What is Reddit's opinion of
Indie Hackers?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
100 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
I interview successful e-commerce entrepreneurs. I don't have the numbers on what they net, but Nadeef grosses up to $10K/month, and ABS Pancakes grosses up to $25K/month.
You can also check out Indie Hackers interviews, they have hundreds of businesses that share their financials, some as high as $100K/year.
Hope that helps. Let me know what you think?
I saw this idea posted on Indie Hackers. Was it you who posted it on the "Ideas & Validation" group? Good luck on the idea btw.
edit: Nvm it is you. Link
We are cash positive though our costs are generally < $20 / month 😄. We're completely boostrapped right now and don't actually have salaries. We spoke more about this here: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/da7a4f5d63
Happy to answer more questions and would love any suggestions you have for us!
— Zaheer, Levels.fyi
Scam? No.
Idiot? Yes.
Let us speak plainly: this person is bringing literally nothing of value to the table. They lack even a basic vocabulary to adequately describe what they need/want.
"COMPUTER GENIUS", with "MAD computer skills" isn't how someone who is serious/competent describes a potential partner, it's how septuagenarians describe their 11 year old grandchild who sets up their WiFi and removes all the malware they got from downloading free Mahjong games.
The reality:
- There is no money to pay you up front.
- You will do 95% of the work, and be asked to split(the nonexistent) proceeds 50/50.
- You will have impossible things asked of you.
- Your "business partner" cannot spell or use correct grammar.
You want to see what the language of a serious SaaS founder looks like?
Go someplace like here: https://www.indiehackers.com
Read some of the posts/interviews with successful founders. Report back here and let us know if they sound anything like the author of this Craigslist gem.
Stripe is the way to go to manage SaaS subscription payments.
Don't worry about the legal, admin, and all that stuff for now. Focus on building a useful product that people want.
I would recommend you check out the Indie Hackers community: https://www.indiehackers.com/ , you'll find a lot of useful resources and most importantly a supportive community to help you on your journey.
Best of luck!
I'm 25 and if you asked me two years ago what idea I'd be working passionately on, I couldn't even give you an educated guess.
The best ideas come out of being exposed to problems. So, the more problems you are exposed to, the more potential $-making solutions you'll come across. Two years of deep exposure to my industry generated a ton of ideas for me to latch onto and test.
I suggest you just keep holding onto hope, and take jobs that are challenging and solve problems. Always keep looking for the next best thing until you know enough about something to come up with a good solution for it.
Also read: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses
Yeah, keepin' it real and providing honest insights into how things work is rare, IMO because it is such powerful knowledge to have when the balance of power in these situations is usually asymmetric. Why I love the 37signals folks, keeping it open and real.
For others enjoying this, and I'm sure you're already aware of it, but Indie Hackers does in depth behind the scenes with numerous small businesses and founders that might resonate like this Slicehost case study: https://www.indiehackers.com/products
Nice to see my interview (GifShare) quoted in your article.
I'd say one caveat to "raise prices" is when you're in the early stages of your company, don't just raise prices because some asshat like me said to. Raising prices is a natural side effect of improving your service and growing your company.
Just use PostgreSQL, mongo is not ideal for relational data. You might run into problems in the future trying to use mongodb as a relational database. Furthermore, if you don’t know sql you should NOT rely on abstractions like prisma until you have at least attempted a pet project with using raw sql with one of the node libs for Postgres. From there you could move up to a query builder like Knex. From there you can start considering using an epic abstraction like Prisma or Objection.js (my personal favourite)
See here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/maybe-you-should-never-use-mongodb-6410ac1a25
"Entrepreneur content" is pretty broad. From the names you mentioned it sounds like you want general "how to make money online" content?
Like you alluded to, the majority of such content on YouTube is centered around someone trying to sell you something - their courses, a product which promises to make the process "super easy" ... and in fact the problem with these videos is that they over-simplify everything since it's in their best interest that you get super pumped and spend money on whatever they're selling.
It's not YouTube content, but a site I like to read from time to time which keeps it real is Indie Hackers. They interview entrepreneurs of all types, from ones making $100s/mo to ones making $millions/mo in a multitude of industries (all bootstrapped). It's pretty inspiring, check it out.
That sucks man! You can check out Indie Hackers. It's a community of people helping each other to build side projects. Indie Hackers has been incredibly motivating for me, after seeing so many people making a living from side projects, with a full time job, having kids! It's doable but difficult. But you're not alone. There are a lot of people doing it (including me) and we're here to help each other.
Not the OP but we recently did an interview where we gave a comprehensive breakdown how to build one of these types of websites. In our case, the example site we showed makes $1,500/mo and is now completely passive (after two months of sweat equity). https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/html-color-codes. Happy to answer any further questions.
I made a goal-tracking app Complice, starting 3 years ago. It was initially sort of a side thing (I was in school at the time) but it's finally grown to the point where I can comfortably live off of it. Having a SaaS is awesome, because I can take lots of time off to do other stuff.
