[csallen]

I left my job. Or, more accurately, the startup I was doing contract work for went under, and I decided not to look for another contract afterwards. I worked on a few projects before starting my business, Indie Hackers, which I grew to just under $6k/mo in revenue (in 8 months) before joining Stripe.

I've done interviews with close to 300 founders. Recently, I added a sortable, filterable directory that can help answer questions like yours. For example, you can filter to only show businesses started as a side project: https://www.indiehackers.com/products?commitment=side-projec.... I'm still working on improving the accuracy, but it's coming along.

[greysteil]

Wow, Courtland, I had no idea Indie Hackers was only 8 months old when Stripe acquired it - you already seemed super established to me. Congrats on achieving that in such a short space of time.

[shostack]

I was just listening to an older episode of Indie Hackers today as a matter of fact. Thank you for contributing something valuable to the ecosystem. A lot of similar podcasts/blogs focus on a lot of fluff, but you do/did a great job of directing the conversation, and summarizing long-winded guest comments that may not use the proper business jargon into concise and interesting tidbits.

One thing that was always interesting for me as a listener is that I'm actually the opposite of a lot of your audience. I'm a senior marketer who knows the marketing world inside and out, but I'd consider myself an "early" programmer[1]. It is a very different set of challenges. But one thing I noticed was the true lack of basic marketing skills many of your guests had in the beginning of their journeys.

Would you say that the "baseline" for that knowledge among engineers has increased over the last couple of years as the "indie hacker" movement you and others like Patrick McKenzie have helped foster has grown in awareness and popularity? Ie., given the propensity for developers to spend a lot of their time researching solutions online, do you find they are starting with more of the basics in place than they did maybe 5-10 years ago?

[1] https://zedshaw.com/2015/06/16/early-vs-beginning-coders/

[komuW]

Allen, thanks for your work.

I used to read indie hackers once every 2weeks. I would go to the site and read the latest 6 or so interviews.

With the new sortable view, i can't sort by recently added. I can sort by recently updated, but that isn't the same thing. Could you add a sort by recently added?

[csallen]

Check https://www.indiehackers.com/interviews (just added this recently, sorry!)

[wuliwong]

I've seen other attempts to build a community around this demographic before. One I really liked, I even found someone on there and we built a nice project together, though I forget the name.

Do you recall what you focused on when you started? What do you think led to your success and traction?

I find this stuff fascinating when there seems to be an idea that people want to happen but no has been able to get it right. Then finally someone (or some people) crack the code.

[csallen]

Long day, finally back. The key was a combination of (a) identifying the right audience, (b) finding a distribution channel that could consistently reach them in large numbers, (c) creating a product ideal for that audience and distribution channel, and (d) parlaying that traffic into its own community. And not necessarily in that order.

The answer to those questions turned out to be (a) developers who want to self-fund profitable online businesses, (b) Hacker News, (c) interviews with successful developer founders willing to tell their story and share revenue numbers in the open, and (d) getting readers onto a mailing list, then sending them links to interesting forum threads every week for a year.

Lest I seem smarter than I am, this analysis is being done with the benefit of hindsight. I did not have 100% of this stuff planned from the beginning.

[csallen]

I put my whole history up here: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/indie-hackers. I've got to run, but hopefully will remember to come back and edit this comment to respond to some of your questions!

[tn_]

That's awesome. What is the business model of IndieHacker?

[Arubis]

Inspiring people to start businesses that are highly likely to become clients of Stripe, its parent co.

[elorant]

Sponsors

[bwb]

What did the sponsors get in return? I am guessing traffic was pretty low comparatively so what was the pull?

[csallen]

Traffic was relatively high when I started talking to sponsors (~100k uniques/mo). Also, it helps to choose your sponsors widely. A company with low conversion rates that sells a service for low prices needs tons of clicks to justify what they spend on an ad. But a different company — let's say a recruiting company — may make thousands of dollars off of a single high-quality click, so they make for a better sponsor/advertiser.

[cooervo]

How is indiehackers generating revenues?

[csallen]

It doesn't anymore, since I joined Stripe. Before that I sold ad space on the newsletter, website, and podcast, and I experimented with affiliate links when my interviewees would mention certain products or books. Selling ads was a pain, and the affiliate links weren't particularly effective.

If had to do it over again, I would've avoided most of the above and instead focused on charging for community memberships while simultaneously making the community more valuable to join.

[moropan]

yup, that seems to be working well for nomadlist