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Comment by thyrox | Hacker News Reader

As an avid follower of indiehackers.com since its early days, I have to say that I'm disappointed with the current state of the site. What used to be a vibrant community of indie founders sharing their struggles, learnings, and wins has devolved into a spammy showcase of "look how easy it is to make money/followers with this hack" posts.

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.

I hope now that the site isn't pressed to make money maybe it will go back to the roots and stop compromising the quality and authenticity.

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> 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 think this episode gives hint https://podcasts.apple.com/fi/podcast/270-exiting-for-millio... you almost hear how CSallen and ChanningAllen brains are ticking.

Do you have a specific minute in this podcast that you recommend starting at?

16.30m forward.

It sounds like ads are going to be the first source of revenue.

Before getting acquired he used to run ads on his Newsletter, so now that he has a much larger audience you are probably right.

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.

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

Any sufficiently unmoderated professional community becomes an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Linkedin.

"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

Or… they could just run the site for free. It’s not expensive if they make everything static files.

They aren't going to run the site for free. They need to earn revenue from it to stay afloat and earn a living. They will monetize it somehow - ads, subscriptions of some sort, some other manner. Maybe they will sell it outright and move on to some new venture. But they will find a way to monetize it now they are not getting salaries from Stripe.

They can draw salaries from somewhere else and use a portion of that to run the site for free.

The main purpose of the site is the discussion forum, which can't be a static site.

$1000 a month on servers would do it. They could probably do something premium $10/m to pay for it.

Forums can be run fairly cheaply if you want.

> 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.

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

"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.

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

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