In some senses, I have a different thing on the side, which is productivity coaching. The fact that I run a productivity startup adds to the sense of my credibility as a coach, so it's definitely related. Before Complice was making enough money for me to live off of, coaching was actually where most of my money came from. But it was always a "side" thing in the sense of being a minority of the time I actually spent working. I still do a bit of coaching, but not as much as before.
I've written a bunch about my process of getting to where I am now, on Indie Hackers... which might be a good site to check out in general if you're interested in people making money with personal software businesses.
Companies buying advertising with Facebook know that FB is.. ahem... somewhat unconcerned about the ethics of how stories get spread and propagated. But since the Slimy Algorithm sells advertising, destroying western civilization has been an OK consequence. Surprise! Facebook is happy to make up the lost revenue from their outage by taking it from their advertisers via ramping ad frequency way up - even though that degrades ad performance.
OP: based on your other posts it sounds like you're early in your career (sorry if I'm wrong). I know hearing that something that you build it "somewhat useless" is not fun, but you need to change your viewpoint on feedback. The last question that u/Yolo19966 asked "What makes your site different?" is the clincher. If you can come up with a good answer to that, you're in a good place. If you can't, iterate on it until you do.
If you can take feedback well and turn it into actionable improvements you will do very well as an engineer. Come to appreciate direct and candid feedback, and seek it out. It'll make you great to work with and make your life easier too.
PS: for side projects check out https://www.indiehackers.com/ for some inspiration and advice!
You should check out Indie Hackers. It's a community of people working on side projects and making a living. You can get help from the community for any part of the process. In fact, I'm also working on a side project apart from a full time job as a developer. It's incredibly hard and like you, I don't know how to market. But after seeing so many people doing stuff, I started teaching myself basics of marketing. I've read somewhere that a programmer who knows marketing is unstoppable.
You can explore IndieHackers. Its a community of people who started side projects. You can start your own side project or collaborate with others. I like its products section with different filters.
Not specific to game dev, but maybe check out https://www.indiehackers.com/ to meet like-minded people who create indie web sites (often starting out as a "side-hustle").
I personally have not (though I hope to some day!), but check out https://www.indiehackers.com/
It's like a reddit clone specifically tailored to businesses like this! You can find a lot of useful information and get some networking done over there.
Man, there are quite a few people who wanted to be in a gaming industry.
> Reality: Make websites as a hobby.
Same here... But I am trying to make websites and ask users money to use. :-|
> No idea how to transition into the dream career.
I would ask you to follow people from the industry you are interested in on Twitter.
Personally, I would recommend you to follow Stephanie Hurlburt. She is pretty awesome and must follow for motivation.
Also, this podcast interview with her on Indiehackers is really a nice place to get to know her.
> Kudos to you OP for replying to every single comment.
its Wednesday and OP is jobless. But thanks For saying this.
You don't really have to make it big. There are many software business out there that provide a good service that solves a problem and flips a profit for their owners.
Check out https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses
It's about diversifying your income. If you lose your job for whatever reason, or become handicapped in some certain way where you can no longer dependably add value to your employer, your income drops to near zero. Having a back-up plan isn't a bad idea.
The purpose of Nomadlist is to provide a landing page so the owner can charge $75/year to other digital nomads in exchange for access to a Slack chatroom and a Discourse forum. To that end, the accuracy of the city data is largely irrelevant.
Love these questions!
We use cutting-edge technology to give you more than just another scheduling tool.
Among others, we trained an AI on +100K posts to predict how well your post will perform.
We're also currently looking into NFT support directly from FeedHive to embrace how creators will be using the web in near future!
So the biggest differentiator: We're up-to-date with 2021, and we're future-proof. Buffer, Hootsuite, Falcon, (...etc), are "just" scheduling tools.
We use 3 different marketing channels:
- Social Media
- SEO / Content
- Paid ads
By far, the most efficient channel has been social media.
I'm very active on both Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram with my personal brand, and so far, the product is mostly founder-led in that sense.
It's something we're actively trying to change though.
We would like SEO / Content and paid ads to become the main channels in the long run, since they are easier to transfer (to a potential acquirer in the future), and easier to reason about (predict ROI, CAC, etc).
email forwarding service. also support webhook, smtp and log
Totally self-funded. I leanred a lot. Currently made about $1300 per month
Also build in public https://www.indiehackers.com/product/hanami
Hey this is a really helpful tool.This can be used with clients, within companies or among friends.
However, I think it should be much simpler. The process of rating each image individually is not cognitively aligned with how we naturally perceive, process and judge designs. We do that in split seconds (mostly subconsciously) but in the current version of this tool, we are not only being forced to be conscious but also an extra layer exists that forces users to convert a subjective matter (design) into a quantified form (no.of stars). Also, that brings another issue, how can we be certain of a user's ability for such conversion? That their rating is reliable?
