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Starting a business, but don't know what your mission is? How about: making your life better.
Working on the things you enjoy, at the pace you set, from wherever you want, with the people you love, so you can be happy… these are perfectly fine reasons to start something.
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Unpopular opinions: We're living in the greatest time ever for the most people ever, things are getting better and have been for a long time, the technology we're addicted to is mostly awesome, and the challenges that face us are solvable.
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I pay $30/week for someone to teach me chess for 60 minutes. He never wants to stop, so we usually go for 90.
I have no particular goals with this. I might drop it in another few months. But it's great to "hang out" with an expert who's passionate and pushes me past my limits.
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Unpopular take: college was 100% worth it for me.
- 20+ close friends for the rest of my life
- met smart ppl who inspired me
- MIT degree makes ppl think I'm smart before I prove it
- changed my self-image from lazy to hard working
…I wanted to drop out the whole time though.
I’m decently exposed to smart successful people and not a single one of them wants their kids to go to college.
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One of my favorite pieces about the internet, written in Newsweek in 1995, got almost everything wrong.
You've could've made a fortune betting on everything this guy bet against.
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Big news: Indie Hackers is indie again!
Six years ago, @Stripe acquired @IndieHackers to help us grow and inspire millions of people building online businesses.
From today on, @channingallen and I will be joining their ranks as founders ourselves! Step #1 — generate revenue 😅
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Someone help me understand the appeal of Claude Code, compared to Cursor:
- Doesn't have a real textbox, so it's hard to select/manipulate/copy text in your prompts as you write them
- Doesn't stream back AI responses, so you have to wait for them to finish before reading them
- Much harder to audit all the file changes it's made
- Can't go back up the tree to edit previous messages/responses
- Etc.
What am I missing?
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It's not that coders are being replaced.
It's not even that coders are switching to using AI for everything. (Although vibe coding is fun.)
It's that hundreds of millions of NON-coders are starting to generate massive amounts of AI-written code that will quickly dwarf the amount of code that exists today.
This is a YouTube+smartphone moment, where suddenly we got 10000x more video creators in the world.
That didn't mean the end of professional video creation, cinematographers, movies, and TV shows.
And this doesn't mean the end of high-quality human-written code, apps, and websites.
At least not yet.
Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei
in the next 3 to 6 months, AI is writing 90% of the code, and in 12 months, nearly all code may be generated by AI
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It works! ✨
I've been vibe coding with Cursor to build myself an analytics app…
But instead of dashboards, I want a 2D map where the pages on my website are buildings..
The blue dots you see are live traffic to Indie Hackers!
It's the start of my own little "app city" 🗺
This is just the start. Eventually I want to understand what's going on with all my apps at a glance, just by looking at my city from a birds eye view.
I have way too many vibe coding projects 👀
This is probably the one I'm having the most fun with.
Believe it or not, this one's going to be an analytics app.
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If it's worth making, make it great.
If you can't make it great, make it smaller and simpler until you *can* make it great.
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"We hadn't told a single person, and we had $40,000 in sales."
I interviewed @adamwathan about his journey from college dropout to solo founder, and he had me saying "wow" more than any other guest on the podcast. 😅 Great story, A+ tips, give it a spin!
indiehackers.com/podcast/098…
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The dopamine hit from encountering novel advice fools us into thinking it's better than it really is.
Most of what we should be doing are things we've heard a million times already.
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This is why I'm big on flexibility and avoid a rigid schedule. Work on things when you have the energy to work on them.
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It's impossible to be 10x smarter than someone, but it's possible to be 100,000,000,000x richer.
As a founder, it's tough to execute 100x or even 10x better, but it's quite possible to have an idea that's 100,000x better.
There's a lot of leverage in working on the right thing.
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Someone will always be getting richer than you, going faster than you, doing better than you.
So what? Kudos to them. Ignore it, and keep doing you.
The world's a big place, but don't let that ruin your own happiness.
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Everyone runs a business. If you're an employee, that business is yourself. Interviewing was sales. Your salary is your pricing. You only have one customer, and the service you're selling may be generic enough for you to have millions of competitors. But you're still a business.
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3am, my girlfriend, from bed: "Babe are you still code vibing?" 👉👈🥺
Me, crazed, from desk: "We only stops when the code says we can stops"
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Six years ago a photographer took some photos of me.
She put them on Unsplash with tags like "podcaster" and "computer".
