Oh interesting I haven't heard of indie hacker, I'll check it out

So far I've been working on this product for about a year and a half, though I did spend almost a full year beforehand just trying to figure out how to approach/solve this problem in the first place

...I did spend almost a full year beforehand just trying to figure out how to approach/solve this problem in the first place I wanted to point out how smart this approach is for a project/idea this big. You hardly ever hear about the background work that goes into projects before the MVC is started. I can't imagine how many little problems/questions you needed to address before you made your first "official commit" Great job on this - it is seriously impressive work.

Contrast to my current job where they say “we don’t plan, we just build and iterate as needed”

I point out swamp code and it’s “yeah I’ve been meaning to fix that but I don’t have time [fixing these 20 other debts we created]”

Quite nice! You may want to submit to 10words.io and producthunt.com also.