Day 1: Introducing OneNomad

I'm 40, in debt, and just back from a layoff. I'm building a portfolio of indie products on weekends so I never have to depend on a single employer again. This is the plan.

Matt StvartakApril 26, 20265 min read

I'm 40. $0 in retirement. In debt. Just back from a layoff.

Building a portfolio of indie products on nights and weekends so I never have to depend on a single employer again.

This is day 1 of doing it in public.

Why public

Honestly? If no one's watching, the easy thing is to skip a weekend. When even one stranger is paying attention, the easier thing is to ship.

Also I'm not great at marketing. I love building. Documenting what I ship is the lightest marketing motion I can sustain. Hiring someone is the alternative and I can't afford that until products earn.

And selfishly, I learn faster watching other indie founders work than reading polished playbooks years later. Hopefully somebody else gets the same out of watching me.

What OneNomad is

OneNomad is a portfolio of independent software products I'm building solo. Not a single-product startup trying to scale. Multiple small products, each finding its own audience, the collection acts as the company.

The bet: any single product has a good chance of failing. Build 5 to 10 and the odds at least one hits go way up. Some become cash cows. Some get sold. Some die. The collection compounds.

Pieter Levels and a bunch of other indie founders have walked this path. Slower than VC unicorn-chasing. But you keep creative control and there's no exit timeline you didn't choose.

What's shipped so far

Built and shipped, all on weekends, in roughly the last two months:

SnapTab. Receipt scanning + bill splitting mobile app. Live on the App Store and Google Play. Uses Gemini Vision to read receipts, then helps you split the bill via QR code payment requests and SMS. Free. Pro tier ships this week.

Dungeon Diary. Campaign management for D&D Dungeon Masters. Live in beta with paid tiers. Free covers all the structural stuff (campaigns, NPCs, encounters, world building, lore wiki). Pro adds AI credits for generating NPCs, quests, and character portraits. $79 lifetime Founder's Pass capped at the first 100 buyers.

FieldLedgr. Quote-to-cash for small trades businesses. Mobile-first because tradies live on their phones, not desktops. Estimates, e-signatures, invoicing, payments, follow-ups. Live web with paid tiers (the first OneNomad product to charge). Mobile coming.

Thyme to Plan. Meal planning, recipe management, grocery list generation. Web app live. Mobile app in app store review.

Engram. Open source MCP server. An intelligent memory system AI assistants use to remember things across sessions. ~1,000 NPM downloads.

Persona. Open source MCP server. Per-product brand voice profiles other tools can read for consistent voice across content generation.

Cortex. Internal MCP server for personal work productivity. Pulls from Confluence, Jira, Notion, Slack, calendar, and email to surface "what should I be working on" at my day job. Not currently public. Might open-source later.

What's in flight

Outpost is a marketing operations platform for the OneNomad portfolio. Internal tool for now, possibly a product later. Built on Next.js, Payload, Neon, and a mix of AI providers via OpenRouter. Seven modules planned: mention monitoring (Scout), ASO automation (Compass), pre-sell campaign launches (Pitch), visual content generation (Postcard), weekly analytics digests (Journal), content publishing (Dispatch), and live build progress tracking (Trail).

Tonight Compass shipped its first two phases. Phase A pulls Apple App Store listing snapshots for my own products on a daily cron. Phase B added competitor tracking, so I can paste a competitor's App Store URL and Compass starts pulling their listing daily too, deduped by content hash. Manual "run now" buttons landed for every cron across the platform so I'm not waiting on Vercel's schedule when iterating. Phase C, AI-powered ASO recommendations comparing my listings against competitors, is in progress on a branch.

The current focus is monetizing what's already shipped. Pro tiers on Dungeon Diary and SnapTab first. Outpost is the leverage layer that makes marketing the rest of the portfolio possible without me grinding 5 hours a week per product on Pinterest pins and tweet threads.

What you can expect from this blog

A post here every week or two. More when I'm shipping a lot, less when the day job is heavy. Topics rotate:

What I shipped (when something goes live)
What I learned (architecture calls, mistakes, surprises)
Real numbers (revenue, downloads, retention. The actual picture, not just highlights.)
The economics (what these products actually cost to run)
The personal stuff (layoffs, money, when do I quit. All of it.)

Not promising a posting schedule. I'd rather miss it than fake it.

What you can expect from the products

I build real software with the intent to charge for it. Some products have free tiers that are actually free forever. Some are paid only. None of them are "free trial that turns into a hostage situation."

Pricing stays defensible. Close to or below comparable tools. I'd rather earn indie credibility than squeeze every dollar.

If a product fails (some will), I'll sunset it honestly. Refunds. Clear data export. Not just a silent 404 one day. That's a commitment.

Why now

Why today and not 3 months ago or 6 months from now?

Tonight I shipped Dungeon Diary pricing, the SnapTab Pro tier spec, the OneNomad blog you're reading, the Outpost architecture, and the first two Compass phases inside Outpost (ASO snapshot tracking + competitor monitoring, with manual run-now triggers across every cron). FieldLedgr already had paid tiers (first OneNomad product to charge), but tonight is the first time the portfolio actually feels like a portfolio instead of a pile of side projects. Going public when there's something real on the table makes sense.

Also just started a new day job after a string of layoffs. Day job pays the bills while the portfolio earns. The plan is to ship enough indie revenue over the next 18 to 24 months to make the day job optional. Going public sets the timer where I can't quietly back out of it.

Not selling the dream though. The dream might not work. Portfolio might not generate enough. Audience might never grow past zero. Timing might be off. I'd rather find out in public than tell myself privately I'm "almost there."