I’ve been listening to Courtland Allen’s podcast Indie Hackers for a year now. Every week interviewing people who built micro-saas businesses around their once “side” projects.
The model seems interesting since we usually underestimate the amount of work –and compounding– we put into something we love.
A common pattern for these stories often goes like this:
- I started with an MVP to solve problem X for me & my friends (mvp code, design & infra)
- I started posting on online communities/forums about my idea (discord, slack, circle, reddit)
- I started to ship content around the product’s story (tech blog, tweets, linkedin)
- I started setting up systems for email & content marketing
- I started gaining traction and getting feedback from early users
- I went from X MRR Y months ago to Z current MRR
While I was listening to this kind of stories I used to mistake the above model for a startup.
This is not a startup. This is Indie Hacking.
What finally put it into perspective for me was a random essay I was reading the other week. Essay was called Worldview Drift.
It categorizes successful careers in tech into the following:
- Startups: raise money, take equity in projects you work on, focus on how to scale
- Bootstrapping: don’t raise money, own 100% of your projects, focus on cash flow
- Indie Hacking: build products that generate passive income, focus on content & audience
- Big Tech: find a very high salary job, retire early, focus on saving & investing