public’ shaped his approach.
How they decide
Lukas is research-heavy but then impulsive in execution. He’ll spend two weeks reading case studies, comparing pricing models, and analyzing competitors before deciding on a new feature. Once he decides, he moves fast – he’ll code a prototype over a weekend and launch it unpolished. He rarely asks for opinions during the research phase, preferring to trust his own analysis. But for decisions about marketing copy or positioning, he’ll seek feedback from his two trusted friends. He is strongly influenced by data (conversion rates, churn) and by the stories of successful indie makers he follows, but he consciously avoids comparison traps. Major life decisions (career, location) are made slowly, with pro/con lists and a spreadsheet of financial projections.
How they sound
Lukas speaks in a calm, measured tone with a slight Bavarian accent. He uses technical jargon naturally but also drops startup slang like ‘ship’, ‘iterate’, ‘MVP’, and ‘traction’. He tends to understate his achievements – ‘I made a few hundred bucks last month’ when it’s actually €800. He avoids hype words like ‘disrupt’, ‘synergy’, or ‘revolutionize’. His sentences are often broken by thoughtful pauses and ‘um’ as he mentally edits his phrasing. He’s sarcastic but not mean, and laughs easily when self-deprecating. In conversations about his side project, he’ll quickly pivot to asking the other person about their work – he’s genuinely curious but also slightly insecure about being seen as bragging.
- Age: 28
- Location: Berlin, Germany
- Occupation: Software Engineer (backend, day job)
- Income: $65,000 (day job $55k + side project $10k)
- Education: Master's in Engineering (Technical University of Berlin)
- Company size: 250 employees (SaaS scale-up)
- Years in role: 3
Personality traits
- Resourceful – finds workarounds with tape and code
- Pragmatic – prefers a scrappy MVP over a perfect plan
- Restless – always itching to start the next experiment
- Self-critical – often doubts his marketing abilities
- Curious – reads outside his domain (psychology, small biz finance)
- Disciplined but procrastinates – logs 10 hours/week on side project but sometimes wastes evenings on YouTube
- Frugal – tracks every euro spent on tools and subscriptions
- Skeptical of hype – ignores crypto, AI bros, and get-rich-quick schemes
- Enjoys tinkering – loves optimizing a Zapier automation for 10 seconds saved
Goals
- Launch a productized no-code automation service (flat fee, monthly retainer) for local Berlin small businesses within 6 months
- Reach €2,000 MRR from side projects by the end of the year
- Learn effective sales and copywriting – he knows he’s weak at marketing
- Transition to full-time indie work within 2 years, without taking outside funding
- Travel to Vietnam and Thailand for 4–6 weeks, working remotely from hostels
- Build a small but engaged community of indie builders in Berlin (20–30 regulars at meetups)
Problems & frictions
- Chronic time scarcity – day job drains energy, leaving only 1.5–2 hours of focused side project work per weekday
- Decision paralysis – he has three half-built side projects and keeps switching between them, afraid of committing to the wrong one
- Imposter syndrome about selling – he can code anything but freezes when writing landing page copy or reaching out to potential customers
- Loneliness of solo building – he misses the camaraderie of a startup team and sometimes feels isolated in his evenings
- Berlin rent is eating into his savings – despite frugality, his share of the WG costs €850/month, leaving less for reinvestment
- Health neglect – he skips runs when side project deadlines loom, leading to lower energy and back pain from long sitting hours
Values
- Creative expression
- Learning
- Flexibility
- Independence
- Practicality
Interests
- No-code tools (Bubble, Zapier, Retool)
- Productized services (micro-SaaS, automation consulting)
- Indie podcasts (Indie Hackers, The Bootstrapped Founder, Syntax FM)
- Minimalist productivity (GTD, bullet journaling)
- Bouldering
- DIY electronics (Arduino, Raspberry Pi)
Media habits
- Daily Hacker News and Product Hunt scanning
- Subscribes to 8 Substack newsletters on bootstrapping and no-code
- Listens to indie podcasts during commute and while cooking
- Follows 150+ indie makers on Twitter (X), posts progress updates weekly
- Reads technical documentation for fun (PostgreSQL, n8n, Supabase)
- Avoids mainstream tech news (TechCrunch, Wired) – finds them too hype-driven