I didn't think much about it at the time. But it turned me into a widely-used free stock photo. 🤣
Now I get a message every week from a friend who's seen me somewhere.
The latest is ebay's developer program.
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Normalize moving closer to your friends.
Living a 10-minute walk from a friend vs a 30-minute drive away is just as life-changing as living in the same state or country vs not.
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Prediction: The best indie hacker companies in 2021 will be building tools and platforms to support the creator economy — the millions of people moving online to make a living from writing, videos, podcasting, teaching, etc.
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Am I the only one who thinks these are hideous?
Feels like going back to 1998, let's not
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Vibe coding is the best way to learn how to code.
If you've always struggled to learn, it's literally never been easier. Download Cursor, tell it to make something, and ask it to explain.
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"A business is simply an idea to make other people's lives better."
—Sir Richard Branson
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I never would've learned to code, gotten so good with computers, or been interested in startups if not for video games.
I think the worst thing you can do as a parent is buy a video game system for your kid.
No worse habit in the world.
There is a direct correlation with being overweight, single, lonely, broke and depressed.
My kids will never own one.
Community note
Scientific evidence shows that gaming in moderation has benefits to kids and people in general. For example: reduced stress, improved memory, impulse control and problem solving skills
nih.gov/news-events/ne…
theesa.com/global-report-
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"Everything can be commoditized except trust and attention."
In the past 6 months, @DruRly grew his newsletter from $0 to over $20k/month in revenue. But before that, he tried a bunch of ideas that didn't work. Here's Dru's story 👇
indiehackers.com/podcast/173…
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Imagine if all the time you spent reading new advice you spent following old advice instead.
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There's an idea prevalent among founders that if you aren't working 80 hours a week, you're not a "real" entrepreneur.
But if you started a business to make your life better, can you call it a success if it's consuming your life instead?
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It's been a year since I started working on the @IndieHackers podcast, and it's somehow grown from 1,000 listeners/episode to over 30,000. 😮
I'm taking a short break before the next year of episodes, but just wanted to say thanks for listening so far!
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Aimlessly growing your Twitter audience just to give yourself optionality in the future is like collecting college degrees.
It's useful procrastination — the worst kind of procrastination, because it feels like a good idea.
Instead: Figure out what you want to do, and do it.
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IMO the biggest way we're living in an idiocracy is minimizing the importance of community.
We're tribal animals. We're supposed to find purpose and connection from contributing to a community of people we know and love.
Instead the norm is to:
- isolate yourself solo or in a nuclear family unit
- choose where to live based on granite countertops and nice closets
- ignore proximity to friends, family, and community
And then say, "Oh it's fine because I've got ____" then fill in the blank with some last-100-years tech thing that only gives you 1% of the connection you need: phone calls, group texts, video games, internet communities, social media, driving/flying to see people you love 1-2x a year, etc.
So millions of people have no real community.
Then people are lonely, stressed, depressed, and wonder why.
And couples are breaking up and divorcing over the time commitment of raising kids and the monetary cost of $2000/mo/kid for childcare, wondering how it could ever be more efficient.
Even worse, nobody works on relationships.
The "healthy norm" is to cut people out and disappear into the sea of millions.
If you don't love your family, you move away. If you get in a fight with a friend, you never speak again. If you break up with an ex, the expectation is to delete them from your life as if they never existed. Etc. So nobody has relationship skills to work through challenges.
Sadly it's hard to fight against all this, except to be born into a community where these things are not the norm.
Something I noticed on here
People in twenties barely ever cook or don't even know how to cook anymore
Their entire concept of meals is just from delivery apps
There was a guy on here that was concerned about microplastics and wondered "how can I eat food if delivery apps package everything in plastic" and I was like "yes you gotta cook your own food"
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Showing up every day is 95% of the battle. None of the tips, hacks, micro-optimizations, or marginal adjustments matter if you're not putting in the reps.
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Underrated: Building a business that not only grants you financial independence, but that also forces you to:
• meet with people who inspire you
• learn new skills that empower you
• travel to places that intrigue you
• do the work you find meaningful
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Want to give your coder friends a gift for Christmas?
Learn how to report bugs:
❌ "I tried to click the button, but it didn't work." Huh?
❌ "I tried to go to the store, but it didn't work." What?
✅ "When I try X, I expect Y, but Z happens instead. Here's a screenshot." 🙏
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Should I put Indie Hackers back into invite-only mode?