In UX there is a thing called 5 second test (backed by "research") and it does exactly what the name suggests lol. It measures design preference by exposing a design to users for 5 seconds. Check that up and similar research maybe? If you can develop along those lines, then you'll have a research backed product. Good Luck 👍
P.S.I'm in for beta testing, lemme know when. I have worked on a similar project back in the day :)
What you are doing now (asking questions) is good!
It'd be easier if you started with some industry experience, but since you've already started, you should try to learn as much as possible.
Generally in a startup, there are two broad types of people: programmers and hustlers. The programmers build products and the hustlers work on everything else (crucially, sales and marketing). Because the person you partner with is a programmers, your job is to learn business in general, understand your business model (ex. b2b vs. b2c) and how to make the business profitable, etc. And programmers/developers are most likely not very good with UX and really understanding the users, so you could do work in that front.
You might need to have a vision (a small vision would do but you need to have at least a bit of direction of where to go) for the business and go out validate the idea or engage with the users.
As for VC, know that fund raising is not necessary if you are just starting out. Most startups that have to rely on outside funding without a good understanding of business operations don't survive. If that's you, save yourself your youth and go get a good job where you can learn a ton, save money, and come back to entrepreneurship later.
Here is a good resource.
This looks really cool, and I'm honestly considering using it for a couple of my projects for only $15/month.
However, but I'm not a fan of how this is presented here. This is a community that as a whole presents side projects that are being worked on as side projects, but this looks like a full business that has been worked on full time by multiple people for at least a couple of years (potentially as part of an agency?). Your own page links to an indiehackers post about how your partner has been working on this full time since the beginning of 2019.
This tool may very well be useful to people in this community, but it's kind of being presented in a way that is demotivating to anyone comparing their own side project work against this.
This is ny company - https://www.maonrails.com
Started it at the beginning of 2016 while working full time. It's now generating enough revenue that I could comfortably quit my job and maintain the same lifestyle. I have no employees but do contract on occasion.
Some of my story here - https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/18e3b54250 (this is from over a year ago, I've more than doubled my revenue since)
I'd be happy to answer any specific questions you may have!
You're still getting the link juice from the backlink. Don't worry.
I saw this case study about how backlinks from such sites still impact the ranking very well. it just takes a few months.
This is really nicely executed. Great job. From a UX perspective a vertical scrolling right pane with lazy load about 3 or 4 images ahead would feel like a more immediate experience (I only say that because it's what I intuitively tried to do first).
Ps: You should post this to https://www.indiehackers.com/
Here's an interview with the founders of Scott's Cheap Flights on how they started and grew, I'm sure you can find some great stuff in there as your business is obv similar.
Honestly, you should lurk on Indie Hackers instead (https://www.indiehackers.com/). You'll find interviews and podcasts w/ entrepreneurs who are 100% transparent about their mistakes, their failed attempts, and what they did to turn things around. They're also completely transparent about their revenue and other metrics.
You should also participate in the IH forum. It's a small community still, but everyone is incredibly helpful and supportive. In fact, you should post there w/ this exact same question!
I lurked on Indie Hackers for months and months, but eventually, I was inspired enough to start a side project, which quickly gained momentum, made me wrap up all of my client projects (I was freelancing), and go all in with trying to start a business. I can't believe how much has changed in the last few months, but I wouldn't have been able to do it w/o having a community of like-minded folks.
Indie Hackers has a bunch of stories, interviews, and resources for people who have started their own businesses. I'd recommend checking out their interviews and the SaaS category to find what you're looking for. Some of the businesses are active while others are more passive with varying levels of revenue.
Similar interesting read: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/launched-my-first-course-earned-over-us-500-000-ama-4382405cd5
This person is building a more lengthy, high-quality, interactive course, and made 500k in the first week. He had 28k audience when he launches pre-sale.
Love it! I do something similar for my community aggregator Hive Index - I call it the "CheapStack". Wrote up a post about it here if you're interested.
There was a post on IndieHackers a couple weeks ago about this very thing. It basically concluded everybody says you should talk to other people to validate your products but very few people actually do it. They use all the online tools out there as a way to internally justify not talking to people. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said the startup arena being full of engineers and other introverted people.
This is correct about the benchmarks. Companies opt-in and pay a fee to cover the large costs associated with running large scale tests of this sort since none of it is sponsored. It used to be sponsored by load testing company, and I refused web hosting company sponsors because the potential conflict of interest. Now all companies participate with identical fee structures based on the amount of tests, all of it is published and disclosed in the report. Paying certainly doesn't mean good rankings as you'll notice. I try to make it as reproducible as possible by publishing everything including the methodology and test site with instructions.
As far as the trustworthy bit, I'm obviously the most biased source. I've talked about it tons including disclosing revenue, best source to read is probably https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/reviewsignal-e1ddcc26ac
Maybe people in the community here will give more of their opinions, but I'm also happy to address any questions/concerns you have about my work.
Unfortunately it is a crazy grind, lots of work for one sale. Ideally since your product is high quality, those slow sales can grow with word of mouth.
