"Twitter is a great source of ideas, as people complain a lot about problems they have in their daily lives."

Gabriel Schemoul
Gabriel Schemoul
Indie maker

Gabriel is an indie maker, fully embracing the build-in-public mentality. His current focus is Publicly.so, a project to help builders get better product feedback.

Besides building his product, Gabriel is also active on Twitter where he has built a following by interacting with the community and sharing his daily progress. Some of this work has already paid off as +140 people from the community have joined Publicly.so while it is still in beta.

Tweet announcing Publicly Beta

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What is your process for starting a new project? How do you decide on an idea to pursue?

I have new ideas almost every day. Twitter is a great source of ideas, as people complain a lot about problems they have in their daily lives. For example, for my current project Publicly.so, I read several times people wanting to get feedback from their users and that they were unable to find a great and cheap solution for that.

What is your tech stack (languages, frameworks, services, os, devices, etc.) and why?

At first, I wanted to use no-code tools like Webflow, but I was too limited for what I wanted to do. So I decided to re-learn to code (I used to be a web developer a few years ago).

Today, my stack is Next.js with Firebase. I’ve seen a lot of my Twitter friends use this framework, so I decided to learn it and use it too.

For now, I’m going to only develop a web app, but in the future, I want to build a native app.

In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?

In the last five years, I’ve improved my personal/work life balance a lot. All thanks to my girlfriend who really wanted us to have a normal life, even if I needed to work a lot on my projects. So I had to work smarter during my working time so I can spend a lot of time with her.

We also moved from Paris to Barcelona a few months ago. That was a great decision because the quality of life is better here. And, as we can work from anywhere in the world, it would be dumb not to move to a place where we feel good.

Interesting

In this section, I (Mat) share a few comments and links I found especially interesting about today's guest.

  • Gabriel often shares his daily progress on Twitter. Follow to see how his project grows day by day.
  • How Gabriel has built a Twitter following by sharing and interacting with the community.