There are too many GPT-4 copy-pasters, it's a headache dealing with them. And quality of users is more important than quantity, anyway.
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I hired someone to be my podcast boss. One of my best hires ever.
She forces me to get on a Zoom call 2x/week, prep for episodes, book great guests. Vets my half-baked ideas. Doesn't let me procrastinate.
And most importantly: she turns drudge work into a fun collab session.
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I'm bullish on @NotionHQ, because it's 2021 and Google Docs still shows you page breaks.
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Similar to this, people say B2C is impossible for indie hackers, but it's not. You just have to know where consumers spend a lot of money, and focus on that.
Consumers spend big on:
- education that can help them earn more
- transportation and travel
- housing and home stuff
- healthcare
- food
- beautify, fitness, clothing, etc.
- status
This is why lots of indie hackers do well with courses, e-commerce, why you see influencers doing beauty and fitness products, etc.
If you're trying to build a B2C productivity app to help people get more done around the home and you have $0 revenue, that's not because B2C sucks, it's because you don't know what consumers care about enough to spend money on.
people spend money in predictable ways:
if it saves them time, they'll pay
if it makes them money, they'll pay more
if it solves real pain, they'll pay regularly
if it gives them status, they'll pay anything
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I'm a big believer in optimism as a self-fulfilling prophecy: If you believe you can do something, you're much more likely to accomplish it.
This doesn't require any magical woo-woo stuff. It's a simple positive feedback loop.
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Every now and then there's something I *really* want to start, but I don't.
I'll do anything else. I'll clean my place. I just went grocery shopping TWICE.
And when I realize what's blocking me, the answer is always the same: I'm aiming too high.
It's okay to suck. Just start.
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There are a million ways to do good in the world. Nobody can do all of them. So it's fine to do your good and leave others to do theirs without putting them down for not doing yours, too. 🤗
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The temptation for new founders is to pick creative problems that nobody is solving.
But you're probably better off if you pick boring or obvious problems, and then get creative with your solution.
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Leaked from Google:
Open source is rapidly catching up to the big players with LLMs… and Google and OpenAI have no moat.
The timeline is insane.
How long until the avg person can host and fine-tune their own GPT-4 equivalent LLM, with unlimited usage and no fees or tracking?
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"I'll be completely honest, I had absolutely no idea whether I'd sell even a single copy."
@dvassallo quit a lucrative job making $500k/year to become an indie hacker. Two years later, he's living on his own terms with no regrets.
This is his story. 👇
indiehackers.com/podcast/177…
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Hacker News — "Haters as a Service"
• endless source of jealous, angry nerds
• 3+ haters on every post you make, guaranteed
• perfect material for writing raps about your haters after you make it big with your indie business
• 100% free
“$20k per month is a paltry amount of revenue” - a guy on Hacker News in a thread about solo founders.
Me:
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To start a business that's lucrative:
1. Find people motivated to make money.
2. Relentlessly help them make more, faster, easier.
3. Ensure their gains are attributable to you.
4. Broadcast their success stories.
5. Charge more than you'd think.
To get rich, make others rich.
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I'm putting Indie Hackers into invite-only mode for a bit to help curb the spam. If you want some invite codes, let me know your username 👍
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HN nowadays when someone writes about how they succeeded at something by working hard on it over an extended period of time
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I'd rather own a stage than compete to be on a stage.
If I couldn't own a stage, I'd build tools for the people competing.
If I was forced to compete, I'd find a stage that rewards me for being unique, not just better.
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🥳 This is my analytics dashboard for my website, Indie Hackers!
Each building on the island is a page on my site.
The little people you see are real-time visitors, browsing my site right now.
When they walk between buildings it's because they clicked a different page. They leave a little trail behind where they walk, so I can see the common paths.
And I can even do time-lapse mode to replay a period from the past at 2x, 10x, 50x speed.
This is ~90% coded by AI.
The weekends are for vibe coding 👌(And the weekdays too)
It works! ✨
I've been vibe coding with Cursor to build myself an analytics app…
But instead of dashboards, I want a 2D map where the pages on my website are buildings..
The blue dots you see are live traffic to Indie Hackers!
It's the start of my own little "app city" 🗺
This is just the start. Eventually I want to understand what's going on with all my apps at a glance, just by looking at my city from a birds eye view.
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People care too much about Elon does with his money, and not enough about what their governments and institutions do with their money.