Toi toi toi! IndieHackers is 'n leuke website voor inspiratie. Zelf verkoop ik, heel saai, 'n aantal WordPress plugins middels 'n freemium model (want ik ben niet per se 'n goede marketeer, maar wel 'n goede developer). En saai sells, want veel (goede) developers willen shiny new toys en lopen met 'n grote boog om al die saaiheid heen...
If you haven't already, I suggest looking through IndieHackers. I get emails from them every other day about bootstrapped SaaS success stories. I'm sure you'll be able to find what you're looking for there.
I was building a list of investors when we needed to raise capital and I found it very time consuming and hard. So I thought raising capital is actually one of the most important things that almost every startup entrepreneur has to go through. But why there were no actual good products out there that could make their life easier? (at least I couldn't find one)
I was using Linkedin, Crunchbase, Angel List and some free email finder tools that limited the number of searches on Angels and VCs and it was super time consuming. That's when I understood that there must be a need for a product that helps founders find investors. We've built it, launched it and it works. Here are our internal numbers:
Investor Hunt gives you access to a database of 40k+ VCs and Angels which we've categorized by their past investments, investment focuses and location so that you can determine who's a good fit for your startup.
I agree that investors prefer to invest in companies that come within their network, but cold emailing works as well if done right. Your odds of getting funded gets considerably higher if you compile a list of investors and send them personalized emails.
We launched a week ago and we already have paying customers. You can see our internal numbers on Indie Hackers here: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/investor-hunt
Sold https://www.indiehackers.com to Stripe. The CEO got in touch with me via a random email out of the blue with "Acquire indie hackers?" as the subject. I didn't know him or anyone connected to him, and I didn't take any deliberate action to make this happen on my part. He did write a little bit here about what Stripe is looking for when making similar acquisitions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14090451
I think working backwards from existing solutions is an interesting approach, and one of many you can use to unlock some creativity while brainstorming. There are many other approaches that have resulted in success as well.
But more interesting to me is the idea that we should build "truly revolutionary" businesses. If that's the minimum bar then yes, it's difficult to solve existing problems. But if you're content with making, I dunno, $5-100k/month from your business, there are many tens of thousands of unsolved and poorly-solved problems for you to find, as well as niches non-winner-take-all markets for you to enter.
Hey,
I'm not an experienced entreprenuer, I'm just another maker like you who want's to build their own start up.
Firstly, depending on the complexity of the site - you should try bootstrap it yourself whether that's using tools available online. I say this because you need to validate your idea to make sure it's a platform that will be used.
Secondly, a great community for you to join with tons of experienced entrepreneurs is: https://www.indiehackers.com/
Always happy to chat further!
To be featured on the appstore you need to submit a feature form to the editors. Amir Rajan has a book about it. I read it and totally recommend it if you're making a game for the iOS appstore.
Tips: Make something that has a viral element in it. Marketing sucks. If you can't, then start marketing from day -100 :/
Thanks
Thanks a lot!
Definitely. You can see more here in this Indie Hackers post.
TL;DR: We're using GPT-3 to generate idea templates that you can write your posts from, to generate relevant hashtags based on content, and to predict how well your post will perform 🙌
Hey, thank you! Great questions.
1. There's always a chance that someone will steal your product. It can and it does happen and it sucks - a lot. I had someone that stole 1:1 my website's copy and that small theft even felt horrible. That said, I think the building in public ultimately gives you an competitive edge over copy cats. People buy in other people not the product alone. The more you share the more credible you are and people will trust you over the copy cat. I do think that one needs to be cautious especially with revenue numbers once you start to earning a significant amount as competitors and other people will eventually exploit it. On the other hand there are big bootstrapped companies that still continue sharing everything and it works very well in their favour. To sum it up, I'd say in the beginning there's nothing better you can do than sharing your journey. Here's a great thread about this topic on Indiehackers.
​
2. Everyone starts at 0 and I don't want to say that it's easy in the beginning. It's actually quite hard and one has to put in a good amount of effort to grow but the reward makes up for it. Before sharing HelpKit's journey I had 300 followers and now it doubled already in just two months and the follower count is increasing over day now. On Twitter it's really crucial to give more than take. Share your story, lessons and failures. People love empathy/honesty and eventually they might find your story interesting as well. Also to get kick of your follower count, it could be interesting to create some value-adding free products and share them on Twitter/Product Hunt and different blogs etc. and always mention your Twitter handle. This could be a great way to kick things off.
​
Hope that helps a bit!
Så absolutt. Det vi gjorde da jeg startet mitt firma var at vi testet ideen før vi formelt startet firmaet. Vi lagde en MVP som markedet svarte positivt på, og videreutviklet den. Vi har ikke tatt en krone i investeringer og ikke brukt noen oppsparte midler heller.
Du kan lese om vår prosess her om du skulle være interessert
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/from-8-000-to-80-000-mrr-in-2-and-a-half-years-d92e0faec1
Thanks! Here's a link to that episode if folks are curious: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/210-derrick-reimer
It was a fun one for sure.
