Corey Zoot (Portfolio of Projects)

Corey Zoot spent 11 years climbing the ladder at a high-growth social enterprise called Demagi, joining as employee number two and building it into a 130-person company where he served as CTO. But managing 30 engineers, chairing meetings, and reviewing architecture docs pulled him away from what he loved most: coding and tight user feedback loops. In 2016, he took a sabbatical to design his ideal life. The conclusion: he wanted to earn money, enjoy the work, and maintain financial independence without the stress of managing people. He stayed part-time at Demagi and began freelancing—a safety net that would define his entire indie hacking journey.

In March 2017, three days before his own wedding, Corey realized there was no good tool to auto-generate place cards from a guest list. His wife wanted to write them by hand for a personal touch, but Corey knew better. After the wedding, this small frustration became his first indie project. He built PlaceCard.me in a week or two—a simple app that takes a spreadsheet of guests and tables, then generates printable, designable place cards. It was intentionally unsexy: no support team needed, no mission-critical infrastructure, no scale-dependent revenue. Just a product that solved a real problem.

For six months, PlaceCard.me made almost nothing. His goal was deliberately tiny: just one dollar in six months. He blogged about the journey, cross-posting to Medium, Hacker News, Free Code Camp, and Indie Hackers. He experimented with Google Ads and forum participation, always slipping in backlinks. His pricing started at ten dollars, crashed to five, then fell to one dollar—anything to break the seal. Eventually, around month five or six, it crept onto page two of Google for obscure keywords like "wedding place cards." One dollar a week became two, then three. The critical moment came when he nearly quit. Instead, he sat down and rationally eliminated every reason why the product couldn't work: people did pay for similar templates on Etsy for eight dollars, so the market existed. It had to be traffic. He kept pushing.

PlaceCard.me's growth was almost entirely organic. By year one (2017), it made about $800. Year two jumped to ten thousand dollars. Year three hit twenty thousand. Corey kept his day-job-lite arrangement—working part-time at Demagi and freelancing—which removed financial pressure to chase aggressive growth. He raised prices, weakened the free tier, and added adjacent products like table cards. He spent only 450 hours in 2019 on the entire operation.

But he also built Pegasus in parallel, starting around late 2016 as a concept and launching in June 2019. Pegasus is a Django SaaS template ($200 one-time, one-year license) that lets developers start projects weeks ahead of boilerplate. He built an email list while working on earlier versions, so on launch he had warm leads. He made his first sale within days—a stark contrast to PlaceCard.me's six-month grind. Pegasus now does $500–1,000 monthly but has been flat since launch because he hasn't aggressively marketed it. He's spending time on other, shinier projects.

The core tension in Corey's strategy: he deliberately chose breadth over depth, building multiple projects rather than doubling down on the highest-potential winners. He values enjoyment and variety over maximum optimization. When a project gets boring or he masters it, he moves on. This shiny-object syndrome is something he acknowledges and even jokes about, but it's intentional—he's wired for building and shipping, not grinding.

Corey's portfolio of projects generates approximately $26,000 in annual profit across all ventures, with PlaceCard.me and Pegasus as the main contributors. His goal, stated at the start of the interview, was to reach financial independence by 2023 and never have to work again. He's well on his way, having cut his reliance on Demagi and freelancing. He remains transparent about his numbers, time investments, and reasoning, publishing his journey across blogs and platforms like Indie Hackers. His philosophy is deceptively simple: keep expectations low, stay stress-free, and keep building things that are fun. Most founders fail because they quit too early; Corey has structured his life and projects such that quitting is not an option—not because it's forced, but because the game itself is the prize.