Being an indie developer is simple, actually.
You update this. You build that. You ship. You look at it a week later and think — hmm. Something's off. Then you fix it.
That's the whole loop.
This time it was the HadisKu website.
HadisKu is my app. A hadis library — 75,000+ hadis from 14 Imam, free, no ads, no subscriptions. I built it because I wanted it to exist. That's the only reason. No business plan. No target market. Just: this should exist, and I'm the one who can make it.
The app itself felt right. Dark, quiet, focused. The kind of thing you open at night before sleep to read something that actually means something.
The website didn't feel like that at all.
It was fine. Informative. It told you what HadisKu was. But it didn't feel like HadisKu. It felt like a readme. And I kept closing my laptop slightly annoyed about it, for months, without doing anything.
Then one weekend I just... did something.
No plan. Just a feeling.
I didn't sit down with a mood board or a color theory document.
I sat down and asked: what does HadisKu feel like?
Dark. Quiet. A little bit like opening an old book. Gold on the edges, like the border of a manuscript. Arabic text that actually looks like Arabic text, not a font that happens to support it.
So that's what I built toward. A dark background the color of a room at 3am. Gold as the accent — not flashy gold, old-manuscript gold. A headline font rooted in Arabic typography. And the first thing you see on the page? Not a description of the app. A hadis. Bukhari No. 1.
Before you read a single word about what HadisKu is, you've already read something from it.
That felt right.
The old site told you. The new one shows you.
That's the difference, honestly.
The old one said: "HadisKu is an app with 75,000 hadis from 14 Imam."
The new one just... puts the hadis in front of you. Live, from the database. Arabic text. Indonesian translation. Right there on the landing page.
You don't need to install anything to know what it is. You already felt it.
The question nobody asks about indie work
When you're building alone, you make every call.
The color. The font. The copy. Whether to add the noise texture on the background (yes) or skip it because nobody will notice (they won't, but I will). Whether the card hover animation lifts 2px or 3px.
Every single thing is yours.
That's freedom. Real freedom, not the motivational-poster kind. You answer to nobody. If something looks wrong, you change it. If something looks right, you keep it. No approval needed. No committee.
But it's also all yours when it's bad. When the site looks off for six months and you keep closing your laptop slightly annoyed — that's yours too. Nobody's going to fix it for you.
So: is that a burden or a blessing?
Honestly, both. At the same time. Always.
I think that's just what indie development is. You carry the whole thing. The weight and the freedom are the same object. You can't separate them.
And sometimes on a random weekend, you just pick it up and do the thing you'd been putting off.
The website looks better now.
On to the next thing.
HadisKu — Kitab Hadis 14 Imam. Free, no ads, no subscriptions.
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HadisKu Web
