Doesn't raising seed-funding stop you from being an "Indie Hacker"?
Personally, I'm partial to early-stage tech bootstrappers, which is one reason why I've interviewed so many people from that niche. It's just a lot more near and dear to my heart, and those are the people who tend to struggle to get coverage elsewhere.
But it's worth branching out, because other entrepreneurs have valuable experiences to share, too. And to the extent that we can get even well-funded companies to share their revenue numbers and behind-the-scenes strategies, that's a good thing for all of us imo.
[0] https://www.indiehackers.com/about
[1] https://media.giphy.com/media/l4FGycUhVUpsBuoqQ/source.mp4
So... once you hire your first employee and the staff is no longer exclusively founders/owners... the founders/bosses are still 'indie hackers', but the employee is not? Or none of them are anymore, you can only be an 'indie hacker' if the entire staff is founder/owners with no employees?
When only bosses can be 'indie', hmm. I guess that is a pretty good synecdoche of a certain kind of bay area techno-capitalist-hipsterist ideology.
At the end of the day, we can spend a lot of time bike shedding about semantics and the name "Indie Hackers," but what's more important is the overall purpose behind the site — a place for entrepreneurs to learn from each other and share their experiences transparently. Sometimes those entrepreneurs will be the Jeff Atwoods and Bezoses of the world, and that's just fine.
The reality of a big shot in SV raising venture capital money is a lot different of mine, a struggling "indie hacker".
If I had to defend it, though, I'd say that _every_ indie startup has seed money. Most of the time, it's from the founder, who commits their own time and money to the project. In this case, they got others to commit their money.
But it's definitely a blurring of the line between indie startups and rocket ship startups.
If that's the defining feature of an indie startup, that it's counter to a regular startup, then being self-funded is only one of many ways that indie startups can differentiate themselves.
All that said, I think the information from the interview itself _is_ valuable. As long as Indie Hackers doesn't become flooded with non-indie startup stories, and as long as the readership is aware that the lessons Jeff Atwood learns may not be applicable to them (which is true of any story on Indie Hackers, really), then it's okay.
I'm not actually sure what Indie Hacker's idea of an idie hacker is.
There are all kinds of people who give "useful advice" that could, in theory, help an indie hacker, but are actually aimed at a general audience. In the extreme case, consider diet and beauty tips, relationship advice or stock investing strategies. Yes, those things are useful to many if not most indie hackers but they're also easily found on more general sites and can easily crowd out more focused content.
It's because, for me personally, the thing that makes IH special is the stories of people who didn't have degrees from elite schools, family wealth or VC funding and still successfully built something sufficient to cover their living expenses or even start hiring employees. Stories about people who do a lot with a little are a blueprint that can be applied by people of just about any background. Stories of parlaying medium-sized fortunes into large ones are most useful to people who already have medium-sized fortunes.
To be clear, I don't dislike interviews with founders of large companies. I sometimes watch them on youtube and have read books about many of the largest tech companies. It's just more useful for me to learn about how people went from 0 to 60 rather than from 60 to 200.
IH is still my favorite place on the internet for that, which is why I care about how well it serves that role. You'd have to dilute it quite a bit before it fell behind the next best alternative, though.