NYC's public college system paid Oracle ~$600M to build our course management portal. It's built on top of Oracle's PeopleSoft suite, which they refused to customize without an extra $400M (to hit $1B).
New Yorkers got the image below and pay $5M+ / year for *hosting*.
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I've never understood this obsession with doing things you'll appreciate looking back from your death bed.
Sure, it's good to be forward looking. But you also have to appreciate your life in the present, instead of just trying to impress some future hypothetical version of you.
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I have way too many vibe coding projects 👀
This is probably the one I'm having the most fun with.
Believe it or not, this one's going to be an analytics app.
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Getting rid of "tweet" and replacing it with "post" everywhere is the worst marketing decision I've ever seen.
Imagine Apple drops "iPhone" and renames the whole line "smartphones."
Imagine Nike drops "Jordans" and rebrands to "sneakers".
🤦🏾♂️
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I've said it a million times.
You're not an employee, you're a business. We just changed all the names.
- Posting your resume is marketing
- Interviewing is sales
- Salary negotiation is pricing
- Your employer is your customer
It's smart business to have multiple customers.
A friend of a friend at Google interviewed at Facebook right as the virus hit. Accepted new job in March. Didn’t quit old job. Apparently does both jobs at home in 55 hours/week. Neither company knows yet. Might have reversed the co’s, not sure. I have so many thoughts on this.
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"I'm a very good software engineer… and my sister makes cookies. We're making 7 figures."
Indie hacker Sam Eaton went from coding a web app that made $0 after 9 months ➡️ coding a cookie delivery business for his home town that makes $1M+.
🍪🏡 > 👨🏽💻🌎
indiehackers.com/podcast/166…
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"I built @Gumroad that weekend. It launched Monday morning. 50,000 people saw it. It was probably the worst thing that could've happened."
I had one of my favorite convos ever with @shl about his journey from aspiring billionaire to indie hacker:
⭐️ indiehackers.com/podcast/100…
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Half the founders I know are trying to become influencers.
Meanwhile the biggest influencers are trying to become founders.
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How to get what you want:
1. Work hard: do what you need to do, even when you don't want to.
2. Work smart: deconstruct what works, learn and iterate when you fail.
3. Work long: stay in the game long enough to win.
The magic formula.
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This is awkward. The latest guest on the IH podcast is… me!
@gilbert and @djrosent from @AcquiredFM interviewed me about:
- going through YC + my 6 failed startups
- how I built IH
- being acquired by @stripe
- a future with millions of indie hackers
indiehackers.com/podcast/185…
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Indie Hackers now has a GPT-4 moderator bot auto-dispensing JUSTICE on these spammers 👨🏿⚖️
…and yes, his name *is* Botman.
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"When making hard decisions, I've leaned more on my morality than my business sense."
I talked to @callmevlad of @webflow about…
🔥 15 years w/out giving up
📈 growing to 155 ppl and 70K customers
💻 the future of No Code
♥ putting people over profit
indiehackers.com/podcast/144…
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"Put your whole heart into it, love it, invest in it, and care about it. If you do that, things can work out. Even if they don't, you'll grow a lot as a person."
@taylorotwell came onto the podcast to share how he built @laravelphp into what it is today.
indiehackers.com/podcast/137…
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The world already has billions of videos, books, movies, stores, websites, apps, features, bells, and whistles. Most of it is mediocre.
Nobody wants more mediocre stuff. What they want is a small number of really great things.
Do fewer things, but do them better.
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Scarcity mindset is the belief that there's not enough to go around.
It leads to tunnel vision. You become obsessed with preserving what you have, so you fail to see new opportunities right in front of you.
As a founder, what you want is the exact OPPOSITE perspective.
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When your business is small, you can simply brute force things. Finding your first paying customers is 1% being clever and 99% reaching out.
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I've given up on ever being able to accurately predict how long it will take me to build something.
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Does anyone else feel unreasonably self-congratulatory when you're on top of your inbox? I just responded to an email 10 seconds after it arrived, and now I feel like I deserve the day off.
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Don't equate product ideas with business ideas. Good business ideas also include:
- Problem: What are we solving? For who? Why now?
- Reach: Where will people find us?
- Money: How will we sustain ourselves and profit?
Without these, you have a product, not a business.
