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by Scubabear68 1206 days ago
I honestly found the article rather confusing. Maybe it’s the terminology used? When I hear the term “indie hacking”, I don’t think of product building (although author’s link has that as a definition). Going into the post I thought I’d read about some person’s five year journey into some wonderfully whacky personal hacking projects. The post seemed to start that way.

But then half way through, the tone changes to talk about product and business and learning all that commercial stuff.

The story ends talking about the projects only generating minimal revenue, and disappointment stemming from that.

I am far from an expert in this, but what seems to be lacking is clear cut goals from the start on the business side. If the goal is to hack, then the code itself is the reward. If the goal is to start a business, then you need targets (users, revenue, profitability, growth, etc) and plans (product vision, marketing strategy, market research, etc).

2 comments

Author here - Sorry for the confusion. The term originated from the Indie Hacker forum launched around 2016, a forum that was dedicated to helping people start small businesses online. This is the website I linked to at the beginning of the article to give people context. I've seen this term used often in the context of startups on reddit as well as hacker news, so I thought it was common knowledge. It doesn't have anything to do with "hacking" computers, though I can see why people might think that.
Well, the term "indie hacker" means starting a business yeah. The difference with just "starting a business" is that the mindset is most of the time to build a small scale project that can be built and maintained alone.
I must be out of touch, I didn't know it was an established phrase to mean that. Thanks.
Not actually sure which came first, this site or the term, but indiehackers.com [0] is one of the main internet communities built around this.

[0] https://www.indiehackers.com/

Funny part is that indiehackers was purchased by stripe, meaning they likely ended up more financially successful than 99% of the startups posting on their site.
The term has been very much abused by SV grifters unfortunately. I've written about this before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33536247