Thanks everyone ✨
We've got on the product of the day on Product Hunt, which is very exciting!
The launch process is documented in this short post on IndieHackers. Please check it out, keep supporting us, and providing the feedback.
Also - don't miss a special deal available on ProductHunt!
Thanks everyone ⚡️
We've got on the product of the day on Product Hunt, which is very exciting!
The launch process is documented in this short post on IndieHackers. Please check it out, keep supporting us, and providing the feedback.
Also - don't miss a special deal available on ProductHunt!
The Product Hunt launch for Divjoy drove over $10,000 in sales. Probably more if you include the word of mouth it generated.
Things that worked: - Offered a limited time deal with a countdown (FOMO!) - Announced to my existing audience on Twitter and in my newsletter. - PH happens to be my target audience. Lots of people on there that want to build SaaS products and Divjoy helps them do that.
I wrote up a detailed recap awhile back on IndieHackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/from-product-hunt-to-16-285-in-sales-827d57e7e8
Something in between. As a sole dev I'd say it's better to have few high paying clients than lots of low paying ones. I find customers that pay more also require far less support. So it's a win win.
Free product upsell to commercial side product/ plugin works great. I also try to generate traffic to my blog with content marketing.
I'd highly recommend taking an hour and listening to this podcast, great advise on pricing: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/088-jason-cohen-of-wp-engine
It’s an Image Editor SDK, see: https://pqina.nl/pintura/
I’ve recently done an AMA on IndieHackers about it :-)
Getting the first paying customer is an amazing moment, that's when I started to feel that my stuff has a place on the market and things gonna be just fine. With my previous product, it took about 2 months, using low key digital marketing techniques. Depending on the type of product and industry, it can vary from 1 week to 6 months tho'. Here's a lot of example on how others get their first ones and how long did it take for them:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/finding-your-first-users-without-spending-on-ads-69d79d88ba
Seems like a Saas starter kit to help people build SaaS products faster without dealing with the boilerplate code, lets them get to the unique business logic quicker. Take a look at this indiehackers thread for similar products it might give you some inspiration:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/29-saas-starter-kits-boilerplates-based-on-your-favourite-programming-language-framework-35387161e0
One of my favorite online communities is IndieHackers, a community of early stage founders and makers.
It's an incredibly supportive community, and one that provides so much value for it's members. This is something that is super important for entrepreneurs, who usually have a somewhat lonely journey in pursuing their ventures.
After joining this community I was so inspired by the benefits of being a part of helpful online communities, that I launched a directory of online communities called the Hive Index, to help others find communities for their interests.
Just as an aside, despite the majority of them being bad for the environment, there are environmentally friendly cryptocurrencies, such as nano, which does not use mining.
https://www.leafscore.com/blog/the-9-most-sustainable-cryptocurrencies-for-2021/
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/can-crypto-be-more-environmentally-sustainable-8e4b717211
I wish I had time to partner! I've got a few more products in the pipeline but I'll be here and answer any questions if you have any.
For pricing, you could consider a personal plan (maybe that one is free) and a business plan (maybe $20/month).
To take your product to the next level, it requires wearing a different hat. You have to become a product owner and a marketer in addition to a developer. Product owners actively think of the problems their product can solve and how to innovate in those spaces. PO's will look to find "product market fit". That's where what you're building becomes something that people actually want to pay for.
If you want people to use your product, write a list of use cases. Try a "100 things" list. After you have a list of your use cases, reach out to businesses in your area and ask if they'd be willing to beta your product for a lower monthly sub (like $10/month). If they don't want to pay for it, ask them why. Take feedback, iterate, then call them back. Once you have something that people will pay for, then you can be more confident in "paid aquisition" (Facebook/Google/etc ads). You can use the $100 or $200 a month to start driving traffic your way
Finding product-market-fit is the hardest part, but it's really easy if you're nice to potential customers and ask them good questions.
Good resources are this YouTube playlist, a book called "Start Small, Stay Small", and a podcast called "Startups for the Rest of Us". The indie hackers community is also really good but I'm more of a lurker there.
Your post made me think of this podcast interview with a cookie company that focused on really fresh product and distributing demand like you’re looking to do. https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/166-sam-eaton-of-crave-cookie
Best of luck!
Amateurpreneur is one that's geared towards first-time entrepreneurs, if that's what you're looking for. I also really like the Start page on IndieHackers which IMO does a great job of walking you through the process of getting started with an indie business or side project.
In theory it's a great idea. In practice it needs you to be very thorough, extremely detailed and bring out the learning very clearly
A similar idea that is doing very well already is software ideas. It has ~400 paying subscribers.
Kevin, the creator, is building in public and recently shared his progress and learning in a post on indiehackers.
Yo dude! Thank you. Definitely record your journey.