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$200k in revenue in less than a year for a website built without code 👀
Congrats @bentossell!
indiehackers.com/product/mak…
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In 5-10 years, millions of people will be able to tell stories like this one. 🔥
My little side-project is now making around $2500/mo MRR 💵.
Here's:
- what I learned
- what went well
- what didn't go well
...plus some bits of advice if you want to launch your own paid product.
(thread) 👇
/cc @IndieHackers @levelsio @csallen @patio11
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No-code isn't a passing fad.
It's here to stay, and no-coders are building real businesses.
@TaraReed_ and her students are living proof.
She's quietly bootstrapped Apps Without Code, to $5M/year with enrollment numbers rivaling Lambda School's.👇
indiehackers.com/podcast/180…
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Underrated: The ability to steal the essence of what makes something else work well, without also copying the superficial idiosyncratic details.
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Sage advice that's guided me to the right places for the past decade:
For the big things in life, make sure you're running toward something, not just away from things.
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When's the last time you practiced something?
I mean you set aside hours every week. You repeated a skill, analyzed progress, worked to improve. Not mere habits or repetition. Deliberate practice. For most, I'd guess not since youth.
Also: what skills are most worth practicing?
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This is exactly how I felt for my first vibe coding project.
I thought it'd take 30 minutes. It took 3 days 😂
But it turns out it was a skill issue.
I started taking it more seriously and following tips from fellow vibers @yacineMTB, @levelsio, @NicolasZu. I stopped expecting it to one-shot everything. Most importantly, I kept restarting over and over. Then I hit a breakthrough moment.
And now I see the light.
I must be the world's worst vibe coder.
Everyone's building 3d games, while I get error messages & argue with my AI engineer.
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"You need less than you think to get started.
You don't need a business plan or a degree. You don't need to quit your job.
You need two things: a computer with an internet connection, and some initiative."
New convo w @traf about luck and success. 👇
indiehackers.com/podcast/179…
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This is why communities full of builders are so positive.
When you're building things, you're too busy to do much else. And your empathy for fellow creators makes you more supportive.
But when you're not building much of anything, it becomes very easy to critique those who are.
If I may add my own thesis to what Marc writes:
I believe we have created a society that's based primarily on critique. Some critique is always needed in any society, but we focus far too much of our energy and intelligence on critique.
We need to shift back toward creation.
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"We're profitable, and I don't have anybody to answer to."
I talked to @natalienagele about bootstrapping @Wildbit to $millions her own way: with a remote team, her husband as cofounder, 32-hour weeks, multiple products, and no investors to answer to. 👊
indiehackers.com/podcast/090…
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"I'm waiting for a great idea…" The number of people who stumble onto great ideas is dwarfed by the number of people waiting around for it to happen.
Instead of waiting, go find an idea instead! Pick a promising area you're interested in, read everything, and talk to everyone.
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"Tech startups have been dominated by the Silicon Valley VC work-crazy-hours camp. We have to blow that shit up."
@dhh and @natalienagele joined me for a no-BS discussion on trying to make it as an early-stage founder without putting in 80-hour weeks. ⚡️
indiehackers.com/podcast/167…
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The 37signals guys @jasonfried and @dhh were my #1 indie hackers inspiration in 2009.
Then @levelsio was #2 in 2016.
Now they're buying UFO ads in vibe coded games and I feel compelled to sign in and shoot at it to show my respect.
Behold the Basecamp UFO in fly.pieter.com.
Unwise Financial Outlay?
Unjustified Fiscal Outburst?
Utterly Foolish Overspending?
Unplanned Financial Oops?
Undisciplined Funds Offensive?
Let's find out. Thanks @levelsio.
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"This great idea just came to me in the shower!" usually translates to, "I've been thinking about this for days, doing research, taking notes, talking to people, and mulling it all over in my mind, and then this morning a great idea occurred to me in the shower!"
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Slightly overrated: meditation
Highly underrated: finding ways to appreciate the current state of your life, whatever that may be
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I interviewed @jasonfried on the @IndieHackers podcast about learning effectively as a founder, why you should be wary of copying others, the joy of missing out, and how he's grown Basecamp to tens of millions of dollars in annual profit.
Here it is! 👉 indiehackers.com/podcast/105…
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Good example of how obsessing over code quality is unrelated to creating a successful business in the early stages 👇 Just get it built!
RemoteOK.io is a single PHP file called "index.php" generating $2,342.04 in a day. No frameworks. No libraries. 💖
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