From Paperboy to President: The Indie Blueprint Inside Wings of Fire

It starts in a small coastal town—Rameswaram—where a boy, son of a boatman, sold newspapers before school and watched dreams rise in the heat shimmer off the sea.

Wings of Fire, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s autobiography, isn’t just the arc from poverty to the presidency. It’s a blueprint for anyone who’s ever shipped alone at night, started from scratch, or dared to dream something bigger than their station.

Start Where You Are

Before the rockets, before DRDO and ISRO, it was discipline. Grit. A childhood anchored in family, community, and the hunger to learn. Kalam writes about waking early to deliver newspapers, about teachers who shaped not just his thinking but his character. These weren’t motivational quotes—they were moments. Quiet ones.

Every indie builder knows the terrain. Shipping from dorm rooms, learning to code at night, building first products from scratch without a playbook. Big dreams don’t start in glass towers. They start in the margin between what’s expected and what you know is possible.

Rejection Is Not a Signal to Quit

Kalam didn’t get into the Air Force. His first dream—flight—ended with a rejection letter. He didn’t spiral. He recalibrated. He joined India’s fledgling space program, built its first hovercraft, and dove into propulsion science when few in the country knew what that even meant.

We’ve all been there. The startup that didn’t raise. The idea that no one understood. Sahil Lavingia’s Gumroad came out of a side project that failed. Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s Ness Labs rose from what didn’t work before. You pivot. You keep building. The rocket doesn’t launch the first time—and that’s fine.

Build With Others

Kalam never tried to be the genius in the corner. His memoir is filled with names—mentors like Vikram Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan, engineers and technicians who stayed late, failed together, and tried again. Nothing was solo. Every breakthrough came through collaboration, and mutual trust.

It’s easy to mythologize the indie hacker as a lone wolf. But even solo founders have a circle: users, friends, mentors, collaborators. Joel Gascoigne built Buffer on daily user feedback. Real momentum happens when you’re willing to be part of a team, even if you’re the only name on the About page.

Fail in Public

India’s first satellite launch failed. The SLV-3 didn’t reach orbit. Kalam doesn’t gloss over it. He walks you through it: the tension, the media attention, the team stepping forward to own the mistake.

Then? They fixed it. They flew again.

This is how indie founders survive: not by hiding failure but metabolizing it. Not every feature lands. Not every v1 converts. You learn, iterate, and ship again—without letting shame steer. The ones who stay in the game are the ones who stay visible through the worst of it.

Make It Bigger Than You

Kalam wasn’t chasing fame. Every milestone—missile development, satellite launches, policy work—was wired to a deeper mission: national self-reliance, public good, shared dignity. He didn’t build tech for the sake of tech. He built because he believed India could—and should—do more.

That north star changes everything. It’s what keeps you moving when no one claps. Founders working on climate tools, education access, regional infrastructure—they’re not always chasing exits. They’re chasing change.

And when the work gets heavy—and it will—that deeper purpose is what lets you outlast it.

The Indie Litmus Test

Ask yourself:

• Are you starting with what’s in front of you, or with what should be possible?

• Are you going it alone when you should be finding mentors and teammates?

• Are you willing to fail in public—and fix in public too?

• Does your idea lift more than just your name?

Wings of Fire doesn’t hand you a playbook. It hands you a mirror. It asks: what will you do when it’s hard, when no one believes in it yet, when the path doesn’t exist?

Because that’s where all the good stuff starts. In the invisible work. The small town. The tiny bet.

Catch fire. Then fly.