(Here's instructions for how to set up live stream in case it's helpful: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/007-how-to-live-build-on-youtube-for-free-and-grow-your-audience-2-min-5bdc650af8)
Tutorial hell is so real. I got stuck in it too before learning React. Can't encourage you enough to pick a project, build until your stuck and then take tutorials along the way to unstick yourself.
Really appreciate your kind words. They mean more than most people think.
As a reference, only 1% of the IHs community reports > 2k MRR. And this isn't even validated-only data. So... I think your numbers are pretty abnormal. Still fascinating :D
Source: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/holy-heck-this-is-hard-8ebe864174
Both. Depending on the company it might be significantly easier a response from an employee, who can champion the cause internally.
Learn the art of cold outreach in any case. Have a great subject line, then short email this is focused on them and not you. Don't get into the details, just focused on getting permission to engage in conversation.
Here's a good podcast to start: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/157-baird-hall-of-wavve
I love Myth Busters! So I just found this old thread https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/discussion-what-is-an-indie-hacker-4f078287fa. Turns out I sort of fit into this category. Been building all kinds of side projects for the last 5 years.
I just stumble upon this on Indie Hacker; it might interest you: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-write-great-microcopy-40-pro-tips-dcbfabd061
For the social media experience, you could do that with Glide.
Checkout this tutorial on MakerPad for inspo
IndieHackers also have a really supportive no code community
Do you have any any work done? It's a lot to ask someone for 10 hours a week without anything tangible to back it up. I hate to be harsh but a good idea is like 10% of actually getting a product to market. You may have a lot more luck if you have a prototype or a really solid plan to create and then monetize your project. https://www.indiehackers.com/ Would be a good resource as well! Good luck on the project man.
Yep, those are all great ideas, thank you. I'm already working on some new ways to match.
I think our Twitter and IndieHackers project page are good ways to follow the progress.
Sure! Actually I did an interview on my early days that you might find insightful: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/the-productivity-app-that-helped-to-build-and-grow-itself-b4d7afdf11
I was a bit ahead of where you are now, but it will make much more sense than anything I tell you now! Also, the community is very helpful!
Tip number 1: Don't overthink the tech stack. Just start coding an mvp and ship it in hours. If it works, and the idea is validated, you won't need much to improve the tech stack to adapt to it ;)
I've love to! I've done interviews here and I'm happy to be on podcasts!
This is definitely one of the underdog ideas. Early last year, we were exploring the same idea to launch as a productized service. We now do it as part of our content marketing offering.
Here are the 3 things we have learned:
- there's definitely a lot of demand for it - SMBs / freelancers, etc. are definitely on a lookout for someone who can design emails for them and write copy. Over a period of time, there's not much to be done on the design front - the pool of templates that resonate with the mailing list of the business you're working with are in place, you just need to write fresh copy for every single email. This will leave you with time to focus on scaling your business (getting more clients, put people in place who can design custom emails, etc.)
Do read this interview too on IndieHackers . - One of the key challenges you need to address is people trusting you with their mailing lists / accounts. How do you plan to address this?
- (this might be trivial and subjective) it's always better to carve out a niche for the kind of emails you specialise in - is it e-commerce, long-form, visual email, etc. For instance, a lot of brands approach us to write emails that have a funny / comic copy...
I hope this helps.
Have yet to figure out whats possible, or what to pursue next :)
Thanks for the endorsement. Everything about how it works is published for review at https://reviewsignal.com/howitworks and I'm happy to answer any questions people might have. I've done a bunch of interviews including one on IndieHackers which answers a lot of common questions and even gives away pretty detailed revenue figures.
Unfortunately, no Canadian filter. I put up a flag next to companies that cater to specific countries (couple british companies are listed). Most of the companies seem to cater to a global audience that I track because I can only track companies with a lot of data. Most local/country based providers never hit the scale I need to provide any meaningful insight.
It definitely can bring in traffic. The one time I got something on there I wasn't prepared though and it didn't really do much.
Just ran across this guide last week which might be good: https://www.indiehackers.com/@Nickt0783/cd729bc396
He says he got 3000+ app installs from Product Hunt.
I like the idea. I'm seeing quite a few products that are meant to help with motivation, but this is a new take. One of my questions is, where are these influential Twitter accounts coming from?
My startup it's not my side project, it's my full time project now, but since I'm a solo-founder working from home, it shares some of the traits of side projects (it started as one). I'm having trouble signing up for Product Launcher because I'm not sure when I launch and I don't want to commit. The reason is that I'm releasing beta after beta, increasing the quality and I don't want to release 1.0 until the quality of the product is good enough.
Something that I could use is public shaming if I don't publish any updates on a given week. Whether it's a beta release, a tweet about progress, a blog post, things like that. I understand that this is a more complex product than what you developed already so it might for later if what you have right now gets enough traction.
Have you posted on Indie Hackers? Product Hunt? I think both audiences are perfect for your product. I can help with PH if you want.
A lot of people will suggest building an MVP to gauge initial interest. I would start even before that: Don’t spend any more time than necessary on something that you don’t even know is actually viable.
