Indie Hackers is indie again

I definitely second Starter Story. Great, curated resource.

Indie Hackers is hit or miss. Occasionally, you stumble upon a great nugget, you find outstanding help from community members.

Typically, you get a lofty influence post with no value.

I am still a member. Semi-active. But not very involved.

Looking forward to the future, though! With reclaimed freedom, I would love to see it flourish again.

Note that Starter Story is $348/yr. Is it worth it? Feels a bit rich for me without knowing whether the value is there.

i disagree. Maybe the POSTS in the Forums are low-value, but the Podcast and interviews have always been great sources of inspiration and value imo.

I do agree that the past several months, and the past several podcast episodes have been less than exciting and inspirational, but I wonder if the reason has anything to do with this decision. It may be that there were changes happening behind the scenes and Courtland and Channing were getting bored and that affected their enthusiasm. That could be why they decided to leave and rekindle that Indie spark.

Either way, I never thought the value of IndeiHackers was in the forum post - comments sometimes maybe- but rather in the podcasts and interviews as these told the stories of starters and how they built their companies. To me the forum was just a way to keep traffic around engaged between episodes of the podcast.

Do you pronounce it "tee dot el why"? or "tee lee"?

That Park.io interview is one of my favourites too, I love his approach to "growth" and that it's not always a good thing for a company and he's just happy doing what he does.

Very inspiring for solo side-project people like myself :)

I think it simply opened the eyes of many of us to the high number of those sorts of actors in our midst.

"I hope now that the site isn't pressed to make money".. it is the opposite ,right? now they have to make revenue and profit because they are independent

I think any unmoderated professional community is bound to end like LinkedIn.

> isn't pressed to make money

At $0 MRR, that's exactly what they are.

This is not a dig but the (current) reality of community sites.

At Stripe, they were probably being paid as marketers, not engineering managers. (No team, no direct reports.)

One problem is that indie hackers, by self selection, are not typically investable. If you're not looking to raise, the forum you spend your time on can't, say, buy equity in you or funnel you toward a batch-based accelerator program.

Maybe the Allens can do micro-investments, but again you have a selection problem at play.

They could choose advertising and decide to grow the base. Then they start competing with outlets like The Hustle, My First Million and Morning Brew.

The group of people who want to be indie hackers is much smaller than the group who enjoy “business news” (Morning Brew) or business entertainment (My First Million).

Whatever the Allens decide, I hope they succeed.

I also left because it sort of became a "buy my pamphlet on how to make money selling pamphlets" site. Hopefully this indicates a new direction.

Yeah if we have something like list of must read indiehacker that would be nice

> Don't get me wrong, I'm all for celebrating success. But the recent flood of self-promoting posts that offer little substance or value to the community has made it harder to find the signal amid the noise.

Yesterday I posted a question about which country is best for an indie hacker to incorporate in. Got zero responses.

I posted about how to do outreach sales. Got some response but the response I got from /r/startups was 100x better and gave tons of info on how to start and what to think about.

I like the idea of indiehackers.com, I think when they got bought by Stripe they were given goals/targets that resulted in it turning into what it is.

The indie hacker community doesn't feel very indie or hacker in the sense that it seems to fall into the same "easy money with this hack" junk content and "let's interview successful person about why they're successful and hence make them more successful" tropes that every other site has.

Doesn't mean indie hacker hubs are a bad idea, just that it feels less about learning and more about cheap content.

"isn't pressed to make money"

It was never pressed to make money. Courtland said it many times on his podcast that Stripe never expected or gave him goals to earn revenue.

My guess as to why Stripe acquired IndieHackers is that COurtland promoted founding small companies to aspiring solopreneurs and those new companies would need to collect money and hopefully would use Stripe to do so. Encourage more and more people to found companies, and more and more new companies would use Stripe - free low-key sourcing of new customers without marketing or real revenue generation from IndieHackers.

They do say they were getting paid a salary over the last 6 years

Sounds like they're going for ads to start with (their responses in the IH post comments).

Feels like less than 1% of the users are actually active regularly. Can't see how ads are gonna bring in much revenue.

Hope they manage to turn it around though because the old IH days were the best!

How what went down? If you mean Strip not owning it anymore, I think the post explains pretty much everything. They're on good terms and Strip is simply supporting rather than owning IH now

Teach and inspire people to become entrepreneurs on their own terms, e.g. without raising venture capital. Media company (podcast, newsletter) with a large online and in-person community.

I’m guessing maybe Stripe’s recent round allowed IndieHacker founders to cleanly cash out and separate

It's a Reddit/HN clone maybe in the sense that it's a community, but it's not a "post links get karma discuss" it's more focused on individuals trying to make profitable internet companies & helping each other out on that journey (and of course promoting themselves along the way).

This is a good place to start: https://www.indiehackers.com/start

It's about people trying to make money from their small lifestyle startups (as opposed to trying to get VC funding).

That's an... odd.. (ok.. wrong) interpretation.

Stripe previously completely bought them out. So Stripe had complete ownership.

A company firing you and then giving you ownership of a company they had previously bought seems unlikely.

FTA: > This has been about four months in the making. Branching out on our own is something we mutually decided on with Stripe, and we're excited about it!

Do you have reason not to trust @csallen?

If I had to hazard a guess this might be a cost-cutting measure on Stripe's part similar to cuts on content marketing that other companies have done. DigitalOcean divested from CSS Tricks [0], and there was an article earlier today about Amazon shutting down DPReviews [1]. Maybe the Stripe founders gave the IndieHackers folks a chance to spin it off again as opposed to shutting down.

[0] https://geoffgraham.me/goodbye-css-tricks/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35455797

The two founders/employees probably cost $600k/year and at this point, Stripe is so well established that IndieHackers sponsorship probably doesn't move the needle much on Stripe adoption anymore. They probably just mutually agreed to cut ties and the founders will have control over their own revenue / income.

Maybe check the mailbox attached to your house?

Reach of to Courtland. He helped me out with a similar situation.