Surveys are a great way to quickly validate an idea, but you need to send it to the right audience - when asking your friends and family, they might rate your ideas more favorably than they would if the same idea came from a random stranger due to something called "interviewer bias".
I run IdeaCheck.io, where we'll generate a questionnaire from your idea and use a panel of respondents to gather direct feedback from your actual target audience. You can read more about IdeaCheck and how to validate ideas in general in my Indie Hackers interview here: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/ideacheck-io
If you're looking to actually employ the contractors, that's a totally different business. There is nothing really wrong with the business model, but you have to be aware that at that point you're not really running a "startup", but a labor company and all the things that go along with it.
Here is an article from IndieHackers that I read a while back about someone doing this for clearning. They make a ton of money, which is great, but choosing to employ the workers rather than contract them really changes the core business. https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/myclean
Learn from people who won't sell you something. Many successful entrepreneurs made it with the help of others, and there's a big culture of paying it forward.
Entrepreneurs are a lucrative group to sell to. They're looking to latch onto something, and are willing to pay to become something better. I'm into startups, and I think the best way to move forward is mainly working on a profitable project or learning the stories behind other successful entrepreneurs/business leaders. You want to know how others succeeded, so that you can figure out what could work for you, in your own style. You're only as good as your idea, approach, and timing, so if you're learning from useless sources you can easily be led astray. Here are some links that I like:
https://www.startupschool.org/?course=1 Startup School by Y Combinator, an online course on entrepreneurship with some awesome people talking about business. First episode (bottom of the page) has the founding CTO of facebook talking about entrepreneurship.
https://www.indiehackers.com/ Indiehackers, lots of stories of profitable side projects and businesses. You can learn about products that make millions a month in revenue, or even $500 a month in revenue. What makes them have such vastly different earnings, is it the idea, execution, or the market?
https://www.entrepreneur.com/topic/masters-of-scale The Masters of Scale podcast by Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn, Paypal, Greylock tech) is pretty great. Honestly, it's a bit out of my reach because my company's not at the scaling stage, but it's fascinating hearing about how industry leaders think about business.
I understand your analogy to the music industry (kardashians!) but from a marketing perspective, he is obviously effective.
I have no love for everything he does, but I have found his general themes to be very useful when he says to focus on the absolute smallest market possible.
1) He has a podcast called 'startup school' that is old, but still useful.
2) And an article I found enlightening along the same lines: article
Also, I'm not a marketer either.
thanks for the kind words /u/zylai and /u/translucent
I absolutely DO have affiliate links for most hosts (but not all). I am running a business, but trying to do it better than everyone else by being honest (and it doesn't pay off as much as you think - my earnings are disclosed in a big interview here: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/reviewsignal). That said, affiliate links don't impact the ratings at all. I've tried to make that claim as verifiable as possible by making all the data public including how the rankings work: http://reviewsignal.com/howitworks which explains everything about the site.
I'm also always happy to answer any and all questions you might have :)
Shopify platform is great for beginners. We researched several other platform before going with this one and we are happy with the choice. If you want to go subscription I would consider Cratejoy, though I have heard of some downsides.
If you have the capital, design your product and pay for a shopify theme. Have someone take some nice product photos and work with a color wheel to decide a good color scheme for your site.
Once your site is looking decent, open up social media channels. We actually launched our site by doing a launch page and running mass giveaways on twitter/fb and then sending out newsletters when our site launched. It didn't give us much traction but it gave us a few customers at the start. Open up twitter/fb/instagram depending on where you think your customers are. It can be very overwhelming so it might be best to focus on one or two channels at a time. We used IFTTT a lot early on to send posts across multiple channels.
Another way to market your site is with content creation. There's plenty of blogs/podcasts you can read that can help you in doing this. This can be youtube videos, blog posts, podcasts, etc. Share the content and make sure to read up on how to optimize the SEO with your content.
Once again, if you have capital read a few books on adwords/fb ads and pay for advertising. I don't recommend this early on as you WILL burn cash quickly if you don't know what you're doing. It's best to start this when you have capital and when you know who your customers are.
There's plenty of resources out there. Right now I'm listening to the Indie Hackers Podcast which is awesome. The interviewer asks good questions and it seems like the guests always try to give us much information as they can squeeze into the hour.
If you have more questions feel free!
I don't know how they are bankrolled, but they are competing in a saturated market. Unless they can demonstrate how they are going to get a significant chunk of the market, they can't count on VC money. Most likely they can pay for little more than servers. Even more likely, someone will eat the losses within 5 years of starting a company.
You should look for underserviced markets. For example, https://forestry.io is a simple product which is serving a significant user base of static site generators. The features itself are not "killer", and their income is probably not in the millions, but I'm betting they make a decent income.
You should definitely be looking at Indie Hackers if you're interested into starting your own business built around a service/product. (https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses) - and If you'd like, I can send you a free coupon for The SaaS Handbook (https://leanpub.com/saas-handbook). I started writing it today as a part of a #100DaysOfCode challenge. It's more of a technical read, so far (ie, how to set up a VueJS project with api driven development in mind). I plan to go in depth towards selling/marketing your service or product, including market fit, but very goal oriented as I want to push myself to put something out there, instead of discarding it as I did so many previous side projects.
Edit: It seems Forestry closed a $560k USD seed investment in april 2017. Good for them :)
You should read this !
/u/courthead the founder of indiehackers, always come up with smart, creative and non-shady ways to fund his website
>During that time off, I just wanted to explore new tech and build what I wanted to build. About three months in I came across a web-based game called A Dark Room, and reached out to Michael Townsend to see if he'd be okay with me porting it over to iOS (with my own spin to it).
I like this, thank you :)
I've also stumbled upon this article here, which gave me some ideas.
You can go to https://www.indiehackers.com/, it's a great community of entrepreneurs. I'm sure you will get inspired and could find an idea you can modify to start your own business.
Alternatively, ask a business owner if they would be okay with you investing in their business. It'd be like buying a franchise but without having to do all the hard work.
Did you consider introducing paid license for companies with e.g. >$1M/year income? Looks like to could be sweet spot in your scenario. Individual/smaller dev shops could still use it and when they will be profitable enough then they will pay for a license.
When the project will bring financial stability you could focus full time and make a living for years. It's way better than selling your time to the next corp, literally for pennies comparing to your own healthy business.
For inspirations I recommend checking Sidekiq story making OSS profitable. There is also, from .NET word, MappingGenerator story (polish only) about turning it to paid product when still offering free version.
P.S. No company will ever pay for something when they don't need to do. That's how business operates. Donations are usually pennies even for huge open source projects. If someone won't pay for your work you personally will pay later - with your time, health, family or/and money.
My First Million is great. Gets the creative juices flowing. I also love Indie Hackers. Both will give you ideas and context in how to get started.
Thank you.
I came up with the idea as I was a DJ myself. More here > https://blog.vibecast.com/welcome-to-vibecast-the-website-builder-for-djs-a412fe1e529d
I linked various updates to building Vibecast here > https://www.indiehackers.com/product/vibecast
I hope that helps :)
Folosesc timer pentru tehnica Pomodoro . Mi se pare esential sa faci pauza si sa te hidratezi. Daca vrei extra boost, incearca sa faci flotari sau alte exercitii in pauza.
It isn't easy to make money even in a gold rush, in programming even if you're selling the "pick-axes" to the people pursuing the gold it isn't easy.
Others have mentioned the common things I here about nowadays: web3 and AR/VR.
Creating an app is hard and the app store is full of apps that have never been downloaded. SaaS (software as a service) is hard too but there's some success stories at https://www.indiehackers.com/ in the interview/podcast section.
You should start with the problem. Some of the questions you should ask yourself:
What's the problem you are solving? Can you explain it in one or two sentences?
Do you have this problem yourself?
Who are you solving the problem for?
Do they hang out together and identify as a named group (e.g. developers, teachers, or NBA fans)?
Are there enough people with the same problem?
Are they aware of the problem? Do they know the problem exists? Are they actively looking for a solution?
Do they have the problem regularly?
Is it a valuable problem? Do people pay money to solve the problem?
Is it a growing problem, meaning more and more people have it every year?
I highly recommend this article: How to brainstorm great business ideas
I would encourage you to read this post by Courtland Allen, the founder of Indiehackers. I think it's very useful and inspiring.
This episode of "Startups for the Rest of us" might also be useful.
Dynamic MRR sounds good. Indiehackers do it (https://www.indiehackers.com/products?revenueVerification=stripe). You've to verify it from Stripe or something to dynamically change.
The exception to this rule is technology-based or internet-based side gigs, imo.
If you're tech savvy it's possible to set up a SaaS platform (for example) that once set up will consistently bring you in income with minimal work/updates required. Or to create an app that can bring in a bit of extra income.
For an example of what I mean, check out IndieHackers.
I don't understand the amount of hate that side gigs get on this subreddit, however if you're just talking about physical side gigs (e.g. walking dogs, doing surf lessons) then yeah I see what you mean.
I’ve seen this app featured on bubble and great that you were able to grow it:)
Here’s the other side of your story https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-sold-my-no-code-gpt-3-bubble-app-virtual-ghost-writer-4cf8e20929
I will break it down. Say a public Nano mixer is created. Lets also suppose a thousand transactions are made into and out of the mixer every x seconds. Out of all those transactions one of them is coming from a dodgy wallet that previously received stolen Nano. U cannot now track that Nano as it has effectively been washed in a public mixer. Nano is fungible.
If it was Bitcoin in that public mixer, because of UTXO you can track each bitcoin transaction even in a public mixer. To understand how UTXO works follow this link.
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/tainted-coin-day-611-852c6b34f5
Re the openess of the blockchain, the lack of annonymity is baked in but things like mixers and exhanges mean you can obscure actual ownership.